Content Warning
ttrpg fortunes
fortuneis one of those classic unix programs that are available on basically all unixoid systems. The only thing it does is “display a pseudorandom message from a database of quotations”, or as the man-page of fortune for debian says: “fortune – print a random, hopefully interesting, adage”.
To be fair, the fortune part of the name comes from fortune cookies. So whatever is printed is not meant to be taken too seriously.
You wouldn’t think this is a terribly interesting or even useful program, but people have found uses for it over the last few decades. It might just be used to provide a human element to an otherwise sterile work environment, but I also found it used at least once to provide a noticeable update to an otherwise static website (by printing adages about project management. So the updates were functionally useless, but the program did fulfill an important task).
What the program does is this: it takes a file of adages, or sayings, or other small text snippets, and when called prints one of them. You can chose which file you want to take those from, you can choose the length you want your printed text to be, and a few other smaller options. It will determine one and output it. It’s one of those programs that breathes the unix philosophy that a program should do just one thing, but do it well.
You might encounter it every time when you log on to a shell, where the admin has configured fortune to print a quote. Or some people have it in their signature for forums or emails. (sometimes connected with something like cowsay which prints a bit of crude ascii art cow (or whatever) saying whatever fortune spit out.
________________________________________/ I could never be a druid, I just don’t \\ trust the trees. They’re too shady. / ---------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||There are a lot of different fortune files available, from the stock ones that are shipped with distributions, to other projects where you might, e.g. find Discworld quotes, or, I dunno, your favorite Chuck Norris facts.
Anyway, I was futzing around with our IRC network lately and while playing around with a bot that could use fortune, I realized that there was no actual file available for stuff about roleplaying (or wargaming, or boardgaming, or any gaming for that matter).
So I decided to make one.
Right now it’s only a small page on campaignwiki.org: https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/TTRPGFortuneFile/HomePage but the idea is to soon enough move that to github and do it on there.
If you want to add to the file: the page above is a wiki so you can just add what you want to add. (some people already did). I am looking for pithy sayings, jokes, DM advice, and everything else that might be interesting. Have a great quote about roleplaying games? Maybe even a more or less short story? Just add it on there.
