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 CHARACTER HISTORY GENERATOR
I certainly don't suggest that
building a backstory should always be left to the dice, but then again
there are times when players like to challenge themselves by letting the
dice tell them things that they then work to role-play. And as a GM,
sometimes it's a great rolegaming tool to assign things to your players to
challenge them.
The Character History
Generator is an optional set of comprehensive charts that are
simple enough for a grade-schooler to use, but detailed enough to satisfy
the most rabid rolegamer without getting too detail-specific; you
roll up the basics and then create the particulars. The CHG lets you come up with the
framework for any event in your character's past life, prior to his
creation, from his birth or even before (for those events that affect him
but didn't involve him, perhaps involving his parents or ancestors).
Who, What, When, Where,
Why, and How... for Anything!
The CHG lets you drop a few
dice to generate the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of an event,
often with multiples of one or more of those, and it's detailed.
Generating an event takes just a few minutes. Want to generate reason why
your character has a certain Drawback
or Personality Trait? Why he came to
learn a certain Skill? What made him
decide to become a wizard or a soldier or a spaceship captain? How he
became a movie star or got rich? Drop a few dice, and you'll be on the way
to knowing.
Character Origins
Better still, the CHG can be
ideal for those times when the GM and a player get together but the rest
of the group can't make it that day. Once you've rolled up neat CHG
events, the player might be itching to actually role-play those events. So
role-play them! Sure they're in the past, and sure the player knows his
character won't die (at least not permanently), but he has a great
opportunity to explore his character's origins—a great opportunity for
role-playing.
Game Masters: Adventure
Planning
GMs can even use the CHG for
a fast and simple adventure-generation system. You know those nights when
nobody planned to game, but someone says, "Hey, let's jam" and suddenly
you're stuck without an adventure planned? Or how about those times when
you procrastinated and don't have an adventure ready when the
group shows up? Just
grab some dice, roll up one or more events, and you have an adventure. You'll
have to flesh out the details and add quickly generated NPCs
(which is easy with the LARP rules), but
this major time-saver gets you gaming in a hurry. The CHG is also ideal for leisurely
adventure planning, when you just need a little jump-start to get your
creative engine rumbling.
Rolegamer Democracy -
What's this?
A third-party product out
years ago let you roll up random events like this, and it was good, but it
required an entire book. Many RPGs began including pitiful attempts to do
this, usually spanning a few pages and giving so few outcomes that an
entire gaming group was apt to have several repeated details. They
certainly never much allowed for generating background details, and
certainly weren't good as adventure generators. The CHG is comprehensive
and incredibly varied, packing more punch in the few pages it takes up
than you'll possibly imagine.
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