Random Wilderness Generator (RWG)

The Random Wilderness Generator is a tool designed for use during gameplay when the dungeon master needs an outdoor starting point for an unprepared setting or wants to introduce randomness into the game party's environment. It's intended to be an useful resource for solo play and for training oneself as a DM. When using this generator, the initial location of the player characters is always in an area where no habitation or infrastructure is present, an unknown distance from civilisation. The nature of starting hex depends upon the steepness of terrain, the local hydrography, the local vegetation and the climate type. From these details, the degree of threat to the players is determined, as well as the resources which they may put to use, permitting them opportunities to become informed about the world they're in.

Because the world is a much more complicated arena than the limited passages and chambers of an underground dungeon, we should not look to simplified die rolls in order to achieve even the bare whiff of similitude, which must be the goal here. On the other hand, while a functionally real world setting might be created with a highly complex computer generated approach, we'd be at the mercy of that system once it was made, without the ability to spontaneously add results, shift the balance of results, or see directly the step-by-step process of the world being made before us. This may require the consulting of several tables to produce an answer, but as this generator isn't intended to be used during game play, we have the time to study and adapt ourselves to the system as we see the setting unfold.

Links to this page, and throughout this wiki to other dungeon generation pages, include the "RWG" designation and will be categorized under "Random World."