Alchemy: Experiment Types

So the other day while riding through the mad twisting corridors of the blogosphere, I got pointed to the Random Wizard Tower Generator. And well, I fixated on one simple fact that just was a burr in my saddle. A room option of course is an Alchemy Lab, but we don’t know what is going on in the Lab!

Fear that fact! And We will have a set of tables coming out that will help us solve this problem. According to www.spiritalchemy.com there are 12 (well, 14) goals of alchemy:

1d12 Experiment Goal
1 Elixir of Immortality
2 Philosopher’s Stone
3 Preservation/Transmission of Ancient Hermetic
4 Production of Healing Substances
5 Healing influence through relationships
6 Perfection of Nature
7 Production of Precious Metals
8 Transformation of Mineral Substances
9 Transformation of Plant Substances
10 Knowledge of Physical World
11 Knowledge of Inner Worlds
12 Perfection of Human Being


Then by using one of the following 8 Outer Transformations:

1d8 Transformation MethodExplanation
1 Skillful Application of Heat Adding Heat
2 Calcination process involves heating a substance in a crucible or over an open flame until it is reduced to ashes.
3 Dissolution is the dissolving the ashes from Calcination in water.
4 Coagulation is the precipitation or sublimation of the purified Ferment from Distillation.
5 Separation is the isolation of the components of Dissolution by filtration and then discarding any ungenuine or unworthy material.
6 Mortification a two-stepped process that begins with the Putrefaction of the hermaphroditic “child” from the Conjunction resulting in its death and resurrection to a new level of being.
7 Sublimation is the process of transformation directly from the solid phase to the gaseous phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase.
8 Conjuction is the recombination of the saved elements from Separation into a new substance.

We start to see what’s really happening in our lab. But don’t worry, our Experiment isn’t over year, we still need to choose which of the Inner Transformations we will be using:

1d6 Transformation Method
1 Prayer
2 Patience
3 Observation
4 Rhythm and Timing
5 Meditation and Visualization
6 Spell Casting

Then we need to figure out the which of the four methods we will be using to get this Experiment done!

1d4 Transformation Method
1 Outer Technique to affect Inner Transformation
2 Inner Technique to affect Outer Transformation
3 Inner Work proven and fulfilled through Outer Manifestation
4 Outer Work proven and fulfilled through Inner Manifestation

Of course there’s a lot more to Alchemical Experiments and we’ll return to those in a later episode.

P.S. – As a side note, I’m excited to announce that all of these tables are dynamic from our backend SQL Server which means they could change at any time! Hahaha! But what it really means is that it becomes immensely easier for me to write some entries about an idea, and then turn that idea later into a generator!


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New Generator: Ale’s!

Hey Folks, been a long time but here’s a present:
Ale Generator.

This nifty generator will name, and describe an ale for you semi-based on BCJP Guidelines.
You may notice some weird outliers, and the verbage is pretty sad, but hey, it’s decent enough for the first one, right? Hopefully this means you’ll start seeing a couple more posts around here.

Categories: Code,Generators,Inns

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TST: How to Code a Ship

We are getting to the end of our exploration of the ShipInfo.tab, there is still some stuff going on here, actually there’s still a lot going on here.  For instance, what about the call to Ship Captain?  Or the way that we generate our text out there, which brings me too the next paragraph.

While writing about this table I have found that I am sorely disappointed in the actual text output of the ship itself.  It’s bland and boring.  It is one of my weakness in writing TableSmith Tables.  I can make them complex and come up with lots of ideas, but most of my tables fall apart because they don’t come out very interesting story wise.

Others are so much better at this whole story based text generation than I am.  What are the thought processes and building blocks that you folks ues to generate your text blocks?  And how can we incorporate those methodologies in the ShipInfo.tab?

Continue reading TST: How to Code a Ship


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What’s your S(ql)ecret?

As many of you readers know one of the biggest reasons for me to move off of .org to a selfhosted solution was to be able turn my tables into handy generators.  A couple of other reasons of course include the following: 

tables in posts can now be autogenerated, and can be fleshed out easily.
tables can be dumped straight into a .pdf file for easy printing and travel.
automattic generation of .tab files for tablesmith

Now this is not my first time at the php/sql rodeo.  Various other projects spaced convienently many years apart have had cms components with all the nifty sql.  But I’ve never really had plans to make it the db so versatile.  I discovered while working on the ale generator that my first database schema was not very updateable. 

What’s your take on this:
PrimaryKey,  subTable, Header, tableItem, itemDescription
1, aleStyle, 1, Styles of Ale, A Table of Ale styles
2, aleStlyle, 0, Lager, Bottom Barrel yeast.  Often fermented cold

Then I use this query when pulling data for the generator:
SELECT * FROM ‘aleGenerator’ WHERE subTable = ‘aleStyle’ AND ‘Header’ = 0 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

What do you think?  Ideas on a better schema?  Better query?

Categories: Code
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