View Single Post
Old 09-06-2018, 11:13 AM   #25
quarkstomper
 
quarkstomper's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: The Enchanted Land-O-Cheese
Default Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!

One of the couple who ran our gaming group when I lived in Darkest Iowa was rather dismissive of the Central Casting books. She was an English teacher in her day job, and felt that creating backstories ought to be a creative process and that leaving them to the roll of a die was using a crutch. And I can see her point of view.

But I found the Central Casting tables fun to play around with, even if I did not get a whole lot of use out of them. For one thing, despite the author's best intentions, when I used the table the characters I rolled up began to have a kind of sameness about them. For one thing, they all seemed to have tattoos.

My Wacky Brother Steeve used Central Casting to make up a character in a Star Trek campaign, and he wound up with a star tattoo over one eye. We mocked his tattoo, but Steeve enjoyed playing goofball characters and so he just went with it.

When I got married and moved to the Enchanted Land-O-Cheese, I left my Central Casting books with my former roommate who was an aspiring writer and thought they'd be useful as a tool for developing characters for his fiction. And maybe they were.

I think I found them most useful when I mined the table for ideas rather then following die rolls.
__________________
Read "Danger Cay" at Hannibal Tesla Adventure Magazine! Pulp Era Adventure and Two-Fisted Science in the futuristic world of 1935!
quarkstomper is offline   Reply With Quote