The Story of Eigengrau’s Generator
How’d it develop? Why?
I’ve been DMing for many years, and when I started up my University’s Pen and Paper Roleplaying Society, I found myself doing a lot of one-shot games, often at a moment’s notice when we found that too many people had shown up to our weekly sessions at a pub, and we needed extra DMs to accomodate everyone. This was great fun, but I found it difficult to prepare material at such short notice.
I was no stranger to the roleplaying tools available online, but found that there wasn’t any that fulfilled the role that I needed- something that could print out a whole starting town, with enough interesting details to make it fun and engaging, presented as more than just a table of noun and adjective pairs- “tavern: boisterous” is okay, but doesn’t really give a lot for a harried DM to work with.
So, I decided to make my own. I did some research, and found Twine, an engine for interactive storytelling; this was perhaps not exactly what the developers of Twine had in mind for it, but it worked well enough for my purposes. I should be clear, and admit that I am not a programmer- indeed, Eigengrau’s Generator was my first foray into programming, and I came across many brick walls that I managed to break through not by smarts or any natural talent, but sheer bloody-minded determination.
The Generator grew, and I posted it to Reddit, where it received several thousand upvotes, resulting in a good deal of traffic. It soon became apparent that this was something that people were interested in- not only in supporting financially (for which I am incredibly grateful), but also in contributing to. Noticing this, I set up a Discord server with a “Hivemind”, where I would post prompts for people to respond to, their creative contributions being released to public domain so we could implement it in the generator- harnessing the creative power of hundreds of DMs in order to power the engine that works inside the Generator.
To date, the Generator is MIT licensed open source software, and has over five hundred stars on GitHub, 30 contributors to the codebase, thousands of strings contributed by community members, and a thriving community. I’ve learned so much about DMing and programming with it, and still enjoy coding it, three years later.