I realized that I haven't posted about this yet and it really deserves to be posted about. In the past few months, two folks have stepped up and made some awesome Ur-Hadad-related computer doo-dads that I think can add a lot to your games.
First, +Chris Tandlmayer wrote not one but two random generators over on Abulafia, both taken from Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad #1. Both generators are inspired by +Edgar Johnson's fucking awesome "Street Kids of Ur-Hadad" adventure toolkit and the fantastic "ROLL ALL THE FUCKING DICE" generators that Edgar included because, you know, rolling a fist full of dice and trying to sort out everything that they mean can be a little daunting to some. Well, daunting but awesome, right? Anyway, here are Chris's takes on Edgar's tables:
First, +Chris Tandlmayer wrote not one but two random generators over on Abulafia, both taken from Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad #1. Both generators are inspired by +Edgar Johnson's fucking awesome "Street Kids of Ur-Hadad" adventure toolkit and the fantastic "ROLL ALL THE FUCKING DICE" generators that Edgar included because, you know, rolling a fist full of dice and trying to sort out everything that they mean can be a little daunting to some. Well, daunting but awesome, right? Anyway, here are Chris's takes on Edgar's tables:
- Roll All The Fucking Dice Random Neighborhood Generator
- Roll All The Fucking Dice Random Gang Generator
Finally you can truly run Ur-Hadad completely spontaneously! (That's totally already the way I do it, but whatevs. Edgar's tables are fucking awesome and everyone should use them!)
The one thing that Chris couldn't get his Abulafia generators to do was to record when three 6's had been rolled which, if you'll remember your Metal Gods #1, necessitates the rolling of a d30 to figure out what strange shit is about to happen. Enter our next generator.
Over on Twitter, Ian Credible (@yngar) came up with a "Roll All The Fucking Dice" generator that does just that: it rolls all the fucking dice. It doesn't tell you what those dice rolls mean, so you have to look that part up/sort it out/make it up, but it DOES keep track of whether you've rolled 666 or not. The good thing about Ian's generator is that I now have more reasons to come up with more Roll All The Fucking Dice tables (or make Edgar and +Wayne Snyder do it) and I can just keep using Ian's generator for all of them. You can find Ian's generator here: http://ludopunk.com/rolldice.php
Within the city of Ur-Hadad, it's really important that each neighborhood have its own atmosphere, ambiance, feeling. I love the direction that Edgar took with his generator, but when I was trying to push myself to improve my improvisational gaming style, I came up with the following method which is necessarily derivative (you'll see why) and practically plagiaristic of other authors' work.
First
Grab your copy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. This book is a necessity to anyone running any sort of city campaign, so I'm presuming you have it and ignoring any deficiency in your esteemed collection of books, both RPG-related and not. Flip to a random page in the book: if it's a page that describes a city, use that city's description as the basis of the description for your neighborhood. If it's not a city description, flip to another page and another page until you've found one.
Second
Grab another book by an author you like, the more transgressive the better. I like to haul out William S. Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson. I'm pretty sure that a middle name that starts with "S." isn't a necessity, but I haven't tested that theory. Now, flip to a random page in that book and find the central conflict on that page; that's now happening in your neighborhood. Look for the central characters on that page; they're now your NPCs. Just mine this shit for important details and make it work.
Finally
Make it work. Unless they're exceptionally well-read geniuses like you, they probably won't know where you took that shit from because you'd never grab an author's popular works, right? There you have it. That's it.
It's also worth mentioning that +Claytonian JP just made his own trait generator for towns, villages, hamlets, etc. over here: http://killitwithfirerpg.blogspot.com/2015/08/assigning-rpg-traits-to-hamlets-towns.html Very cool stuff, Clay!