Bassemandrh said:

Not really. This generator is designed to give outputs like "There's a planet with four continents- One that's mostly forest, one that's mostly wasteland, one that's mountains, and one that's split between plains and wasteland. The forest continent has three mountains and a canyon, and is inhabited by snakes."

Now, if you wanted, you could use that as a starting ground, and then write up cities and stuff on top of that, but the huge majority of the things that matter in Dark Heresy (politics, mysteries, demons) won't be generated by Stars of Inequity.

susanbrindle said:

which isn't to say that a book that helps you generate evil chaos/heretical cults for Dark Heresy wouldn't be a totally awesome thing to have in and of itself…just that you aren't going to find a 'politics generator' in SOI.

The Treasure melee weapons have a pretty decent spread, but the ranged list [rolling-wise; the bonuses are fine for the most part] are a bit odd.

"Who ever uses non-blast thrown weapons" aside, there's no bolter-style or plasma-style options in the list to work from. Weights are also all over the place: The [melta] thermal cutter is a 40kg beast, despite being a basic, not heavy, weapon, and having the stats to match that. Given overheat is never covered or mentioned, the wording difference there would make it odd as well, but at least none of the treasure options can be ones that overheat in the first place.

Bit odd that everything starts 'Impact' as well, including both the melta and the flamer.

'Heavy Rifle' is a half-range heavy stubber, but, again, its 'basic' instead of heavy. You'd expect it to be basic after, say, the Compact archeotech upgrade [not that said upgrade currently grants such an effect]. Steady granting 'reliable' is kind of odd, given its difficult to not at least have Good Quality on the weapons given the Archeotech rolls; plus there's a chance the weapon might also have gained 'never jams'

I've had the book downloaded for a couple of weeks now - I'm glad I downloaded it, because I would have felt a bit cheated if I had paid full price for it.

There's some useful stuff in here for pencilling in details to otherwise one-dimensional systems, but there's no way I'd use it to run whole Endeavours from. I tried to go through the process of system generation from start to finish, but I just found it desperately boring. After generating three planets in the Inner Cauldron - with moons - and ending up with generic hot rocks rich in minerals but not a lot else of interest, I just gave up. For all the generation and tables I'd rather just pick the more interesting bits from the Encounter Sites to give my players something to do if they end up off-course or attacked by pirates or something.

Having said all that, I rather like the Treasures tables. Trying to justify the odd results that it throws up is rather fun (A Relic Shield with the Vanishing and Resplendant quirks … a collapsible archaeotech shield maybe ), though I admit some of the end results can be a little strange. Still, that's what GMs are for, so you can always iron out the kinks

Oh yeah … and this book does remind me of what I liked about Edge of the Abyss, so that's a good thing …

Phew, I just finished making the xenos generators for both the Stars of Inequity and Koronus Bestiary models. That was a lot of work, but it was also the biggest hurdle remaining for my generation application. With this out of the way, the rest should be smooth sailing.

And that's terrain, landmarks and resources for planets complete! Turned out to be a bit more complex than expected. I'm not doing a straightforward conversion of the tables, but extrapolating and expanding where the book suggests a GM should do so. For example, when rolling for landmasses, the book casually mentions "and any number of small islands at the GM's discretion". I'm trying to save people work and be thorough, so my generator actually creates these islands (in the form of "hey, there's an island here". It doesn't create any further details about them). Then there's stuff like exotic landmarks. These are supposed to be carefully considered by the GM before being placed, so randomly rolling for them doesn't work out so well. Instead I had to create an algorithm that considers the planet and the terrain where the landmark is to be placed, to see if it's appropriate. For example, on a temperate planet you're most likely to find glaciers in the mountain ranges and only rarely elsewhere, while on a cold planet all bets are off. Whirlpools are affected by the presence of water and the amount of orbital features. A dry moon without orbital features is unlikely to ever see a whirlpool in its landmarks, and a desert wasteland is unlikely to ever contain an inland sea.

I also created an algorithm to make xenos presence in the system more uniform. If the system contains derelict stations, starship graveyards, or xenos ruins, you're more likely to see the remains of the same xenos species in many of those places rather than a random assortment that barely makes sense. You may come across a system with plenty of Eldar ruins, for example. At this point the generator is less likely to make Ork ruins on new planets than it is to make Eldar ruins, simply because it may have decided that the Eldar, for one reason or another, is a dominant species in this system. If that same system contains a starship graveyard, you're likely to find further traces of the Eldar there. If you come across a foiled invasion attempt, for example, you may find the occasional Eldar ship among the larger assortment of different ships that once invaded the system, the remains of whatever defenses the Eldar were able to muster at the time.

This kind of stuff is among the many reasons why this generator is taking a lot of time to code. I'm a perfectionist, and that means more work for me. Hopefully everyone will be happy when they get their hands on the results.

I am eagerly waiting for your first release, and will be happy to bug test for you.

TiLT said:

Any news about this program? Maybe a a future date?

auer said:

Sorry, I'm doing this when I can. Sometimes other obligations get in the way. This past week I haven't had any time to devote to this application. Don't fear though. I need this thing for my own Rogue Trader campaign, and soon! It'll be released when it's done, and that's hopefully sooner rather than later. I hope I'm not holding up anyone's campaign ideas in the meantime.

The vast majority of the application is done. The remaining stuff is minor, with the exception of saving/loading. From what little research I've done into the concept (not that it's the first time I implement saving/loading in an application, but I like to check for new technology whenever I start new projects), I can either choose to go with a quick and easy to implement solution that breaks old save files when I create updated versions of the application, or a really hard to implement solution that can survive version upgrades. I haven't decided which one to go for yet, but since this is a free application, I'm leaning towards the former.

Ok, thanks for the information.

Just a little update: I've been unable to work on this project for a while, but managed to pick it up again recently. Saving and loading is now implemented, which means that all the major hurdles are gone. The remaining stuff is mostly polish and smaller features. Expect some kind of beta release in the near future.

A lot more work done since the last post. The application is starting to feel finished, though as anyone with programming experience will know, there's always a ton of work remaining when you get to that point. Even so, almost everything is done. Things I've finished since I picked this up again:

- Save/Load

- Export to RTF (a little buggy with tables, but there's a simple workaround so that I don't have to waste any more time on this particular feature right now)

- Print

- Starfarers system feature (this one was nasty. Glad I got it over with)

- Treasure generator

- Gas giant generation (I missed this originally, for some reason)

- Workspaces (a bunch of systems, treasures, xenos, and so on in any combination you desire. The workspace can be saved to disk)

- Plenty of secret stuff.

- GUI improvements.

- Tweaking and bugfixes.

Nearly there now. Can't wait to share this with you guys.

Came on to see if someone had done this. This looks like it's really well featured. Thank you for doing this!

Looking forward to seeing this!

@TiLT

Just yesterday noticed that they have released new Errata for Rogue Trader with some corrections to Stars of Inequity. There are few word and numerical corrections.

Thanks for the heads-up, but the errata only seems to cover colony creation, which is not part of my generator. The errata for The Koronus Bestiary also doesn't touch any of the things I've used, so no changes are needed. Well, technically they were. I stumbled upon a lot of strangeness during my time with these books, in particular when it comes to the use of the Primitive weapon quality for Xenos, and the Improved Natural Weapons trait that isn't described in the Rogue Trader book at all. I know what it does, but I had to go to the later WH40k RPGs to find out.

Improved Natural Weapons are described in Into the Storm as notes on a few creature statblocks; they seem to have completely forgotten after that point it wasn't in the RT-line core book, however.

TiLT said:

Improved Natural Weapons Trait and Razor Sharp Weapon Quality is mentioned in Koronus Bestiary p.4

Checked through Into the Storm and almost missed the mention. Only by luck and my curiosity of all things Xenos (Don't tell Ordo Xenos, I'm already on their Black List for observation) made me take a look of Genestealer stats there and noticed little * mark and yes there was mention about Improved Natural Weapons.

Regardless, the problem was more that FFG seems to have forgotten the Primitive weapon quality in a LOT of situations where it was supposed to be present. I had to carefully look through every stat block to see where Primitive should apply and where it shouldn't. The result is that any Xenos generated with my application will have this quality applied correctly.

In other news, I believe I might be able to get the application out this weekend. I'll post a new thread about it when it's available. I've been spending hours and hours just churning away at it, getting rid of obscure bugs and implementing nifty features I really hadn't expected to need. I'll probably leave out a few features for a later version, such as an expanded ship generator (the basic generator from the GM screen pack will still be there), in-system travel times (a simple and an advanced approach, with the first essentially placing all system features in a straight line, and the second placing them in an actual orbit. The latter means that you might have to travel through each system zone twice in order to reach a feature in the outer reaches if you're unlucky), and one or two special features that I'll keep secret until they're good and ready.

Random observation: Stars of Inequity may call upon the generator to create a brand new primitive species through the system described in The Koronus Bestiary. Based on actual testing of my application, this turns out to happen extremely rarely. You could generate dozens of systems and never see a primitive species being generated. Still, the feature is there for when it's needed.

I just released the first version of this application and posted a new thread about it. Have fun!