What is ARWG?

ARWG stands for Alternate Realities World Generator; in particular, ARWG is a simple application which assists reality designers in creating realistic game worlds. While created with Alternate Realities users in mind, ARWG can be used in a wide range of role playing and speculative fiction contexts.

How does it work?

The World Generator functions by modelling the evolution of a number of societies comprising the game world. These societies interact economically, culturally, and politically; furthermore, they have endogenous dynamics which result from an interplay of internal forces. From this dynamic process, ARWG extracts a "history" composed of important game world events, and periodic "snapshots" which give a detailed analysis of the state of the world (and those who inhabit it).

Some salient features of ARWG include:

• Fully cross-linked HTML output
• Treatment of cultural, economic, scientific, technological, and political variables
• Society profiles in AR CDO format
• A blow-by-blow "history" of world events
• Periodic "snapshots" of the game world
• A unique "language" for each society
• Lists of prominent cities
• Documentation (in HTML)
• The standard AR copyleft

Getting ARWG

Currently, version 0.01 (alpha) can be retrieved from this site. Two different flavors are available:

• The PC version (zipped, with source, docs, and a standard DOS binary)
• The general release (gzipped, with source and docs)

You can also check out the documentation directly.

Carter Butts, ctb@andrew.cmu.edu