You mention Jorge Luis Borges as an influence, but also Umberto Eco and Neal Stephenson. What's their influence on URR?

Borges wrote a lot about a lot of themes which have so much potential in procedural generation: mazes, labyrinths, infinity, mirrors, life and death, the nature of truth and falsehood. Eco's best novels and work offers a kind of "cultural detective work" (or maybe semiotic detective work?) into understanding symbols and their meanings and how they circulate in society which seems a fascinating thing to base a game on.

Stephenson, meanwhile, has produced in his "Baroque Cycle" a very particular and idiosyncratic presentation of the Renaissance/the Scientific Revolution which really appeals to me, and there are some parts of that which I'm trying to emulate.

I’d wager that Eco’s Abulafia, the program that randomly ‘connects’ historical facts to suggest conspiracy theories in “Foucault’s Pendulum’, fit exactly in that mould … It’s a great way of looking at the relationship between procedural (in way: ‘blind’) generation and our brains’ need to connect facts and find meaningful connections, I think. However: Dark Souls’ understated and scattered storytelling does the same, but with carefully crafted text, not ‘blind’ - how will URR handle that? Will its narration, its plot rely on procedural generation as well, or is there a crafted ‘core’ to the game, to be replayed in a random world?

Abulafia is definitely a great example; although I read Foucault’s Pendulum long before I actually become interested in making my own procedural worlds, it definitely had a lasting effect. It’s very interesting to look at how the mind makes connections, particularly in looking at the attempts from players to “reverse-engineer” procedural games and try to figure out how they create their worlds. As for URR vs DS storytelling, the narration in URR will rely on procedural storytelling, though the basic core plot/quest/story is the same, but distinct each time: which is to say, the same basic story will be told across a different range of religions/cultulre/nations each time, so the story will emerge differently, even if the same basic themes - about historiography, “civilization”, metanarrative - are there each time. Then the information on that story should be distributed throughout the world in a Dark-Souls-esque manner, and leave the player to piece it together.

There’s also a question there though about how much variation should there be each time, and I intend to develop a system whereby the specificities of each generated world yield a very distinct version of the story each time, rather than different nations simply being different actors in the same play. Though I do realize that it’s a pretty nebulous distinction!