In this GDC 2018 talk, Freehold Games' Jason Grinblat goes over the approach he used to generate histories for fantasy RPG roguelike Caves of Qud. 

Grinbalt lays out some commonalities across games that generate histories, demonstrating how he avoided building a full historical simulation by generating historical events and rationalizing them after the fact.

Tying in a discussion about the power of replacement grammars, he explains how to produce rich, convincing histories on a tight scope budget. 

It was an informative talk that's definitely worth watching, so developers shouldn't miss the opportunity to do so now that it's freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

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