Okay community, I'm counting on somebody (or somebodies) out there to be a lot more tech-savvy than I am. I'm also counting on you to have some time on your hands to devote to this great hobby of ours.
It's happened enough times now, over the years, that I've needed to populate a town with businesses, and NPCs. It's not terrible work but it can be tedious and monotonous.
There are several separate tools out there already. Things like:
Dave's Mapper or Inkwell's City Map Generator for maps.
And Trove Token's Storybook for a host of other things like NPC names/descriptions, and inn/tavern names.
Then there's d20pfsrd.com's useful NPC Database drawn from Paizo's great books for stat blocks.
What there is not, however, is something that does all of these things at once. Something that randomly creates a map, complete with a legend where specific businesses are numbered and named. Then provides a table of descriptions for the businesses wherein the proprietors and notable NPCs are named/described/linked to a stat-block.
Is this possible? I'm guessing it is. I'm not sure how much work it would be, but I'm guessing if someone could devise such a tool the community at large would be very grateful. They might even find it in their hearts to donate money freely to the developer/developers of such a program (much like they do for Kyle Olson's Combat Manager).
So, is there anyone out there that could accomplish this task? Likewise, are there other members of the community that would use such a program, and maybe even donate money/buy such a thing?
I know that if this program existed today, I'd donate money, and or purchase it right now.
It sounds fairly simple; the issues is that these kind of things (in my experience) aren't very useful because they don't make sense. I mean, yes, it's easy to write a program that prints out that building 16 is (rolling), a 'potion shop" run by (rolling) a female half-elf named (rolling) "Kuzak Fimblebottom," a (rolling) 9th level (rolling) ranger, and here is the standard stat-block for a 9th level ranger, which specifically does not include the Brew Potion feat.
That doesn't sound useful?
I could easily take one of the feats off of that 9th level ranger and exchange it for Brew Potion. That takes far less work than manufacturing every element of the town myself, even with the help of random generators.
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That doesn't sound useful?
Er,.... not to me, no. (Why else would I have written what I did?)
I've seen too many such random thingummy generators for other systems and it generally requires substantially more work for me to doublecheck them and to fit them into a plausible but narratively interesting structure than it does just for me to make s*** up as I go along.
I could easily take one of the feats off of that 9th level ranger and exchange it for Brew Potion. That takes far less work than manufacturing every element of the town myself, even with the help of random generators.
There are several issues here, though.
The first is simply why you want every element of the town. While this town of 2,000 families may have twenty-five inns, the party's only going to be staying at one of them -- and even if they want to visit all the inns looking for the one-eyed orc they suspect of being a cultist of Aaaargh, you'll probably want to skip the dozen "nope, never hurd uv him, zurr!" encounters in the interests of time.
Similarly, the party is probably not going to be wandering around every street in town. If you look at how movies stage city scenes, there are three ways of getting around. You're either going to someplace you know, or you're going to someplace someone told you to go, or you're following someone. If I need to buy a pizza, I go to the shop around the corner. If I need to find a shop that sells tubas, I will ask for direction. And if I need to know where the one-eyed orc is heading, I'm going to follow him. I'm probably not going to walk down New College Lane just to see what is there -- and if it turns out it's full of flower shops, that won't enhance the story narrative.
ETA: Third, the list kind of locks you into it; you can't recreate large swaths of the town on a whim in the interests of coolness. Once we've established that New College Lane is full of flower shops, and nothing else, it's hard for me to retcon that that's also where a famous 500 year old druidic college is located.
Finally, any automatically generated list will have unrealistic holes in it. Either I forgot to put it on the list of possibilities, or it simply never came up. ("What do you mean, this is a town of 2000 families and no midwife?") So you may be overestimating the amount of time you save having a phone book for the city, because you're going to be scribbling over it.
What these kind of lists are useful for, in my experience, is coming up with interesting story plots if I'm pressed for imagination. "Hmm, there's a barber shop right next to a meat-pie shop. S. Todd, proprietor. What can I do with that?" But to use that, I just need the list of shops, as I'm probably going to be moving things around anyway.
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Orfamy Quest has some very good points regarding the utility of these things.
That said, I've got a small program that might be able to help if you're willing to invest some tedium / non-tech intensive prep work for later convenience.
It's a random table roller. It reads a text/csv file containing a table in a specific format, randomly picks a result, then checks whether that result requires it to roll on a secondary table (in a separate file). It repeats this process until there are no more secondary tables to roll on.
Let's say you want to roll for a medium magic item. The program rolls like so:
1) Type of item = Lesser medium weapon.
2) Lesser medium weapons = +1 ranged weapon with a +1 ability
3a) Ranged Weapon types = Light crossbow
3b) +1 ranged abilities = Frost
3c) Special materials = no special material
Putting it together, you have a +1 Frost Light Crossbow.
Upsides:
- Can be used for pretty much any repetitive randomization activity. Mine does items, encounters, and NPC names.
- It's also possible to make it relatively smart if you design your table branches carefully. In my example above, at step (2) ranged weapon is specified so that at step (3) it can roll on matching type and weapon property tables and not generate a ranged weapon with a melee-only property like Vicious. However, I didn't bother to set it up to avoid giving a crossbow a firearm-only property like Reliable.
- There's a "batch" function that I designed for rolling on the treasure tables in UE (generating item groups of a set average value) which could be adapted for rolling features of a town of a certain population size.
Downsides:
- You need to set up the tables in the appropriate .csv format, which is time consuming (I've spent 10-15 hours on the items and I'm only about two-thirds done).
- It doesn't write files with this info, so you have to copy-paste from the output screen.
- It doesn't handle images.
- Because I wrote it for personal use it's not error-tolerant. If you send it a text file that's not formatted in the way it expects, it will crash.
I could give you the code and a bit of advice on setting it up for town generation if you're interested. I could even send along my item generation tables (useful for store inventory). But I am not able to invest the time required to set up the tables myself at this point, or to add image/mapping functionality.
I've found it!!! Whilst perusing the web for other digital resources the other day I was directed to check out this: Mathemagician.net. The town generator on this site does almost everything I was asking for above. Simply name the town, pick what size it is, plug in some population percentage numbers, and click submit. The output is entirely clickable. It lists all the shops in town by name, and each shop is clickable for notable NPCs. It lists all the town NPCs by name class and level, and even gives brief descriptions of their disposition or key character traits. This is the gold star winner. Combining this with any of the random city generators previously listed gives you a fully fleshed out town in mere minutes. Thank you Justin Dunmyre!!!!!