Question to ttrpg mutuals and followers: What do you consider to be the essential features of a good OSR-ish hexcrawl generator?
@otterorder Actally I thought of a better way to do this than the one I said in the response to you comment: One could ensure that biome transitions make sense by implementing another hexmap as a biome table like this:
The idea would be that instead of rolling for terrain on a traditional table, the user starts by putting a token somewhere on this map, and then rolls 1d6 to randomly determine what direction to move it in, and whatever terrain it lands on is the terrain of the next hex. This maintain randomness while ensuring that terrain transitions make more sense.
So for example if you were rolling 19 hexes to make a flower hexcrawl and rolled the following path:
The terrain of the hexes would be Grassland - Lake - Grassland - Grassland - Forest - Grassland - Grassland - Beach - Hills - Beach - Cliff - Ocean - Ocean - Beach - Beach - Beach - Jungle - Grassland - Swamp
Which would look like this on the resulting hexcrawl:
Of course the biome map above is just one I quickly put together to demonstrate this idea, and for an actual generator I'd probably spend a lot more time tweaking it. But I think I'm going to go with this idea for terrain generation.
This reminds me of this PWYW thing on drivethru...
But there's something wonky about the dice rolling and the way procedures end up working out, unless I grossly messed something up. But, perhaps you could glean something useful from it.
My thought was something along the lines of... like... rotating the roll key or using a single d6 instead of 2 or something. I have mostly been using Sandbox Generator by Atelier Clandestin when I've been wordbuilding lately, but there's still room for improvement.
I've been using the same sandbox generator! I have my physical copy of it right here in fact :p
A lot of the random generation procedures I've been writing for this project are loosely based on its content (but extensively modified and tinkered with), since I think it's fairly solid procedure-wise, but it definitely has room for improvement as you say.
I'll check out the one you linked too :p
I've been totally consumed by this. I have written more d66 tables in the last week than I can remember off the top of my head, full of spelling mistakes from sleep deprivation, I've written generators from inns to wizard towers to cities to temple complexes, I'm writing a religion generator, I'm a god breaking down adventuring locations to their essential components and building systematic procedures to endlessly reassemble them and recombine them back together. I'm going insane someone put me down.
