Pendulum is a recently released product from the highly talented hand of Jon from Tale of The Manticore podcast. Wanting to get started with my world of Mykovnia this weekend but not knowing quite where to start, I decided to swing the pendulum and see what happens.

From the author:

Pendulum is a world-building assistant for one or more creators. Using this tool, along with a coin and (optionally) a d20, you will sketch out a roughly 500 year history for a settlement, going from Hamlet to Large City and documenting the events and rulers that shaped it along the way.

This is a nice, guided creativity tool which provides you with a long sequence of events where you toss a coin to decide whether the pendulum swings more towards Law – where things are in the hands of the settlement authorities – or Chaos – where things go out of their control.

I began with a rough idea of where my settlement of Refuge is located and how it began. From there, I ran the Pendulum method and covered 205 years of history in the first sitting. I’m aiming to add one more event daily as part of my Tiny Prep until I get it finished.

It’s a lot of fun to mess around with while simultaneously being really simple to play with. Kudos to Jon and his collaborators for creating a really neat tool. It’s 99 cents at the time of writing.

Game on!