Let’s talk about random generators.

 

First of All +Joshua Macy made an excellent little Chrome extension called Roll M that allows you to roll on anything that looks like a table within your browser.

Now, while rolling on tables is neat and all, the thing that makes me really excited about it is that it also works with groups of images.

 

I’ve already talked about how easy it is to make visual encounter boards with Pinterest. Well now let’s blow those socks off.

First download Roll M. The link was back up there hurry up.

Yes, you will need Chrome.

Now head over to this Pandaemonium board I made full of art and miniatures. I’ll probably add more later shut up I’ve been busy. These are the things your players are going to start running into because fuck it.

 

Roberto-Ferri-Le-delizie-infrante-olio-su-tela

 

Okay now click on the icon Roll M put on your toolbar (that’d be the white square with five orange dots) and then move your mouse cursor over the Pinterest board.

Notice how it highlights things in blue? It’s showing you the areas you can select for rolling! What you want to do is get it to highlight in a wrapper around all the images, so just move your cursor into the margin between a few images… and click.

 

INSTANT VISUAL ENCOUNTER RESULT.

 

And unlike my d20 Ostentatious Fashions board I didn’t even need to number them! So useful. Image too small? That’s okay just click on it.

 

 

For Another Thing +Benjamin Eisenhofer told me about a little program called Inspiration Pad Pro (there are dodgy-looking blue links to download the free desktop version, it’s fine trust me).

While it requires a little bit of learning on your part, if you can get your head around the process you’ll be able to build and save tables that you can run through the program to generate random results, even putting in conditional sub-tables (if result is “You Grow a New Dealy” generate “Oh God Where?!” etc.) if that takes your fancy.

 

 

And now for the mewling thing that has been keeping me up all night, every night.

 

 

After having made a couple of automated random generators of my own, and thinking about Brendan’s wish for an easy way to automate things, I decided to make a random generator template.

It is called Choose Your Own Generator.

With this generator you can input your own entries for up to 7 tables and generate random results right there on the webpage without ever having to touch a scrap of code, even choosing the display of the results and how many you generate at once.

 

Well Paolo Greco, being an amazing man, wrote a little javascript bookmarklet that he could run on the page in order to collect the data from the tables and turn them into a link that generates a pop-up result every time you click it.

So I turned that into a button on the page, so that you don’t have to get your soft hands soiled with javascript.

And then I modified it to also pick up the display option.

And then, as wonderful as this was by itself, I wanted more.

 

So I started teaching myself how to use databases and got three-quarters deep into a working archive page before I was talking to Paolo and he advised me that he actually deals with databases for a living, and graciously oversaw the final stages of what I had begun.

 

So what does this mean for you? It means The Seventh Order of the Random Generator, a public archive of bookmarklet random generator links created and submitted through Choose Your Own Generator.

 

It means a bevy of random generator links that aside from being used on the archive page, can be DRAGGED TO YOUR BOOKMARK BAR AND KEPT FOREVER, that can be COPIED AND TURNED INTO BLOG POST LINKS. The code is entirely contained in the link, once you have it, you don’t even need to be connected to the internet to use it, it just pops-up from whatever page it was run from.

 

So enjoy, make some freaking generators already.

 

I need some sleep.