The Würfelalmanach, published by Georg Nikolaus Bärmann in 1829, is a playful system for generating one-act plays by rolling dice. These short dramas were popular on stage and in private gatherings, and Bärmann's book offered a way to create 4×10^155 possible variations from 1,200 text fragments. This web app recreates the experience, letting you explore an early example of algorithmic storytelling in an interactive way.
This project requires Node.js (LTS v20 at time of writing). Please follow the installation instructions for your platform.
Install the dependencies:
npm installTo start the development server:
npm run devTo create a production build:
npm run buildThe text and dice table was digitised and added to Wikisource. A TEI version of the text and a JSON dice chart were created for this project.
This project is licensed under the MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective – EXC 2020 – Project ID 390608380.