Lives of the Azar

Lives of the Azar. A collection of historic and biographical texts, written by Idrizink Erebzidy. Presented to Queen Maki Denkage in 1262, to commemorate the 100th year of The State of Aitsasho.

A procedurally generated history, submitted for NaNoGenMo 2017. It recounts events from a simulation spanning 1200 years containing thousands of people.

The simulation includes birth, adoption, marriage, sexuality, jealousy, murder, religion, emigration, vassalage, and more. It generates natural language biographies which have been manually compiled into the final text.

The Encylopedia

The output of the simulation is a generated encyclopedia, here.

The encyclopedia contains an entry for each person, location, and other entity in the simulation. These entries describe events relating to their subjects, supplemented with other details (like causation) to provide context. This is all rendered in generated English text.

The source code is publicly available on Gitlab.

The PDF

Entries from the encyclopedia have been manually compiled into a 50,000 word novel, framed as a text written by Idrizink Erebzidy (a poet who actually lived in the simulation from 1215 - 1297) and presented to his royal patron. You can download the PDF here.

Compiling the novel has been an interesting exercise in historical investigation. I started by deciding the text was written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the monarchy of Aitsasho. Studying the encyclopedia reveals that its monarch at the time, Maki Denkage, was enthroned at the age of 13 only 1 year earlier. One can assume Idrizink intended to present his work to the previous monarch, Edra, only to have em die before it was complete. This gives his emigration soon after a certain pathos. Other details, like Zoushou Denkage’s rebellion against her grandfather, or characters murdering themselves in fits of rage, abound.