Holy Cow! It’s been a very long time since I’ve done a TST! But as part of my new set of goals I want to continue working on www.therandomdm.com and make more progress on making it awesome! What better way to start than with an installment of TableSmith Tuesdays! My first project is to make a ‘Painting’ Generator. A lot of loot, castles, and hordes have paintings and they can add enormous depth to a campaign world. But how do we make a generator so that we can have an emergent storyline? One that we didn’t know about until the generator told us about these interconnected paintings. Well that’s my goal.
The first thing I had to do was start on one type of painting. Perhaps the easiest in my mind to create is a landscape. This probably will have other aspects to it, or can be used for other uses but for now my focus is on how can we describe a landscape… One of the notes I found while researching landscape paintings was that as defined a landscape painting will contain a sky element. In that sky element there may or may not be clouds. BING! So here it is a quick a dirty blog post on how I came up with a my cloud generator. This is Stage 1: Upper Atmospheric Clouds:
I started at Wikipedia looking into cloud formations and had this line:
A thin mostly cirriform-looking cloud based from about 264,000 to 280,000 feet (80–85 km) and occasionally seen in deep twilight after sunset and before sunrise.
And we need to break it down into its parts:
- a thin mostly
- cirriform-looking cloud
- based from about 264,000 to 280,000 feet
- and occasionally seen in deep twilight after sunset and before sunrise
Now we can examine this line and break it up into generative parts:
- a thin mostly
now we find a dictionary (those still exist, right?) and try to add more descriptors:
2 – being of less than usual width
fine, hairline, needle like, paper-thin, skinny, slender, slim, slim-jim, thin, and ultrathin
remove the ones that aren’t applicable
fine, hairline, needle like, paper-thin, skinny, slender, slim, slim-jim, thin, and ultrathin
leaving us with 9 new options. After that we take the antonyms of thin (because it’s MOSTLY!):
chunky, squat, stocky, stumpy, thick, thick-set, bulky, massive, voluminous, thickish, widish
eliminate the ones that don’t sound good or descriptive enough
chunky, squat, stocky, stumpy, thick, thickset, bulky, massive, voluminous, thickish, widishleaving another 5 options: stumpy, thick, bulky, massive, and voluminous.
All of that gives us a great sub-group:
;Volume
1, thin
1, fine
1, hairline
1, needle like
1, paper-thin
1, skinny
1, slender
1, slim
1, ultrathin
1, stumpy
1, thick
1, bulky
1, massive
1, voluminoius
We move on to the next bullet item:
cirriform-looking cloud
Wow. How is that going to help us make a descriptive generator? It won’t no-one knows what the heck cirriform-looking means! Right!?! Unless you are a meteorologist and then why are you reading this and critiquing my understanding of cloud formations. So we hit our preferred search engine and try to locate some sort of other descriptive line. [http://namesofclouds.com/cloud-names-by-altitude/cirriform.html]
Cirriform clouds are composed of cirrus or cirro clouds. In Latin, cirro means curl. These clouds appear as thin and wispy strands in the sky. They are often called a “mare’s tail” or “children’s hair” because of their close resemblance to hair strands. If you see clouds that look like curly hair, you can be sure that those are cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds can be white or faint gray. They usually form at altitudes of 16,500 feet in the temperate regions and 20,000 feet in the tropic regions. Cirrus clouds form due to the deposition of water vapor.
There it is. Curl! “Mare’s tail” or “Children’s hair”. Further down on the page I find that there is a little more interesting tidbits that we might be able to use to create a really great description:
- Some of the shapes you can see are conglomeration, hollow columns, solid columns, rosettes, and plates.
- In temperate regions, cirrus clouds are usually segregated and appear in columns and plates. They are positioned on top of the cloud. Rosettes and conglomerate shapes are near the base of the cloud.
- In the North Arctic Region, cirrus clouds appear in column, rosettes and conglomeration shapes. The ice crystals on these cirrus clouds are 4 times bigger than the average size.
- In Antarctica, cirrus clouds appear in columns. These columns are longer than those that can be seen in other continents.
But these descriptions are still sort of blah. A paper-thin hollow column? Boring! Or even worse a segregated paper-thin column…. GAH! Hang me now I say. So I turn back to the wikipedia entry and there is some interesting descriptive items:
Type 1 Very tenuous resembling cirrus.
Type 2 Bands — long streaks often in groups parallel or interwoven at small angles.
2A Streaks with diffuse, blurred edges.
2B Streaks with sharply defined edges.
Type 3 Billows — clearly spaced roughly parallel short streaks.
3A Short, straight narrow streaks.
3B Wave-like structure with undulations.
Type 4 Whirls — partial or rarely complete rings with dark centers.
4A Whirls of small angular radius of curvature, sometimes resembling light ripples on a water surface.
4B Simple curve of medium angular radius with one or more bands.
4C Whirls with large scale ring structure.
We eliminate a bunch of different weirdness and rephrase the wording a little bit more and get another finally interesting sub-group for us to use:
;Formations
1, [Edge Definition] long streak
1, [Edge Definition] short, narrow streak
1, [Edge Definition] undulating waves
1, a single [Edge Definition] undulating wave
1, rippling
1, [Edge Definition] radial bands
1. [Edge Definition] rings
You can see that we added another small sub-group on to that one to give us a couple more options based on the wikipedia entry.
;Edge Definition
1, diffused
1, blurry
1, sharp
1, defined
And then there is a little something I found to add in later on:
While cirriform clouds look pretty in the sky, they still look fascinatingly different when visible light interacts with its ice crystals. It can produce fire rainbows, sundogs, and glories. Jet stream cirrus clouds are also a sight to see because they stretch across continents. This cloud seems like it is never-ending.
based from about 264,000 to 280,000 feet
Moving back to our outline, we now have a height issue to deal with. However, because clouds are defined by their height and they form differently at different heights (apparently!) I’ve decided to do this slightly differently and will address this at the end of the series.
and occasionally seen in deep twilight after sunset and before sunrise
Fire Rainbow
A ho-ho! This brings us back to the little tidbit we found out above! “… fascinatingly different when visible light interacts with its ice crystals…” A little research shows that any examination into fire rainbows, sundogs and glories are detailed discussions on the bending of light. Scientific discussions on light refraction doesn’t bode well for our descriptive generator. By switching over to the image search, we get a much better understanding. Glories are halos. Without a whole lot of research it seems that graphically speaking fire rainbows and sun dogs are pretty similar. So let’s add that into our table:
;Colorfication
8,
9, highlighted in the colors of the rainbow
10, a colored rainbow radiates from the cloud
Tie it all together with a :Start group to get it going. Like this one:
:Start
1, [Volume] [Formations] [Colorfocation]
Gives us these results:
- paper-thin blurry short, narrow streaks highlighted in the colors of the rainbow
- ultrathin set of sharp undulating waves highlighted in the colors of the rainbow
- bulky diffused radial bands a colored rainbow radiates outward
- voluminous defined short, narrow streaks highlighted in the colors of the rainbow
- paper-thin a single defined undulating wave highlighted in the colors of the rainbow
- stumpy set of sharp long streaking a colored rainbow radiates outward
- bulky set of blurry undulating waves
- fine set of diffused long streaking
- slender defined rings highlighted in the colors of the rainbow
- paper-thin set of sharp long streaking a colored rainbow radiates outward
