Pen, Dice & Paper

Greetings Brave Adventurers

Added 2021-12-07 20:57:48 +0000 UTC

I wanted to share with you some of the generator features I was working on recently and the ones I plan to work on in the near future. But firstly, I'd like to thank those who joined in to support us. This is awesome and you have our sincere gratitude!

Here are the things that are already live online:

Sandbox Persistence/Anchoring/Permalinking

Sandbox anchoring will store a sandbox in its own unique URL so it can be revisited and shared. This feature relies on the availability of hosting storage and is possible thanks to our new Patreon supporters.

Optimized images

I've moved away from using PNG images and started using WEBP images. This reduced the total size of any generated sandbox page by a factor of x7 (from about ~14Mb to ~2Mb). It should make the pages more responsive in some tablets or phones.

ZIP file download

To make it easier for you to save a sandbox, you can now download it as a ZIP file using a button in the sidebar. This feature utilizes a bit more server time. Here again, thank you! Patreon supporters.

Duplicates avoidance

Due to the sheer size of the content, duplicate region names, faction names or other names will eventually pop out here and there.

I've added an experimental duplicates avoidance feature that should help get rid of these in most cases.

Here's what's coming soon:

Players handouts

The players handout will include a copy of the hex map and some well known details about realm and the players settlement of origin.

There's a prototype in place (located at https://pendicepaper.com/hexroll/handout.html and also bundled in the zip file) but it still requires more work to be usable.

Random wilderness encounters

I'm also working on adding additional random encounters tables to various places, either to complement or replace the current pre-rolled encounters.

Finally, here are the generator features that will follow:

On-demand generation with parameters

I already have the core of this working, but with the time it currently takes to generate a sandbox, I would still have to wait before making this generally available. This feature will also allow content creators experiment with their own full version of the sandbox generation model.

Printing-friendly output

One of the first things people tried to do is print the generated sandbox, only to find out it has somewhere between 600-665 pages.

I'm going to dedicate some time in the near future to produce a print optimized version. I'm currently thinking on the following layout parameters: