[sgqwonkian]

Psientist and Phlagm,

Any luck with the "random number generator" kludge you'd discussed? Does it work?

I tried something similar to make random items generate at the start of the game for you to trade for at Glory. The ITMS command doesn't seem to work at Glory - just the more specific ITEM command does. So I made a bunch of quests with a "havenstuff" key.

If I set the quests with an "always" flag, it would generate the first quest on the list alphabetically every time you played.

If I set the quests with an "event" flag, it'd only generate items at all about 50% of the time, and when it did there'd be one less place/esmeralda/nova/jumboshrimp etc in the universe that game. It kinda worked, but it made the universe less interesting when it did.

So now I'm left considering a third option... I could take every existing ally and event quest, and add a section near the beginning with
STAR #
FLAG existing
PLNT hope
ITEM itemname
END STAR

Pros: A different random selection of equipment would be available every game.

Cons: After playing the mod enough times a person could come to figure out "If Haven has a proton matrix, that means I'm going to be sabotaged. If Haven has a gatling laser, that means a star is going to go nova." etc.

That Con kinda bugged me, so I chose to use method #2 (events that do nothing but generate starting stuff) for my Teeming With Life mod.

But the reason I mention this is that if you're using it to generate hidden variables, this third method would work great for you.
You could have the haven quest (or brass or pirate quests) initialize the variables, and then have each (or some portion) of ally and event quests increment them by various numbers.
It'd all be invisible to those playing the mod - unlike my starting equip idea, there'd be nothing for them to reference at the start of a game and deduce what events were destined.