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Dwarf Curator |
| 2021-08-24 |
Dwarf Curator
In the first months of the plague, I had look at Dwarf Fortress. The world generation phase was intriguing.
What if instead of creating a world for a role-playing game, one would generate thousands of them, and then select one that is suitable among the surviving ones, even inspiring to play in. Curating instead of creating.
It would be a blend of Civilization and Dwarf Fortress and could run fast and wild.
There could be early filters applied early on, for example, as soon as all the "playable" intelligent species die out, the world is discarded.
There would be a function which would stop the generation and declare the world "ready for curation", might be function of time, might be function of mineral resources consumption, like "after 10% of tin and 10% of gold have been extracted". Or it might be technology level based, closer to Civilization, "as soon as rudimentary steel making is mastered somewhere".
Languages and cultures could be seeded and tracked in the world creation too. Humanoids on the west coast could speak a single language while those on the other coast would have multiple languages due to the difficulty of travel between their communities, or wars...
The game master browsing the surviving world would be served a replay of the world creation, he would then be able to dive into the world and explore the settlements (and the ruins of former settlements) and see the link between the communities. It could generate place names, encounter tables, local pantheons and myths.
The end result could take the form of a wiki, though I think I'd favour a dataset clearly specified (and with extension points). Other people could then work on clients and further tools around the dataset. Alternate dataset generators could also be developped, faster and wildly different, as long as the clients can grok the dataset.
Let's play worlds not rules, as they say.
