Review: Kingdom Builder Generator Pack

Chaotic Shiny is well-known for its many generators, so a product like this is long awaited. While opening up a web browser is not exactly inconvenient, having a bunch of generators in one place is a lot better an option, so the Kingdom Builder from Chaotic Shiny is a neat little thing. At $3.95, I think it’s worth the expense if you need a quick little source of inspiration, especially for sandbox campaigners.

Disclosure: I got this for free from Swordgleam to review. Also I’m not a programmer therefore this will be an Idiot Review. I think. I just like saying that.

The Kingdom Builder packages improved versions of a few Chaotic Shiny generators along with brand new ones with the aim of quickly generating a random fantasy kingdom. It can generate a whole kingdom at once, or you can generate the constituent parts yourself, including setting some parameters. You can generate flags, currencies (with equivalencies), mottoes, regions, cities and maps. The map feature is very neat, as it can make a hex map out of a quick little splash of colors. You can set a few parameters and have a bit of say into the geography it pumps out, which is nice.

Each generator offers some nice details into what it has generated. For example the region generator gives you some tidbits about the local culture and politics as well as the borders of the region, and the city generator talks about the attitudes of the local politicians, any noteworthy religions, and the important districts in the city. As previously mentioned, the currency generator does equivalencies for the random currencies it pops out. Here’s something I just generated now:

Kingdom Name: Aelullalra

Ruled By: A council

Motto: Trade, Weatlh, War

Capitol City: Xouv is a city with a stunning beaurocracy. Its leaders take pride in their assassins and literature. There are nine major districts: mansion, gambling, nobles’, bakers’, carpenters’, crime, old district, garden and theatre. The local politicans are unfriendly.

Flag: The flag is a square  with two stripes of dark blue-violet and white,  and a diagonal bar of blue-black from left to right. The emblem is a knot of some sort.

Currency: 1 gold miag = 11 bronze bieb | 1 bronze bieb = 10 copper shamoen

Description: This  kingdom is bordered on two sides by tundra. Their  relations with their neighbors to the northeast are mercurial. The people observe a local religion. They have a tempestuous relationship with their political leaders. There are five major cities, the largest of which is located in the east of the kingdom. They are sometimes troubled by inter-guild wars.

This was done using the automated generator. You can get a bit more detail out of it by generating things separately in addition to using the automated generator.

The Generator Pack does all the things you’d expect a program to do. It prints, it can save (to rich text in this case), you can fiddle with your older generated kingdoms, you can fiddle with the window size, etc.

If you’re low on ideas then the Kingdom Builder is good for you. It is also good for sandbox campaigning, if you want to keep your options open and not even think about what lies beyond a certain amount of hexes until immediately after the time comes. If your PCs wander off somewhere, you can very quickly generate a civilization for them to run into. For more religiously story-based campaigning, it’d probably serve well before the opening of the game, but it may feel disjointed after. For someone like me who has a ton of ideas already, it’s a novelty. A very nice novelty, but I don’t think I’d ever use it seriously. But that’s not the fault of the Kingdom Builder. What it does, it does very well.

The only really concrete problem I really have with it is that I’m a Mac user so I have to boot into my Windows 7 partition to use it (which being that I’m playing Starcraft 2 a ton since Monday, I don’t really mind). Some people have had success with Mono, but I haven’t had success with Mono with anything and don’t really bother anymore. However, it is such a light-weight app that I can run it off a virtual machine without a hitch, and since I keep a virtual machine with a streamlined hack of Windows XP on it for the purposes of DDI stuff, I can run it beautifully there within Mac OS X, so I’m fine.

I also think that these generators could make some really nice iPhone and iPod Touch apps, but I’m not a programmer so I don’t know what that’d entail for Chaotic Shiny Productions to do. I just think it’d be cool to have something like that, and maybe they should look into it! The App Store is a hot place to be, and I think it’d be a lot better for Kingdom Builder to be in a handheld form for use at a table.

So overall I can recommend the Kingdom Builder if you need some quick inspiration, or if you are a devoted worshiper of randomness, then the Kingdom Builder is a great value for you.