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Dungeon generator

- Posted in D&D by

I recently stumbled upon this awesome free online Dungeon Map Generator, which gives you really nice ready to use maps like this:
enter image description here

While trying to build such a generator from scratch, I quickly came to the conclusion that this one is in fact much more complete and complex that it appears at first sight (and you realize that once you've tried to build your own):

  • Maps are not just orthogonal, they're nicely rotated
  • Walls are sexy
  • Rooms can be round
  • Rooms have notes

So yes, I'm trying to build my own map generator (got the idea while playing the solo Dungeon Crawler 2D6 Dungeon, which is by the way as cheap as excellent) and after a few hours of Lua, right now my generated maps look like this (beware, it's all but as sexy as above): enter image description here

There's a French proverb that says “when I look at myself I feel sorry, when I compare myself I feel comforted”.
Well, right now I'm much more sorry than comforted :)
So now I've got some work, first debug (the doors are badly placed, the corridors too numerous), rooms should be numbered in a clever way, and then make the output a little prettier (as far as the look is concerned there's definitively room for improvement).
And then generate levels interconnected by stairs :)

Why spend hours trying to do this when very nice free tools already exist?
Because “Its the not the destination, it's the journey.”
Peace out.

More than images, ideas

- Posted in D&D by

Recently I played quite a bit with Stable Diffusion, a program for generating images from text, and it's amazing.
I'm not going to try to show here some unmatched ability (that I don't have) to generate extraordinary images, the Internet is full of tutorials on the subject (I recommend for example Sebastian Kamph's YouTube channel, he is both talented and educational).
However, let's talk about the unexpected fact that these images ... stimulate my imagination.
Indeed, in order to illustrate in an original way the textual descriptions of my imaginary world of Gilianar, I played with Stable Diffusion and besides the quality of the images produced, I discovered with surprise how this tool gave me new ideas.
Let me explain.
Let's say I want an image of a dragon perched on an old tower. With the following prompt

ancient yellow and green dragon with a large wingspan perched on an old broken stone tower

I get this for example:
enter image description here
Not bad for a start.
Stable Diffusion's modus operandi is to generate a lot of images, then once you like one of them, to modify it in a loop until you get a satisfactory result.
So let's modify it, but this time starting not from the textual description of the beginning, but from the image above (yes, Stable Diffusion is amazing, I already said it).
By playing with the enigmatic parameter Denoising strength, one introduce more or less chaos in the following images and so that's where magic happens, it's as if a part of a story was written without us.
After a few generations, an image clicks in my head.
"Oh yeah, that's cool, it looks like a forgotten tomb, let's keep this one!"
enter image description here
So much for the grave, now it looks more like she has boobs and she is instead near the entrance to her nest, on which she watches fiercely.
What if she protects her eggs? Deal!
A few random images later with guarding her eggs added to the description, this one fits my mood:
enter image description here
Definitely a good start for a place and the history that goes with it!

Thank you Stable Diffusion, I was just looking for original images to illustrate my texts, but I actually found more than that, now I own an iterative idea machine!

Life's too short not to explore ideas

- Posted in D&D by

After spending a few hours reading Monte Cook's Ptolus D&D campaign setting, it became obvious that creating a whole world was as appealing to me as playing someone else's. So why not giving it a try?
I don't know anyone who has died of shame, at least not officially, so I'm going for it. Gillianar (do you see the wink?) is a world designed for D&D, but above all to have fun materializing my ideas, my dreams, even my deliriums.
Ideas come quicker than I can write them down, it's quite exhilarating. I know I won't last the distance (let alone approach the 800 pages written by Monte) and that I might get bored pretty quickly, but getting started is pretty exciting :)
This universe will be freely available here, after all I'm writing for me and not to get rich.
It's just a pity that I waited for the advent of ChatGPT to try to write something, but at least it will all come from my fertile brain and not from an AI as good as it is :)
To the question "Where do I start?" I answered with "Draw the world as it is in your head", the first result (there will be a lot of changes I think) is the image bellow. Gillianar, home of tormented heroes Yes, 99% of it is probably just a compilation of what I've read or seen in medieval fantasy, but that's okay. For me :)

See you soon, and while then, roll high or die!