I have spent a decent amount of time in the past few weeks experimenting with marketing. Some of this involved flat out spending money on audio equipment and some of it involved “Collabs”. Some of this also involved figuring out how to inspire curiosity on the tweeters.
For those of you who did sign up at derfdice.com as a result of all that marketing—Thank you! I have been randomly handing out premium account upgrades like they are candy due to the volume of good feedback I have received from people.
I am super glad to see that I am starting to get traction.
I will be sprinkling more of my personal learnings into my weekly posts. I am very sorry if that is less interesting than my reflections on decades-old career mistakes. I cannot pretend to know the desires of the silent majority and I have not yet gotten any requests for content from the vocal minority. Do I even have a vocal minority? If that is you, say something!
Today I want to talk briefly about making cool tables. There are a lot of people out there writing about the problems that Derfdice solves and even some well-dressed internet people posting videos about it.
I discovered this week that there is considerable value in show don’t tell.
I initially just started sharing the text outputs from a few really good tables. That did not get me many stars on the Yelp.
So I decided to leverage The Power Of The Internet And Technology. I have been using some really cool procedurally generated art tools from starryai to help generate some more visually compelling posts. I think this has been successful.
I think I started getting more success when I decided to create my own new tables to show the art of the possible. In a magical world of tomorrow I am hoping to feature other people’s tables but for now I am going to eat my own dog food. You can Google that if you like—it is a popular enough and important enough early startup activity that merits its own gross-sounding soundbyte.
This week I built a table to generate ominous random buildings and that is when people started showing up to the party.
The good news is that making tables is fun. The bad news is that I need to figure out how to get people to stick around on the site long enough to want to make a table or two. Part of the magic in making tables is in using other people’s publicly available tables.
I am going to include the top level of the Ominous Fantasy Buildings table for an example:
Ominous_Fantasy_Buildings
| 1d13 | Result |
| 1-3 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings} |
| 4-6 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Civic_Buildings} |
| 7-9 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings} |
| 10 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings}, {Building_Special} |
| 11 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings} built on the ruins of a {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings} |
| 12 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings}, {Building_Special} |
| 13 | {cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings} built on the ruins of a {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings}, {Building_Special} |
This is probably a bunch of noise to most of you but the above table from derfjohn uses tables from both derflib, an account I made that was populated with a bunch of really simple tables, as well as cthogan, a good friend who created some really cool tables.
If you scrutinize this table closely what you will see is that it generates a handful of really common structure names 9 out of every 13 times. There are a few different building types to add variety.
If you look closely at the remaining 4 out of 13 times, it generates a Special description.
Building_Special
| 1d11 | Result |
| 1-3 | shrouded in dark clouds. |
| 4 | in the heart of a decaying forest. |
| 5 | on the edge of a rumbling volcano. |
| 6 | amidst a corpse-strewn plain. |
| 7 | atop a treacherous peak. |
| 8 | in a misty valley, reeking of death. |
| 9 | overlooking the ruins of a destroyed city. |
| 10 | surrounded by a swampy moat. |
| 11 | where {Royal_Male_Name} fell in battle. |
The end result is a pretty wild collection of ominous buildings.
- Tor Morskull, an ancient Monastery built on the ruins of a Barracks
- Crug Crevas, a simple Jail
- Caer Nevrow, an ancient Cathedral built on the ruins of a Tower house, in the heart of a decaying forest.
- Ered Dinskull, a decaying Town hall
- Ered Crevas, a simple Hospital
- Caer Banil, an ancient Town Square
- Dol Gorskull, a looming Convent, shrouded in dark clouds.
- Crug Guul, a looming Notary
- River Morrow, an unassuming Keep
- Morth Greynor, an imposing Motte and Bailey
- Mount Ithil, an unassuming Shrine, shrouded in dark clouds.
- Minas Tirom, a partially constructed Notary
- Ered Ithrow, a simple Abbey, shrouded in dark clouds.
- Ras Morom, an imposing Monastery
- Mawr Moris, a decaying Almshouse
- Mount Banis, an imposing Jail
- Tyrn Mornor, an unassuming Cathedral built on the ruins of a Castle
- Crug Dingul, an imposing Fort
- Ben Dogul, an ancient Bridge
You will notice that some percentage of these entries are pretty much trash—This is okay!
The beauty of this site is that it generates a whole pile of randomly rolled stuff so you can pick out the parts that you want to use.
It is far easier to pick three really cool sounding things out of a list of ten items than it is to create three really cool sounding things.
You will notice that there is a hefty amount of special buildings that are shrouded in dark clouds.
This table is a work in progress. I expect that will eventually just be “1” instead of “1-3” on the table. There are some tables in derflib that have 200 entries. At the end of the day this will probably be closer to 20 than 11 but you never really know.
Feel free to check out derfdice.com if you need to generate random content—whether it is for a TTRPG game or for a bunch of NPCs in a video game or even if you want to make a funny spicy internet startup name generator.
As always, please feel free to Socials this post. Hopefully you find something here interesting enough that is worth sharing.
If that doesn’t happen I think I have enough eyeballs here to start assaulting you soon with Raid: Shadow Legends ads. I am hopeful it will not come to that!
See you all next week.
