I am creating a fully open world, for my group to travel around, find quests and caves/dungeons, but I want most of it to be completely randomized. So, as they are wondering along a path, I roll a percentile to see what they stumble upon, be it cave, camp, village etc. There will be some elements that are predetermined, like the Capital will already be written up and already be on the map, and some special locations will also be written, but not have a specific location (unless a quest places it somewhere on the map).
I was wondering if anyone had already done something similar, or can give me some pointers to how to write up the percentile list. Because I don't want the world-map to be empty, but at the same time, I don't want there to be something every ten foot. I also don't want some locations to be too near other certain ones, like a dragon nest right at the door of a thriving city that doesn't acknowledge it's existence.
I'll throw this out but it may not be what you're looking for.
Below are links to World Map Generators which include besides geographic layout but also locations on the map for exploring. It might be worth your time to play around with these three world generators to see if they can give you, it may not be random, but places you are interested in.
Running a truly open world takes a lot of preparation, as you'll want to seed the world in advance rather than laying the tracks in front of the party as they go. The draw of the open world is that the players will hear rumors of what's in it that excite them and they'll choose where to go and what to investigate based on what's peaked that interest. Rolling the world fully randomly at the table as the go down the road and just telling them "you find what you find" somewhat robs them of that. They have full freedom to go anywhere, but no real choices to make of what to do when they get there.
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I am creating a fully open world, for my group to travel around, find quests and caves/dungeons, but I want most of it to be completely randomized. So, as they are wondering along a path, I roll a percentile to see what they stumble upon, be it cave, camp, village etc. There will be some elements that are predetermined, like the Capital will already be written up and already be on the map, and some special locations will also be written, but not have a specific location (unless a quest places it somewhere on the map).
I was wondering if anyone had already done something similar, or can give me some pointers to how to write up the percentile list. Because I don't want the world-map to be empty, but at the same time, I don't want there to be something every ten foot. I also don't want some locations to be too near other certain ones, like a dragon nest right at the door of a thriving city that doesn't acknowledge it's existence.
Much appreciated
People have done this for video games, but the quantity of math required to make it not seem stupid and random is impractical without a computer.
I'll throw this out but it may not be what you're looking for.
Below are links to World Map Generators which include besides geographic layout but also locations on the map for exploring. It might be worth your time to play around with these three world generators to see if they can give you, it may not be random, but places you are interested in.
https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/ *scroll below the map to see locations and places of interest.
https://www.d20srd.org/fantasy/world/construct.cgi
https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
I have some other ideas on how to pepper in random places onto a map but start with this one first.
Running a truly open world takes a lot of preparation, as you'll want to seed the world in advance rather than laying the tracks in front of the party as they go. The draw of the open world is that the players will hear rumors of what's in it that excite them and they'll choose where to go and what to investigate based on what's peaked that interest. Rolling the world fully randomly at the table as the go down the road and just telling them "you find what you find" somewhat robs them of that. They have full freedom to go anywhere, but no real choices to make of what to do when they get there.