Golden Anvil

I receive a monthly roleplaying magazine called Pyramid released as PDF by Steve Jackson games, the ones who publish my roleplaying game of choice (GURPS). They articles are usually not dependant on any particular roleplaying system although they sometimes include stats appropriate for GURPS. This month's issue was themed around post-apocalyptic adventuring. You know, after the nuclear bomb kind of stuff, or zombie survival. That kind of thing.

In general, it was a fairly good issue, but there was one article that just got my creative juices flowing. The article present a number of equations that would be useful in doing statistical modeling of populations. It talked about birth and death rates, reproductive rates, age distributions, growth limits, short and long term effects of things like wars, etc. It also provided links to online resources for furthering your own research.

For me, this is fascinating stuff, because I've always had this interest in simulations and modeling. I've had a project I've been working on off and on to develop a program to do history simulations for fantasy worlds, and another program to generate family tree type histories that could be used as character or NPC background info. I even blogged about the second one back when I had this blog stuff running through wordpress.

Anyway, this article and it's excellent resource links got me thinking about these two programs again, and I'm kind of itching to do some more development work on them again. I actually have all sorts on interesting ideas on how to implement them, and while it would really end up serving much practical purpose, it's the process of implementing it that's fascinating to me. I doubt I'll actually make much real progress, since I'm so busy with stuff, but it's still fun to think about.

I might normally have more to say about this, but it's way late. I need to go to bed.