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I’ve been busy working on some AI-powered Game Master tools, some of which will eventually become exclusive to our patrons. The first of these tools is the Bookshelf Generator, a concept that was proposed by one of my users on our AI Game Master Tools discord server. This user mentioned that a particular PC in their group always had a penchant for investigating bookshelves, with the aim to perhaps find some hidden lore. This GM often found it challenging to have in depth material prepared for every bookshelf, however and suggested a tool that could generate a list of book titles as well as a description of the contents within. This seemed pretty straightforward to make, so I went ahead and created it.

This tool enables you to not only input a setting—be it a generic RPG setting like Dungeons and Dragons, specific realms within those worlds like Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep, or Baldur’s Gate, or other game worlds like Night City from Cyberpunk 2077, the Ninth World from Numenera, or Rokugan from Legend of the Five Rings—but also specify the exact location of the bookshelf. Whether it’s in the study of an eccentric wizard or the waiting room of a ripperdoc clinic.

Finally, the Bookshelf Generator presents an optional field where you can input unique genres that may not be typically found in that location. Perhaps it’s a collection of cookbooks in a wizard’s tower or romance novels in a town master’s office.

The tool then generates an appropriate list of book titles. From there, you can choose to generate more specific details about the title, including the author name, author Background, physical description of the book, a summary of the book and a book excerpt. Finally, each book has a potential hidden secret that players may uncover if they pass the appropriate check. I’ve aimed for this tool to be system-agnostic, with checks ranging from easy to very hard and corresponding to generic skills you can align with the system you’re using.

The Bookshelf Generator will be freely accessible until the end of August. Afterward, it will become exclusive to patrons at the $3 tier.

I welcome any questions or feedback about this new tool—I’m excited to hear what you think. Happy bookshelf exploring!

At the start of  each new year we reflect and we talk about how it went for us. And when we talk about our year, we usually only talk about the big events: a job change, a new relationship, a heartbreak, this big stroke of luck or that big misfortune.

But the fact is, our lives are mostly filled with moments that aren’t particularly noteworthy at all. It’s not interesting to talk about the Vietnamese sandwich place you went to for lunch a couple times a month. It’s also not interesting to talk about that parking garage space that you rented when you started driving to work. Rainy days when you do nothing but stay inside reading or watching TV are not interesting, nor is that day you spent waiting at the DMV.

And yet, despite the fact that we don’t care to remember them, these moments constitute the bulk or our experiences. They provide background, context and depth to the “big” events that we do remember and talk about.

If I had read the above paragraphs in 2012, I think I would have nodded my head in agreement. However, since I wasn’t particularly diligent about journaling or keeping a record of my days in any way I don’t think I would have understood its meaning completely until I started taking videos each day using the 1 Second Every Day app to make a montage of the year.

This was the video I shared for 2013:

I admit that I did feel my ego inflate a little bit when friends started liking my video on Facebook and saying how “awesome” my year looked, despite the many days in that year where the most interesting second was a video of the the overcast sky out my apartment window, that programming book I was studying, or that video game that I got addicted to for a couple weeks. Still, I did the best to make my year look as interesting as possible, and many times I found myself seeking out novel situations and activities just so that I could show I was living an eventful and interesting life.

So yes, narcissism was likely one of the bigger motivations for first embarking on my 1 Second Everyday project in 2013. But after that quick swell of pride I experienced after people had liked or shared my video had subsided, I realized that I was still left with the richest chronicle of a period of my life that I could ever hope for. 2013 was one of the best years in living memory for me, but I think that because I had taken a second of video each day to chronicle it, it seemed far richer than any year before it. It was richer not because I experienced more, but simply because I remember more of it. This is why I continued to take video each day in 2014, and will most likely do so indefinitely.

And here is the video from 2014. Happy new year 🙂