Oracles

by Jens Alfke

This is just a simple web-app that randomly chooses and displays messages, intended to serve as inspiration for roleplaying games or fiction. See it in action:

• In A Wicked Age
• Itras By
• The Decktet

There are a lot of these online oracles/generators already (check out Chaotic Shiny and Abulafia), and there's nothing especially novel about this one; it's just that the existing ones display very bare-bones HTML, but I wanted one that's as lovely as the works that inspired it.

Features

• It's pretty! I've tried to follow the designs of the books (q.v.) without aping them exactly. I used free fonts from Google Web Fonts and backgrounds from Eos.
• It looks pretty good on an iPhone, using the special viewport meta tag. (I'm not sure how it looks on Android or other mobile devices; let me know if it can be improved.)
• On iOS it's optimized for being saved to the home screen. It's got a custom icon and it opens up full-screen. (It doesn't yet run offline, though.)
• It's 100% client-side code, so you can run it on any web server or even on your local disk, without needing PHP or anything else.

Source Books

In A Wicked Age

Vincent Baker's In A Wicked Age is a dark fantasy sword-and-sorcery roleplaying game focused on storytelling. An integral part of the game is its four "Oracles": before each session the group draws four cards from one of these and uses the characters, locations and situations they describe.

(There are already two different functional but bare-vones web implementations of these oracles.)

Oracle text is copyright © 2007 Vincent Baker.

Itras By

Itras By is a surreal role-playing game by Ole Peder Giæver and Martin Bull Gudmundsen, which takes place in the vaguely-1920s, vaguely-Nordic setting of the eponymous city. The game doesn't use dice; instead, decisions are resolved by drawing cards.

Resolution card text is copyright © 2008-2012 Ole Peder Giæver and Martin Bull Gudmundsen (English translation by Ole Peder Giæver, Jimi Thaule, Martin Bull Gudmundsen, Magnus Jakobsson.)

The Decktet

The Decktet is a deck of cards invented by P.D. Magnus. It is unique in that most of the cards have multiple suits; this allows for many novel mechanisms in card games. Moreover, each card has a unique picture and name, with a suggested Tarot-like interpretation. While no one to my knowledge actually believes in the divinatory power of the Decktet, the pictures and interpretations are certainly evocative.

The Decktet design and card images are copyright ©2010-2012 P.D. Magnus. Some rights reserved. A version of the deck and a bunch of supporting prose is offered as open content under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Credits

• Text is copyrighted as listed above.
• Macondo Swash Caps font is by John Vargas Beltrán. (SIL Open Font License)
• Goudy Bookletter 1911 font is by Barry Schwartz, based on the original design by Frederick Goudy. (SIL Open Font License)
• Berkshire Swash font by Brian J. Bonislawsky, Astigmatic One Eye Typographic Institute. (SIL Open Font License)
• Fortune Letters and Refreshing Beverages fonts by P.D. Magnus, "free for use in any project, commercial or non-commercial".
• Background textures are by Eos Design. (No license specified; free for personal/nonprofit use)
• Code and markup are by me, Jens. (License is ... um, let's say Apache 2.)