Yesterday, me and Her Indoors played through a session of Ex Novo. A new not-quite-game obviously HUGELY inspired by The Quiet Year. Ex Novo is, good maybe, is the best way I can put my impressions of the game. I picked the game up on a whim last week given the cheap price, and given my interest in this sort of prompt based generation as a method for creating.
Ex Novo bills itself as a "playable city-building generator" that aims to builds locations "useful for further creative use". It does 100% succeed in this in fairness. I feel it is hamstrung by trying to make itself generic enough that it can be applied to all genres one could wish to apply to it, but despite this, it really did prove to be a useful tool to push forward with creating without getting caught in the paralysis a blank page often creates, something I have been trying to avoid also when I use the One Page Dungeon Generator to give me a not quite blank canvas for a game location.
I wish the game had more of an arc to it. As is, there is no delineation to the events that can occur once you get in to the development phase. This does lead to an odd feeling when every time one of the more out there events comes up and the prompt from the game book trends towards a fantastic world, when the city we were building was a regional american city. The prompt sets up the event as a sea change or similar that changes everything, and as much as we tried to work with it, there are only so many times that a natural disaster can befall a city before it seems like this has all been a HUGE MISTAKE.
Additionally, it feels as if the game board / map that you draw doesn't actually have a huge amount of interaction with the rules. After a certain point, we began moving further and further from the prompts as they came up and agreed between ourselves that this event that happened sets off this chain reaction of events, leading this district to be founded, this faction to wax or wane, and this landmark to be erected. It feels like the actual mechanical effects described in the prompts would be far too minor for the game as designed to have this satisying arc over a small number of turns. In our game we played 14 turns, originally planning on 10, but having reached 10 turns in a bit less than an hour, decided to extend things out to give things a more satisfyingly substantial feel.
I have been toying with the idea of making some prompt tables myself for a similar purpose. Rough outline of what I would be thinking would be three phases of an arc, with each phase having a completely or partially different set of prompt tables that more closely mirror the feel of the early stages in a place's development, a phase when this frontier place becomes absorbed into a settled place, and a decadent / decline phase as the place ossifies into the odd places that real world cities are.
Anyway, in other things, I semi-recently put up a simple 3d model for some 15mm Rogue Trader esque junky space outpost on itch. it's available for free, some might find it useful. I would love to see it if somebody prints it and uses it on their table.