I had a good round of character creation on Saturday, and we're going to run a prologue this coming Saturday, so much of my brain is in that space now. I'll probably be using that for fodder for this week's posts so you all get to see how I turn this stack of notes into something to play because, well, we did chargen in the absence of system, and I will hack the system to match the characters in time for play. That's going to be fun, but challenging. But that's a topic for tomorrow.
Today I want to talk about Abulafia, which thankfully has the now easier to remember url of random-generator.com. It is basically a giant wiki of random generators, so if you need to create a B-Movie Title, a Superhero Name, a Secret Society (or go a step further and make your own Splats) , or possibly every In a Wicked Age Oracle you can think of, this is your one stop shop.
As useful a resource as this is, it's worth noting that because it's built on wiki guts, it allows for people to constantly create new and interesting lists. There's a bit of a performance hit that comes from this - because there's a lot of referencing various text tables in different places, the page loads can be a bit slow - but the sheer depth of content is more than worth the lag.
I'm a huge fan of these sorts of randomizers, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. It is a rare game that I don't dip into some sort of rich randomizer (like Tarot, I-Ching, Oblique Strategies or the like) to see what it shakes loose. Abulafia has the advantage of being more diverse and outright wacky than any other option, so it's a good tool for a GM to keep in her back pocket.
ok, it's interesting that you say this because the Diaspora wave has got me thinking about this sort of thing in the context of RPGs. For some reason I didn't know about this site (Abulafia) but now I do. very cool.
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