The Whims of Chaos

This is also apparently (on a quick googling) the name of some sort of fan-fiction book that some guy's slowly writing.

This post is not about that.

This post is about, rather, random tables and a request for some entries populating it. The sorts of things that could reasonably be applied to starting characters in any given fantasy game, where there's nothing like "You're one armed! Good luck!" and everything like, "You've only got one eye!" or "Pox-Marked", or "You were adopted by a band of marauders!". You know, the sort of thing that's vague enough to be interesting without being stupid or boring. Irreverant is good, funny is good, (I plan on using them for a beer and pretzels game called SKELTON PUNCHER for fuck's sake, this isn't World of Darkness) just nothing boring.

I think that's where a good chunk of our hobby has gone wrong. Warhammer's absolutely got the right idea- random generation charts for quirks and birthplace and even class feature heavily in their games, in part because it helps reinforce the setting and the theme, but in part because it's still relentlessly old-school and rolling on giant charts to find out that you're a Rat-Catcher who's obese and missing his nose is so interesting that it's a real shame not to roll. How can you go back to planning out your character's entire path again? How could anybody want to go back?

So SKELETON PUNCHER's going to have a chart here or there. I plan on dedicating an entire section to a couple of random character-generation tables. They're just too much fun to use, and too much fun to write.