I was waiting to release this until it was more complete... and then I realized that I couldn't think of what the heck else I should do with it.

So here, have an official beta release of our Random Plot Generator:

http://orteil.dashnet.org/randomgen/?ge ... i=cRSxLFxP

There are still some bugs (the most prominent: for some reason calling another list at the beginning of a list option i.e. calling a continent of Dominaria at the beginning of the line "[continent] on the plane of Dominaria" causes the "on the plane of Dominaria" rider to drop. I have no idea why; it seems to be a problem with the system itself rather than my code).

The biggest change is that there's a whole slew of new basic prompt archetypes into which the information slots. Resulting in interesting new stuff like:



Plausible and potentially worth exploring!



Not particularly plausible!



Simple and to the point!



Outright nonsensical and possibly requiring brain bleach!

And much, much more!

Keeper, you're my hero. Thanks for sharing.

I love these.

"Gruff planeswalks to Taramir. There, he briefly encounters Chardis of the Dual-Walkers , Lia Xu , and Alessa ."

"Ellia the Endbringer planeswalks to Ariva. There, she converses with Fisco Vane, the Shark ."

"Fisco Vane, the Shark interrupts a romantic meeting between Rishima, Queen of the Black Sands and Lia Xu on Jakkard."

Well, see that...



That, uh...

...

Wow, I'm not sure what to think of those two meeting. O_O

EDIT: Oh, and the third one is HILARIOUS.

The words which immediately spring to my mind are "duck and cover."

0_o

Just what have you been doing, Keeper?

So that's why they call her "the Endbringer."


How does it know what I'm thinking? GET OUT OF MY HEAD!


Generator's busted. You could never make a story about that.

Daneera interrupts a romantic meeting between Kahr-ret-Taris and The Eightfold Lotus.

Hahahaha!

Aloise Hartley crash lands upon Ihn Gallad.

Hmm....

Illarion Vale converses with Raiker Venn.

NO!

Aloise Hartley gets entangled in a hilarious romantic folly with Asher.

*Dies*

IN MY DEFENSE the number of 'walkers added to the closing clauses in several of those is also randomly assigned, so romantic meetings do not INHERENTLY have to be polyamorous.

They just seem statistically to end up that way.

Also, I stand by my decision to assign Raiker Venn the pronoun "that ****" 100%.

(And actually Raiker Venn vs The Eightfold Lotus vying over control of a powerful artifact would actually be a pretty cool story. As would Ellia and Fisco just... chatting. Particularly if their particular... interests didn't intersect in a way that would cause them to come into conflict.)

I honestly have no justification for the "NOT LIKE THIS!" template though. Sometimes I just like to do really stupid things, what can I say?

Did you assign weighted chances to the different numbers, or is it just an integer between 1 and... what would you have set it at, 10?

Almost any prompt that causes an interaction between Raiker Venn and another 'walker is immediate hilarity to me, in a decidedly twisted way. Also, nice pronoun!

I assume that this is how the multiversal apocalypse gets started.


I just assume that Jade is fronting The Misfits these days.

You can't actually set integers so it's an even chance between... uh... [checks] a 7/11 chance of one person, a 3/11 chance of two people, and a 1/11 chance of three people. Which was accomplished by awkwardly entering [planeswalker] seven times in a row, [planeswalker] and [planeswalker] three times, and [planeswalker], [planeswalker], and [planeswalker] once.

Well for some templates anyway. Some of them work... totally differently >.<


Yay, someone finally got one of my Battle of the Bands templates!

I'm... not sure what he was expecting.

Yea, these are all pretty hilarious, and most even have the added bonus of getting my wheels turning. Thanks, Keeper!

I'm not sure whether to say "it doesn't work if it tells us things that have already happened" or "well, if it can tell us things that already happened it must be good enough for starting plots."

Woohoo! You're welcome!

I might have mentioned this elsewhere but I actually made use of this yesterday because I've been trying for like a week to figure out what to do with my half of a collaboration story, and just rolling through the generator a few times got me thinking about the narrative in a way that I hadn't before... and within a very short amount of time I had literally the whole story outline worked out It was kind of great.

I place great stock in the power of random generation. If it worked for the Surrealists, surely it can work for us.

Also I love it when it spits out actual stories that people have written.

Yeah, I have long been enamored with randomness. I have a random number generator bookmarked, and use it a surprising amount.

Szat, are you reading this thread? If so, what was that program you used to randomly generate a language based on input words?

Just looked here.

It's DFLangCreate. It's intended for Dwarf Fortress modding but I've found it endlessly useful in general. download. Thread (first post has data on use/functionality)

As a side note, I'm seeing a lot of "Lia Xu" callouts on the thread. That should be "Lia Xin"

"Jakkard is under attack! Molcru must gather allies such as Denner Fabellian , Aloise Hartley , and Some nasty lookin' varmints before it's too late, but he is hampered when he attempts to apprehend and bring to justice Asher ."

"Chardis of the Dual-Walkers planeswalks to Bolas's Meditation Plane. There, he interrupts a conspiracy between Jade and a planar native."

"Raiker Venn planeswalks to Shandrovol. There, that **** gets entangled in a hilarious romantic folly with Illarion Vale and High Shaman Kosik."

Those got increasingly, um, weird.