Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Introducing a New OSR Resource: Meatshields! The Classic Fantasy Hireling & Henchman Generator

Readers of the blog know that I've hinted at a big announcement over the last week or two. It's now time for the official unveiling!

Last fall, I created a random hireling generator. This generator found its origins in materials pieced together from forums, websites, and blogs, and was restructured and revised with my own personal thoughts. I subsequently added a random name generator based on a set of prefixes and suffixes. I tried to pay homage to Gygax, Arneson, and others within. Both were downloaded a ton from Scribd.

Not long thereafter, I started talking to Cr0m, one of the DMs at Red Box Vancouver, who took an interest in the above resources. The two of us cobbled some free time together over a couple months and developed a web-version of the combined hireling and name generators for use by the OSR community. The new generator is designed for classic fantasy and as such is compatible with OD&D, Basic, 1E and their retroclones. The new generator includes new Old School art that refreshes each time you visit the opening page. The generator includes over 1600 possibilities for human names alone. We returned to the articles in Dragon Magazine as a guide.

Please use the comments section below to tell us what you think and suggest and revisions to the generator. Please spread the word through your groups and communities on the web.

I'd like to thank and give primary credit to Cr0m for his time and web expertise to this project. I've made a good friend.

Without further pomp or circumstance, we give you Meatshields! The Classic Fantasy Hireling and Henchman Generator.

http://nerd.christophergeisel.com/index.php/hireling

8 comments:

  1. Very, very nice! Consider this pimped in this Saturday's OSR News!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice work, that is a useful resource.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks James. We are just trying to get the word out any way we can.

    ReplyDelete
  4. hey, that's pretty nice work. I'll definitely be using that in some upcoming games.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This will get a LOT of use in the future. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi, great little tool here. It's already coming in handy for the game we're starting in a few weeks.

    I started a thread over at rpg.net and if you're still taking suggestions I'll copy/paste those here.

    [i]I actually wouldn't mind if it had a few more options; I wonder if the creators would consider suggestions? For instance, it would be useful to be able to generate a block of, say 20 or 50 guys that you could print out and take to the game with you (no computer where we play ). I'd also like to see more variety in the non-combatant types. Torch bearer seems to be the only one despite the mention of porters, potion-testers, & door-spikers.[/i]

    Here is the link to that thread: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=531403

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete