Last month, Iron Arachne turned five years old. Lately, it has not been seeing much in the way of updates. Several half-finished projects lie in local branches in the git repository, waiting for a time when I spend attention on them again.
A.I. is proliferating in the RPG content generator space. The Discord server that I run for authors of RPG generator websites has been much quieter than before, except for the few people whose work is primarily with A.I. tools like ChatGPT. These tools are capable of tying both written and visual content from A.I. into a fairly cohesive whole. The net effect for me is that a lot of my motivation to work on Iron Arachne has dried up in light of what A.I. is doing.
I know the limitations of A.I. right now. I know the value that human-crafted RPG generation tools have over A.I. tools. However, I'm also aware of the time scale here. It's only a matter of time before A.I. gets clever enough to be able to think on "meta" levels and create more cohesive and internally-consistent content across multiple media. Given this, it's pretty demoralizing to be working on tools that explicitly do not use A.I.
However, the purpose of Iron Arachne has never really been about RPG content generation, specifically. That's the theme, certainly, but the actual point of the site is to be my "forever project." I wrote about forever projects back in 2020. Back then, my interest in Iron Arachne was waning too. It was my consideration of its real role in my life that rekindled my passion for working on it.
With that in mind, here are some of the things I have in various states of completion for Iron Arachne that I might work on in the near future.
- An independent name-generation library to be used by both Iron Arachne and MUNA
- A character generator for Old School Essentials
- Name generators independent of character generators
- An architecture generator for creating architectural styles
- A language generator
- A cuisine generator for creating styles of cuisine
- Adding maps to the region generator
With all the work I have on my plate running Silver Gryphon Games, though, I may not be spending a ton of time on Iron Arachne. At least, not until Aether Second Edition, Aethermancy, and Ingenium Second Edition are released. Then I should be able to focus at least a little more on Iron Arachne.