Development Update - March 2023

Hey everyone, hope you've had a good start to your year! I've had a busy few months, working hard to add new features to Fantasy Town Generator. These are:

1. Religion overhaul

2. New create settlement form UI

3. Save create settlement settings

4. More people relations

5. Factions

6. Events

One thing that I sometimes struggle with as a DM is making downtime interesting for my players. Sometime it's easy - I've given them enough to riff off of, or they are creating interesting events themselves. On the other hand, sometimes they arrive somewhere I didn't expect them to, and I have to try and find something interesting for them to interact with. I thought - hey, wouldn't it be nice if town gen could give me some interesting events for a given building - that make sense in the context of the building and the wider town? So, that's what I set out to do, and all the other features came about to support that.

So my first thought was, ok, to generate interesting events I want to have more interesting relationships between people. One type of new relationship would be rivalries. Some obvious ones are business, competetive, romantic, and ideological rivalries. I decided that one type of ideological difference would be a religious rivalry - however the old way of modelling religions was just a list of available gods. Using this to determine rivalries isn't great, as you can imagine a situation where one person worships the Norse god Odin, and another person worshups the Norse god Thor. In this case, they probably wouldn't have a rivalry as they worship two similarly aligned gods from the same pantheon.

So to solve this, I decided to change how religions are modelled - instead of just a list of gods, there is now a list of religions, each with a list of gods. Using this I can now model religious rivalries based on the different religions that people worship.

Heres the new religion form UI:

And the UI for editing an individual religion:

A while ago I realised that the create settlement form was quite difficult to navigate and use, especially for new users. So, while I was in the area I thought I'd make a couple changes to make it easier to use. First of all, I added a new 'landing' form with the main settlement options you might want easy access to, and then I switched from tab based navigation to card/folder based navigation.

The initial create settlement form:

And once you click 'All settings':

Again, while I was in the area - and the fact I've added a few more big settlement options, I implemented save and load form options. This lets you save your settings - which means everything you've changed in the form, give it a name, and then load it at a later date. Note - this feature uses cookies to store the data, so the saves won't transfer to other devices and will be deleted if you clear your cookies. If there is enough demand, I can implement a patron only feature to store the settings in the cloud.

Ok, so back to events. Now that religions had been updated, I went ahead and implemented a bunch of new relationship types. These include - business rivals, competetive rivals, religious rivals, romantic rivals, crushes, separated partners, and affairs. With these, I can create some interesting events based on who is related to a building - for example, maybe someone is challenging a rival, or a scorned partner has found their partner cheating.

For more interesting events, I wanted to add factions to the settlement that could be used to provide more dynamic events that could happen in many different types of building - for example, a faction wanting to overthrow the government might hold a protest, or attempt to sabotage the building. I added the ability to generate random factions based on some typical archetypes - like thieves guilds, adventurers guilds etc, but you can also create your own under the faction settings:

These factions are pretty detailed - including the faction's goals, and the methods they use to complete those goals (to help me generate accurate events) - as well as buildings to generate for the faction, if and when the faction has regular meetings (for the simulation), and how to select the members and leaders of the factions. This is quite complicated, so I've added some templates that are easy to extend to fit your needs:

And of course, factions can be created and edited once the settlement has been generated.

Finally, we get to the main event (pun intended) - events. Using all that information I now have, I can come up with interesting events based on a building. In the building information UI there is a new 'event' button:

When clicked, it will generate a selection of options to inspire you, such as:

The 'Start event' button will trigger the event - moving people around the settlement as needed. It will also trigger any necessary updates to the people involved - for example in the last event above, it would update the relations between Gossparl, Colverslyne, and Zoändrik.

Well that's about it! I'd love to hear what you think about the new features - and any event suggestions would also be welcome!