Last Gasp’s Cörpathium city generator

Last Gasp is a beautiful site by Logan Knight, compelling and raw and brimming over with enthusiasm and gorgeous (often NSFW) artwork. The tagline is “Art, Smut, and Role-Playing,” so you know exactly what you’re getting.

I love random generators, and Last Gasp offers a stunning one: In Cörpathium. It combines a die-drop map (another thing I love!) with conditionals; the conditionals are a great piece of game tech I don’t recall ever seeing before, and they really merit an example. But first, the core concept behind Cörpathium (so the conditionals make sense):

M. John Harrison’s Viriconium was one of the big inspirations that brought Cörpathium into existence, and one of the things that I loved most about those stories was that the city was never the same; places move, facts shift, but it remains Viriconium.

So, conditionals. Here’s the first line under Government:

If there is no Temple District, but the Blood-Red Palace of the Godless exists, Cörpathium is ruled by the Godless and the Childlike Oracle, the Lamb, Eater of Eternity.

You take the first conditional that applies, so if that one doesn’t apply you move on to the next one:

If there is no Temple District, or the Blood-Red Palace of the Godless, but The Old Folk exist, Cörpathium is ruled by that which crawled up from the Emerald Pit so long ago, and the Old Folk live.

And so on from there, and for other categories, until you have your Cörpathium of the moment. It’s brilliant.

It also looks eminently hackable, even for cities without Cörpathium’s peculiar nature. I’d love to see it in book form, too.

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