Overview:

You want to procedurally generate histories for your game. But history is a complex, tangled network of people, places, and, events, so how do you possibly start? In this talk, Jason Grinblat walks through the novel approach he used to generate histories for 'Caves of Qud'. He starts by laying out some commonalities across games that generate histories, using 'Dwarf Fortress' and 'Epitaph' as examples. Then he demonstrates how he avoided building a full historical simulation by generating historical events and rationalizing them after the fact. Tying in a discussion about the power of replacement grammars, he explains how to produce rich, convincing histories on a tight scope budget.