Harbour City:About

Hello, and welcome to Harbour City. It all started back in 2021 with a Kickstarter named Hexton Hills by Graven Guild. The Kickstarter was for 3D-printable Hex map tiles of all sorts. Mountains, plains, rivers, roads, towns, haunted graveyards, epic cities, and more.

You see, they have a map maker, and your map starts off innocently enough, then it grows, and sprawls and ends up being a 4-foot by 4-foot wonderful wall hanging!

One day, a few weeks ago, a friend and I were in a Zoom meeting and we got to chatting. I had McDonalds on my mind when the conversation turned to Dungeons & Dragons. The conversation got a little silly, but the idea of a temple that worshipped the great Saint Ronald the Wise was born. Of course, he had to have some of his friends along, so I tried to think of a cool name for a temple to Grimace, and a few iterations later, this purple color came through in the form of the Grapes of Wrath temple. From there, I began to build a map of a walled city that had a harbor on its southern border, where you had to pass between the temples on the main road into the city.

Naturally enough, since the city revolved around the harbor, and since I prefer the British spelling, the city became Harbour City.

Now for the second part of the intro. You should probably know that at my day job, I work with Generative AI, a lot. What is Generative AI you say? In short, it's an AI that can seemingly understand us, reason, discuss, narrate, and most importantly for Harbour City, create new content. So, bringing work to my art, I decided to explore the possibilities of having ChatGPT, a leading Generative AI tool, help me create the details and story hooks and a lot more for Harbour City. I was astounded at its capabilities.

It took some creativity on my part to give it the right prompts to get it to generate what I needed, but as we learned together, I how to prompt it better, and it how to respond better, we explored Harbour City and its Surrounding Environs.

The last piece of the puzzle was how to get my friend access to what was rapidly coming together on my end. I tried sharing an Obsidian notebook, which is all written in Markdown. That didn't work very well. I tried several other avenues, none to my satisfaction. Then I decided to check out GoDaddy one of the two internet hosting sites I use and see what they could offer. They offered me a great deal on a very basic Linux hosting plan, and a domain name that would let me install a MediaWiki site as an app. And Harbour City wiki was born.

It took a minute before I realized ChatGPT could actually rewrite the markdown into MediaWiki format and we were off to the races, so to speak. Since then, I've built my own personal GPT, another wonderful tool that is part of the ChatGPT family. That GPT has been instructed to provide its output in MediaWiki format with a standard header and footer that work for Harbour City's wiki. It's fantastic.

Credits

A huge amount of the formatting for this Wiki was explained in great detail in the Simple Microsoft Word Template by Laura Hirsbrunner.