yeehaw! western sandbox generator
Over on Wasteland F Smith's saloon cowpoke Anne came out guns blazin' against the ol' locus classicus (if you'll pardon my french) Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice, and my, it caused quite a tussle. In Anne's mind, Mr. Hammer had succumbed to what a bit of that Mr. Marx fella would call fetishism - no, not that kind, but the attribution to dead commodities what had been in fact the work of Mr. Hammer's own living mind. A proper enabler of a genre-Western sandbox would provide some tools for the level design and setting creation - although perhaps Boot Hill's author, a Mr. "Nits Make Lice" Gygax, was not the ideal person to do so.
Well, it's said by one of them wise men of the east or whatnot that it's better to light a candle than call down yet more of God's wrath on the darkness. Whether my candle is worth one or not, well, you're the paying customer and better fit to judge than I.
okay that was exhausting I'll drop the bit
Die drop table is a worse version of what Emmy puts in her games. Other stuff is probably stolen from elsewhere; in turn please steal, transform, and share anything you use it for :)
macro sandbox
Starting year is 1700+10d20.
Get a blank piece of paper and fuckload of dice. Drop the latter on the former. Take them off one by one, noting (on the paper itself) the position and rolled value of each as you do so.
- prime grazing land
- water
- settlement
- rail
- mine (operational)
- ghost town
- mine (undiscovered)
- trading post
- mine (abandoned)
- BIG settlement
- chasm
- fort
- buried treasure
- horses won't drink the water here, for some reason
- improbable natural paradise
- 1d6-1 hermits (d6: 1 Franciscans, 2 medicine men or women, 3 paranoid German political exiles, 4 utopian colony gone wrong, 5-6 totally idiosyncratic divine mission.) If zero hermits, site was abandoned.
- great - or at any rate very big - salt lake
- EXCELLENT grazing land
- permanent dust storm (roll d6 to determine direction each day, travelling 1d20 miles)
- something wildly inappropriate (d6: 1 crashed spaceship, 2 tome of magic that actually works, 3 portal to present day run by Delta Green/SCP/the CIA, 4 your favorite fantasy dungeon, 5 portal to literal Hell, 6 the lost garden of Eden guarded by Cherubim)
Until you cannot do so any more, cycle through the following steps:
- find the two closest mines that don't have an intervening line dividing them, linking them with an intervening line, and routing away from settlements; these become mountain ranges
- find the two closest such rivers, and do the same thing, except you want to route through settlements and away from mines if possible
- two closest such rails, routing through settlements if possible
Roll 1d6 twice to determine dominant macro-faction and challenger macro-faction:
- US Army
- Timeline-appropriate non-US government with flag (Mexico, CSA, alt-timeline thing you made up)
- Mounted native nation
- Settled native nation
- Private commercial interest
- Something else
per settlement
Roll 1d8 for dominant language and religion in each settlement
- Anglo (Protestant)
- Anglo (Mormon)
- Athabascan (non-Christian)
- Athabascan (Catholic)
- Spanish (Catholic)
- Something else
- per dominant power
- per challenger power
Settlements don't need the same ethnic and religious background to cooperate, or different ones to conflict, but it does help.
The settlement is blursed with the presence of the following resource worth fighting over (d6):
- holy site
- medically unique plant
- supposed buried treasure
- mine right there
- fresh water springs (make nearby water sources dry or poisoned)
- fort with massive weapons cache
The settlement lacks (d6):
- water (make nearby water sources dry or poisoned)
- horses and draft animals (they won't approach anywhere near here)
- medicine, for a plague
- any defensibility against attackers
- protection against natural disaster (flooding, earthquakes, something else)
- roll on previous table - the settlement had this, but no longer
for your starting settlement
Make a spreadsheet with twenty entries. Randomly roll their gender, age (7+3d20), and
temperament
- idealist
- bootlicker
- loose cannon
- mystic
- overfriendly
- aggressively "respectable"
- workaholic
- hedonist
- curmudgeon
- heart of gold
ideology verb
- nominally
- ruthlessly
- reluctantly
- scrupulously
- conveniently
- secretly
- instinctually
- thoughtfully
ideology adjective
- peace-seeking
- traditionalist
- egalitarian
- liberty-loving
- progressive
- egoistic
- aligned with dominant macro-faction
- aligned with challenger macro-faction
advantage
- brilliant
- gorgeous (or, if not adult, adorable)
- fast hand
- loaded
- way with horses
- way with machines
- life of the party
- friends in high places elsewhere
vulnerability 1.. drink 2. drink 3. drink 4. guilty conscience 5. wanted 6. indebted 7. enslaved, imprisoned, or kidnapped 8. incurable disease 9. couldn't hurt a fly 10. unable to move around on own
_______ [roll 1d20 to indicate another character]
- hates
- adores
- resents
- blood relation of
- knows damning secret of
- tried to murder
- has led into destructive vice
- is owed a great favor
- could help (but refuses to)
- hopes to run away and start a new life with
- partners in business or some other project, but lets them do all the work
- believes they could save them from vice or calamity
For the entries 5-12 above, 3-in-6 chance the other person knows or believes about this.. (So on a 8-then-4, Alice considers Bob to really owe her one, but Bob is completely unaware that Alice thinks this.)