[jmickey]

Perhaps unrelated - is there anywhere a repository of fictional worlds that creators can use for their projects at cost of free of charge?

This would be great for many industries - computer game development, board game development, movie creators, writers, etc. :)

[themodelplumber]

That's a really interesting idea. I know there are lots of generators out there for worldbuilding purposes and I have made my own on the go for things like conceptual art or short fiction. But to your question, you might ask at /r/worldbuilding on Reddit, which has some really neat stuff going on a lot of the time. /r/rpg might also be helpful.

[stillworks]

I hope this doesn't end up opening a horrid can of worms. What are the implications if the worlds and concepts overlap ?

At a personal level, I would be be very interested in learning/finding out such things though. Even more so if it is possible to automate this "discovery"

[themodelplumber]

Resolving overlap might be the fun part, depending on your psychology. For these types of people there's really no use for predictive anticipation as it can spoil the opportunity to solve unique problems :-)

BTW I "automatically" created a planet while sitting in a boring church meeting last Sunday. I used a kind of "dice gradient" method with the dice app on my phone. "How hospitable is this planet?" OK, so a 2. Not very. What's the temperature? 2 again. Geez, it's freezing.

Anyway after about 15 rolls the planet turned out to be used as some sort of ancient computing device, channeling surface air as a cooling method. The ~20 person exploration team was struggling to get past even the most rudimentary underground security, with indications that the past custodians of this world had significant leverage over physical objects, perhaps through technological means.

A lot of fun, working this up :-)

[ves]

You should read the short story “Glacial” in “Galactic North” by Alastair Reynolds.

[themodelplumber]

Thanks, I just skimmed the Wikipedia summary out of curiosity. It looks like an interesting and pretty intense story!

My own idea was that the planet I rolled up hosted a sort of cargo-cult experiment, where the beings that hosted the computing infrastructure were using it for really basic tasks that were easily perceptible to their sensing skills, not understanding what it was, really. Their technological skills included rudimentary large-mass manipulation, and after making a place for this equipment and securing it, they had long since died out, while their "data center" was still flourishing and had stored extremely valuable data.

[ves]

Oooh that’s real nice. I use a lot of those themes in fiction I write / blueprint (probing the limits of understanding, the interpretation of legacy by the inadequate living, etc)

[officemonkey]

The RPG game "Traveller" [sic] has a method for creating fictional worlds using a variety of dice rolls. The original game was created in the early 80s, but the multiple editions since have created system of remarkable depth. One supplement even was able to generate biomes mapped to a dodecahedral sphere.

Size, Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Population, Government, Law level, Technology, all would dictate the kind of goods available, the political structures, the economics.

It was so easy to generate systems that the game came up with an Atlas of the Imperium which featured thousands of stars. I can confirm that a sufficiently motivated nerd could rustle up a RPG subsector (with 20-40 planetary systems) in an hour.