WitchAdvisor

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  Screenshot

Inspiration

Imagine if Southampton was a place full of supernatural beings living amongst mere unsuspecting mortals - how can you make sense of a place like this, where anywhere could be a potential hot spot for supernatural activity? Our team is currently playing an Urban Shadows roleplaying game set in a supernatural version of Southampton. This project is designed as a creative aid to help the Dungeon Master and players to further develop the narrative by generating supernatural facts based on different locations. This project therefore allows for a social way to collaboratively build narrative together.

What it does

The interactive map links up generated supernatural facts linked to a dataset of British placenames, natural features and public houses. The facts are generated to be relevant to the specific kinds of places and the supernatural factions that inhabit the narrative space, and are marked on the existing map alongside the place names.

Disclaimer: This is a demo version. The final version would load in data dynamically and so we could give WitchAdvice(TM) for everywhere in the world. As it was, for speed reasons we have only included results for Southampton

How we built it

We got location data on place names, pubs, and nature spots from the office of national statistics. For each place we generated a supernatural fact using Tracery. These were then used to create info boxes on an interactive map.

Challenges we ran into

Data loading on the map was very slow so we had to pare down our focus to just places in the Southampton area.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We now have a comprehensive resource of supernatural facts for use in our weekly roleplaying game.

What we learned

We improved our various technical capabilities, learning new things in Javascript, Excel and Tracery.

What's next for WitchAdvisor

We could extend the fact generation, dynamically creating new facts on a refresh. We could expand the focus to the whole country... or the world!

Built With

• excel
• javascript
• tracery