Random Generators

A generator produces text on demand — a character name, a tavern, a "what if" prompt — so you never have to stall on naming a minor NPC. Generators live in the project, sync to your collaborators, and travel with project exports.

What you start with

Projects created from either worldbuilding template ship with five generators, ready to roll:

Generator	Rolls	Bound to
Character names	A given name plus a surname or a byname	Character
Settlement names	Villages, towns and cities	Settlement
Tavern & inn names	Painted signs for inns and other premises	Building
Wilds & landmarks	Mountains, marshes and other named places	Geographic Feature
Story prompts	A premise, a turn and a complication	—

The four bound ones give you a dice beside the name field as soon as you create an element of that type, and beside the matching text field in the editor. Story prompts is unbound — roll it from any dice button's generator picker.

They are ordinary generators, not fixed content: edit their word lists, rebind them, or delete the ones you do not want.

Creating a generator

1. Open the project Settings tab
2. Choose Generators in the sidebar
3. Click Create generator

A generator has a template and a set of rules. Rolling expands the template, replacing every #rule# with a random entry from that rule:

Template:  #first# #last#

Rule "first":  Aldric
               Brynn
               Cera

Rule "last":   Stonehelm
               of #place#

Rule "place":  Riverwyn
               Ashford

That rolls names like Brynn Stonehelm and Cera of Riverwyn. Rules can reference other rules, as last does above, nested as deeply as the expansion limit allows — a reference that would recurse past it is left as plain text instead.

A plain word list is just a generator with one rule — set the template to #word# and put your list in a rule named word.

The Preview panel re-rolls as you type, so you can see the effect of every change immediately. Press Roll again for a fresh set.

Weighting entries

Add | <number> to an entry to make it more likely than its neighbours:

Aldric | 5
Brynn
Cera

Here Aldric comes up five times as often as the other two. Entries without a weight count as 1.

Modifiers

A reference can transform what it expands to, with one or more dot-separated modifiers:

Modifier	Effect	Example
.capitalize	Upper-cases the first letter	#word.capitalize# → Tower
.upper	Upper-cases everything	#word.upper# → TOWER
.lower	Lower-cases everything	#word.lower# → tower
.title	Upper-cases each word	#phrase.title# → The Grey Tower
.a	Prefixes a or an as the word needs	#word.a# → an inn
.s	Pluralises	#word.s# → towers
.trim	Collapses runs of whitespace

Modifiers chain left to right: #word.a.capitalize# gives An inn.

When something is wrong

The editor flags problems as you type and blocks saving until they are fixed:

• a #reference# that matches no rule
• a rule with no entries
• two rules with the same name
• a rule that can only ever refer back to itself, so it would never finish expanding

Unknown modifiers are only a warning — they are ignored when rolling.

Rolling from a generator

Anywhere a dice button appears, clicking it opens a menu of suggestions. Pick one to fill the field, or press the refresh icon to roll a fresh set. Nothing is written until you choose a suggestion, so you can browse freely.

If the field is not bound to a particular generator, the menu lists every generator in the project and rolls whichever one you hover.

Binding a generator to a template

Generators are most useful attached to the worldbuilding templates that need them.

For element names — open the template in the Templates settings section, and under Schema Details pick a Name generator. A dice button then appears beside the name field whenever you create an element of that type, and it skips names already used in the project.

For a field — edit any text or multi-line text field in the template and choose a Generator. That field gets its own dice button in the element editor.

Deleting a generator that a template points at is safe: the dice button simply stops appearing.

Sharing generators

Generators are stored per project, alongside your templates and tags:

• collaborators see your generators in real time
• they work offline and sync when you reconnect
• they are included in project exports and imports

To reuse a generator in another project, export the project and import it there, or copy the rules across by hand.