From Abulafia Random Generators

Abulafia is like, so random



Abulafia is a collection of user-contributed random generators housed within a special kind of wiki. That means you can use the pages here to get interesting random names, treasure, plots, and anything else you need. If you think the results could use a little more imagination, click the 'edit' tab at the top of the page and add a few more choices to the mix (keep with the format you see in the edit box & you'll be fine). Refresh a page for more results.

How Does it Work?

Abulafia was designed with Role-Playing Gamers in mind, but would work equally well for playwrights, authors, and so forth. Besides the regular content available on a wiki, Abulafia has two special kinds of things you can put in pages here. The first is a Story Generation Table, where you can put loads of cool content that you might want in your fiction. The second is Story Generation Display, where you incorporate random results from various tables into the way a page on Abulafia is displayed. Makes sense? No? How about an example.

Read the heading of this section. Okay, now refresh the page. Do it again. The text there is chosen randomly (using an "sgdisplay" tag) from a predefined set of possibilities (using an "sgtable" tag). And that's just the beginning. Take a gander at the Swords page, the FantasyMenu generator, Secret Society Titles, the Alchemical Recipes page, or the Art, Grace, and Guts Oracle for more advanced examples of the coolness Abulafia is ready to make for you. Browse through the links in the Tables section, or for a real surprise, hit the 'Random Page' link on the left navbar.

Tables and Random Generators

Or you might just try looking through the All Pages page, where they're all listed alphabetically. Or maybe you want to start at the Popular Pages page so you can be like all the cool kids. Maybe a saunter through the Categories would be just the thing. You can also see New Pages or Recent Changes to get a sense of how Abulafia is growing.

How can I make Abulafia cooler?

Why doesn't Abulafia have a generator for x? Because you haven't put it here yet. There are two ways to get started with a new generator: 1) use the Generator Template, or 2) Mimic what you already see on a working generator page. In either case, to get to a new page to put your content on, link to your intended name from an existing page (the link will show up red if you've done it right), then click in. Or, you can Search for the intended page name using the Search box at left, and you will be given an option to create the page if it does not exist.

When you're ready to contribute, click the 'edit' tab at the top of a page. You'll need an account, but that's easy - just ask for one here. Check out one of the existing pages and look at how it's done. Basically, you can have sections surrounded by 'sgdisplay' tags (the opening tag should have an 'iterations="5" or something similar). Within the tags, make calls to tables by using square brackets - [tablename]. If you want to call a table on another page, use the format [Page Name.SubtableName]. If you just say [Subtablename], Abulafia will look for that subtable on the current page.

Put subtables on your pages within 'sgtable' tags. Start a subtable with a line consisting of a semicolon and then your subtable name - ;main is a common one to use for starting points into complex tables. Subsequent lines should consist of a number (representing _relative_ probability), a comma, then some text or calls to other tables (again using [] around table names. Remember to close your tags! Otherwise you'll break your table and have to hit backspace to get back to fix it.

If you do encounter trouble or need help making a table work the way you want it to, email me at dave (dot) younce (at -@) gmail (dot) com. I look forward to seeing what you can do with it. Oh, a note about Copyrights - unless you note otherwise, stuff you put here should be considered Creative Commons material. If you have a specific vision for your generator, please talk about that on the 'discussion' tab so other editors know what's OK to do with it.

If you want to make the generators more easy to discover, you might want to help in organising them. You can create portal pages that link to several other generators, or help with categorisation.

If you're new to wikis

Wikipedia has a nice tutorial on wiki editing

Getting an account

3/2012: Due to unreasonable amounts of spam that neither captchas nor blacklists/whitelists seemed to be making any dent in, new registrations have been disabled at this time. However, I am willing to make exceptions for those of you who are actually interested in using the site. Contact me directly via email or G+ with your preferred username and how you heard about the site and I will make an account for you with a temporary password, usually within 24 hours. Sorry for the inconvenience. -Dave Younce 13:58, 19 March 2012 (PDT)

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