Sunday 11 January 2015

Random Towns In Missouri

In my previous post I described five ACW campaign battles I had played out. Each had a name which was randomly generated, because I thought that what the world really needed was a method of randomly determining place-names in Arkansas and Missouri.

Here's how I did it. Each name is in two parts, and generating each part uses its own table.

First Part

D12 to determine row, then a D6 for the individual entry: 1-2 gives the first, 3-4 the second, 5-6 the third.

1 - Bethel - Spring - New*
2 - Bald - Wilson - North*
3 - Harris - Liberty - West*
4 - Cooper - Pine - East*
5 - Clark - Park - South*
6 - Bloom - Queens - (Saint Name)**
7 - Prairie - Red - Sweet
8 - Essex - Yellow - Bitter
9 - King - Black - Ghost
10 - Green - White - London***
11 - Honey - Green - Big*
12 - Lake - Union - Little*

*If you get this, roll another prefix for it to apply to. e.g. You roll 'East'. Rolling again you get 'Pine'. So your place-name starts 'East Pine'. If you roll another entry with a '*' then there is no second prefix.

**Think of a name to go with 'Saint'. You may opt not to bother with the second part.

*** I have included 'London' as a place-holder. Pick any British or European city. As with 'Saint', generating a second part is optional.

Second Part

D6 to determine row, then a D6 for the individual entry: 1-2 gives the first, 3-4 the second, 5-6 the third.

1 - Hill - Creek - Grove
2 - Knob - Ville - Woods
3 - Bluff - Town - Church
4 - Spring - Burg - Ford
5 - Rock - Crossing - Water
6 - Ridge - Field - Valley

Examples

Part 1 - D12 = 7, D6 = 3. This gives 'Red'.
Part 2 - First D6 = 2, Second D6 = 4. This gives 'Ville'.
So our first battle is fought at Redville.

Part 1 - D12 = 11, D6 = 5. This gives 'Little'. So I roll a second prefix.
Part 1b - D12 = 8, D6 = 1. This gives 'Essex'.
Part 2 - First D6 = 6, Second D6 = 2. This gives 'Ridge'.
So our second battle is fought at Little Essex Ridge.

Part 1 - D12 = 5, D6 = 2. This gives 'Clark'.
Part 2 - First D6 = 5, Second D6 = 2. This gives 'Crossing'.
Adding in a possessive we get the Battle of Clark's Crossing.

I came up with the words in each table from a random perusal of a list of Arkansas and Missouri place-names on Wikipedia. Where would we be without Wikipedia?

1 comment:

  1. This is so much fun to see someone out there in the world creating games and names in my home state. I live in Greenwood, MO and teach at a Montessori school located on the southern edge of the Battle of Westport Battlefield. I am on Wornall Road south of the Wornall house and Loose Park. Keep up the good work on those far away battlefields. I love this.

    Cheers,
    Ken
    The Penny Whistle blog

    ReplyDelete

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