Writing a new template for MakeShift requires an idea, a little creativity, and understanding the MakeShift syntax. You can write a template in your favorite text editor, like Notepad++, Sublime Text, or directly into the lab editor. So pop open your favorite editor and let’s get started with an example.
The first thing you need for a new MakeShift template is an idea of what you want to create. Are you naming a new location? Coming up with a new character? Listing the items inside a treasure chest?
Let’s pretend I’m the dungeon master for a Dungeons & Dragons group. We’re on a quest that will bring the group out to a series of seaside beaches to find clues and investigate a crime. I want each beach to have a spooky name to go with the tone of the adventure. MakeShift would be perfect for helping to come up with a bunch of names for our haunted beaches.
Let’s start our MakeShift template with two ideas that are blatantly stolen from other media. We’ll write beach as the first line of our template, followed by the two names we’re borrowing from elsewhere, each on its own line and indented with a tab.
beach
The Banshee Bay
Twilight Tides
Our template right now is saying that a beach is defined as either The Banshee Bay or Twilight Tides. There’s a 50% chance of either one.
Let’s expand those two options. We’ll take out words that represent something very specific and replace them with more general placeholders. In this case, a banshee is a sort of monster in our D&D world. We’ll replace the word ‘banshee’ in our template with the {monster} placeholder.
beach
The {monster} Bay
Twilight Tides
Great! Now let’s pick some spooky-sounding monsters that could get plugged in here. We’ll add a new definition for monster with a couple options below it:
beach
The {monster} Bay
Twilight Tides
monster
Banshee
Spirit
Phantom
Wraith
Now, whenever we encounter the {monster} placeholder, we’ll pick an option from the monster definition list. We could still get “The Banshee Bay,” but we might also get “The Spirit Bay,” “The Phantom Bay,” or “The Wraith Bay.”
Let’s add some more placeholders. The word ‘bay’ is just a natural feature, and the word ‘tides’ is too. Let’s replace those with a {natural_feature} placeholder. While we’re at it, let’s define natural_feature with a few choices.
beach
The {monster} {natural_feature}
Twilight {natural_feature}
monster
Banshee
Spirit
Phantom
Wraith
natural_feature
Bay
Coast
Coastline
Seashore
Tides
Waters
The word ‘Twilight’ is technically a noun, but we’re kind of using it as a descriptor or adjective here. We’re going to pretend it’s an adjective so we can replace it with another placeholder, and a new adjective definition:
beach
The {monster} {natural_feature}
{adjective} {natural_feature}
monster
Banshee
Spirit
Phantom
Wraith
natural_feature
Bay
Coast
Coastline
Seashore
Tides
Waters
adjective
Wailing
Twilight
Shadowed
Ghostly
Great! We’ve expanded the possibilities for our beach names by inserting placeholders and defining a few lists to pull from. Based on this template, a beach name will follow two general formats:
and each of these formats then pull random options from our three definitions.
With just a couple lines and some fun adjectives, we have a template that can create almost 50 random names for our haunted beaches.
Our template so far uses Definitions and Placeholders, two of MakeShift’s core tools. Additional features like nested placeholders, in-line lists, and placeholder methods all give us even more power to mix things up. Check out the examples/ directory on the GitHub repository to see some of these other features in action. Combining these tools with a few more creative ideas could produce an unlimited number of scary beach names or really anything else you can think of.