Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Random town name generator

So far, we've talked about system as a mechanism to help understand complex rules and we've talked about systems as a mechanism to help players make sense of complex sets of information. But they can be taken much further. Here is an effort to see if a system can be used to generate town names.

Language follows a lot of patterns and if we can get a general sense of those patterns, we can develop systems to try and replicate it. This little excel spreadsheet generates millions of fantasy-esque names for towns and villages by stringing together typical fantasy tropes. More importantly, it has a customizable content entry interface so that you don't have to suffer through my ideas but can easily replace them with your own.

You can even change the system for different regions of your world so that each has a distinct feel without putting in the legwork to generate that feel on your own.  All you have to do is put in the logic. What follows is a sample of the output, but you can download the full excel document here.


Looking for recommended edits or requests or stories on how you used it in the comments below!

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