As you may know I’m getting back in to D&D after years of not playing. (Anyone in north Houston with a group that could use a player drop me a line.) Right now I’m working on a campaign world. And last night I came to the point I needed to generate some towns. I read in the DM’s guide how to do this randomly and even did it once.

But then my inner geek came out and I spend the next 4 or 5 hours writing a Ruby script to generate random D&D towns. This script will generate a random town for you each time it is run. It has one optional parameter – the name of the town size as given in the DM’s guide.

After you follow the link above and download the script, if you are running MacOS X (and probably Linux) you go to the command line and type:

And hit return. It will spit out a bunch of text that you can copy and paste into a word processor for use. There is some strange output for the race demographic table. This is because the code uses tabs to make it easier to use the table in a word processor. The command line doesn’t like that.

If you include a town size like “Thorp” it will generate that size town, and not randomly pick the type.

Generates:

Anyway enjoy. I may make it take a flag that generates HTML

Did I mention that every new computer language I’ve every learned I learn making a D&D program, with the possible exception of ObjectiveC.