Tablescript is an idea I had a looooong time ago. It started with questions like:

“What if I could very quickly create Dungeons & Dragons NPCs?”

“What if I could roll random treasure without flipping pages?”

“What if I could combine multiple sources and instantly generate random but useful descriptions of entire towns?”

“What if I could do all these things in the context of a campaign design and management tool?”

I wrote the first version of Tablescript in C++ somewhere between 2001 and 2004. It was large (~10k lines) and mostly terrible. I never really got it to the point where it was useful, but I kept the source around anyways. You can find it here.

And then somewhere around 2005 I discovered Ruby and fell in love. With Tablescript.rb, I replaced 10k lines of C++ with 756 lines of Ruby. Tablescript.rb is a simple DSL that overlays the Ruby language, requiring you to write valid Ruby - which isn’t so bad because Ruby is lovely. It wouldn’t, however, run in a browser.

In 2017 I learned that JavaScript wasn’t so terrible if you took the time to actually learn it. I’m still learning, but I’ve managed to scrape together Tablescript.js - a standalone scripting language that is both browser-embeddable and available as a command-line tool.