Creating things is fun

Happy 100th post!

So I have been working on a “TTRPG” project for a while now—since 1997 in fact. I have talked about the “Joe the Elf” problem last fall and how I have mostly solved the problem for myself. As a result of “The Difficult Times™” and “hey everyone is playing Dungeons and Dragons now” I decided I would spend some time to modernize my tool from a win32 C++ app into a modern day web application.

I started promoting my web app on the Twitters and now that we have some pretty cool tables, I have been working on my marketing skills a little. Judging by how few nickels I am getting from Linking Random Stuff On Amazon as a Clearly Promoted Item, I still have some work to do.

I am now up to 300 followers and have tens of thousands of impressions with some single digit percentage of engagements. I don’t know what is a good number yet for those, but I have seen some of my random tweets get up to 20% so I know there is some room for improvement.

The product itself generates strings of text to assist storytellers and game designers. This stuff does not quite sell itself. I am making the product very frictionless and very free in order to build an audience and presently that is slow going.

So today I want to show what I am doing to make promotional content for derfdice.

Here is a sample of some output from a derfdice table:

• Caer Gorom, a decaying Church, overlooking the ruins of a destroyed city.
• Cael Crevil, a doomed Abbey, shrouded in dark clouds.
• Dol Ithskull, a crumbling Hermitage built on the ruins of a Motte and Bailey, blackened with scorch marks from eldritch fire.
• Dol Gorith, an ancient Synagogue, emerging from the face of a cliff.
• Morth Nevthad, a decaying Hermitage built on the ruins of a Keep, in the heart of a decaying forest.
• Amon Morthad, a damaged Synagogue, emerging from the face of a cliff.
• Caer Crevskull, an ominous Convent built on the ruins of a Armory
• Tyrn Guul, a dreadful Cathedral, sunk into the ground.
• Caer Ithgul, a damaged Shrine
• Amon Sheld, a giant sized Bastion, where Overlord Arianerath the Passionate fell in battle.
• Helm’s Harg, a crumbling Bastion, surrounded by overwhelming dread.

Each of these is a cool, random location that can be used by a DM if they need an urgent random encounter. This describes about fifty percent of “John is just making it up as he goes along” DMing.

How do we go about making this interesting for Twitter?

Let’s take the first ominous fantasy building, which just happens to be my pinned tweet.

After a few attempts at taking pictures of strings with a variety of different formats, I stumbled across starryai. I set up an account and started feeding the string outputs into the site to generate random images.

Here is the one for my pinned tweet:

I post one of these to Facebook and Twitter every day.

A few of the DMs on the site are getting deeper into making tables. We got a cool table for tavern meals, and a cool table for tavern drinks.

It stands to reason that the next step was to make… Tavern menus!

One of the very first tables I made for myself was a random tavern generator. I have added the full tavern menu to it to add some considerable flavor to a random location in a tabletop game. The result is pretty awesome.

In order to promote these, I take the headline from the tavern and run it through starryai, and I get a pretty cool custom piece of artwork. In order to elevate the presentation to the next level, I then put the text through a homebrew formatting generator, and append a screenshot of the text to the tavern image.

This does not have anything to do with career growth or managing teams. This is me talking about a small side project I built with a little help from my friends.

Now that I have updated the framework to work on my phone and run in a browser, the itch to use it myself has increased tremendously. At some point in the not-so-distant-future I am going to get back to running a weekly tabletop game.

I would normally send you off with a scorching final thought. Today I just want to ask a question:

Do you have a creative hobby you would like to talk about?