Ash’s Guide to RPG Personality and Background is a fabulous template supported with rich random generators for creating rich RPG characters.

You start by defining Personality in four-ish steps:

• Primary Motivators
• Emotional Disposition
• Core Traits
• Secondary Traits (Sense or Humor, Favorite Conversation Topics, Group Affiliations, Religion/Spirituality, Quirks, Hobbies, Mental Disorders)

Then you get the Background generator:

• Birthplace
• Family
• Professions
• Significant Past Events
• Mysteries
• Existing Conflicts
• Adventuring Trigger
• Quests

Although some of the entries (particularly the Professions) are slanted towards a fantasy setting, most of the material is pretty universal in its applicability. And although the depth of detail created by the template is obviously most useful for player characters, it’s pretty easy to raid it selectively as a GM to fill out elements of your NPC roleplaying templates.

Tomorrow I’ll be wrapping up my series on Thinking About Urbancrawls, so it feels appropriate to be thinking about other resources for city creation. I recommend checking out Michael Curtis’ Alphabet of the City’s Shadows. It’s an incredibly rich treatment of thematic elements that can be found in the best fantasy megalopolises. For example:

A is for Alleyways

Like the strands of a spider’s web, the alleyways of the city radiate out from the urban heart to ensnare the unwary. Stinking, trash-strewn, and labyrinthine, alleyways serve as the highways for the denizens of the city’s shadows and the homes for the truly downtrodden and lost. It is within these narrow channels that thieves, whores, madmen, and the wretched reside, far away from the opulent chambers and homes of the rich and powerful.

To step into the alleys is to leave the brightly lit world of the honest man behind, even if you can still glimpse those clean, bright streets at the alley’s filthy mouth. The world of the alleyways have rules of their own and those who do not take the effort to learn the rules of that world soon find themselves devoured by it. The alleys are gateways into places never seen by the honest and righteous, who shun such places with good reason. Adventurers, however, often must tread these paths as part of their sojourns into the city. The cramped shops and hovels off of the alleyways are the domiciles and places of business for Hedge Wizards, sages, the Thieves Guild, and other quasi-legal operations. Many alleyways contain the rusted, offal-choked grates that lead into the city’s Sewers, making them the only place to enter that subterranean world unobserved. The alleyways are also the last resort for desperate men when the Watch is hard upon their heels and they need a place to vanish from the law.

 ALPHABET OF THE CITY’S SHADOWS

Since we’re talking about urbancrawls lately, my attention was immediately arrested when I saw a couple of pretty amazing city generators over at Last Gasp.

Both of them are dice-drop generators, which reminds me of the fun you can have with Vornheim, but they’re integrated with prodigious random tables. The first is a generator for small, Lovecraftian-style fantasy towns: The dice drop generates a layout for the buildings and the faces of the dice are used iteratively to form factions, feuds, leadership… It’s fantastic. Check it out here.

The other generator creates a particular iteration of the ever-shifting magical city of Cörpathium, which draws its inspiration from M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. The dice drop in this generator determines the relative locations of city districts and then (this is the cool part) generates a whole bunch of conditionals based on which districts are present and how they relate to each other. You can find it here.

A great post over at the Reef: The Surest Way to Become a Better Game Master.

Spoilers:

STFU AND LISTEN TO THE PLAYERS

She approaches the issue with a slew of anecdotes about games gone wrong (and also games gone right). I’ll back it up with a bit of theorycraft that I’ve mentioned here before: Your players have a pretty good idea of what they’ll find interesting and entertaining. Let them pursue the goals and plans they want to pursue and you’re far more likely to meet with success than if you try to second guess what they “really” want.

You don’t need to take on total responsibility for the game. In fact, you shouldn’t.

Also of value are the follow-ups she and her husband wrote:

How to Do This (in Practical Terms)
Why It’s Generally a Bad Idea to Say No
Answering Other Objections

As I mentioned recently in The Principles of RPG Villainy, it’s amazing how often saying “don’t railroad your players” results in people agreeing that it’s a bad idea while simultaneously trying to justify why they do it all the time.

If you’ve been hanging around the Alexandrian for awhile, then you know that I like procedural content generators. A few examples from the past include:

• The Poor Man’s Hex Stocker
• Factions in the Dungeon
• Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster
• Fun With Vornheim

They’re useful for rapidly refreshing the core content of an open table. They’re valuable improvisation tools while running the game. And they’re an excellent way of getting your creative juices flowing when you’re creating content.

MAGIC THE GATHERING

Here’s a system proposed by Baldr12 on reddit recently. Take your Magic the Gathering cards (or use a random card generator) and draw five times to determine:

THE PROBLEM (Creature/Enchantment): This is the problem. It may have just appeared or it may have just gotten worse.

THE SETTING (Non-Base Land): This is the primary location. It’s either where the problem is located, where it needs to be solved, or both.

THE SOLUTION (Artifact/Sorcery): The macguffin that will solve the problem.

THE FRIEND (Creature): This is somebody that wants the problem removed or can help the PCs remove it.

THE ANTAGONIST (Creature): This is the person who doesn’t want the problem resolved. They may have been the one to cause it or they might be profiting from it.

EXAMPLE SCENARIO

THE PROBLEM (Emissary of Hope): An “angel” claiming to represent the Nine Gods is offering people absolution from their sins with the promise of immediate entry into a heavenly afterlife. Those who agree to the Emissary of Hope’s offer, however, turn up dead.

THE SETTING (Cursed Land): A place known as Devil’s Hollow, deep within the Old Wood.

THE SOLUTION (Envelop): An old holy ritual which will unknit the flames of the soulbright flamekin. Unfortunately, the Emissary of Hope has destroyed all the local holy books which contain the ritual.

THE FRIEND (Canker Abomination): These evil creatures of legend are coming out of the Old Wood. The local church is condemning them. But if the heroes investigate, they’ll discover that some of the canker abominations are speaking with the voices of those “taken to Heaven” by the Emissary of Hope.

THE ANTAGONIST (Soulbright Flamekin): The source of all this confusion and horror is a soulbright flamekin sorcerer who has taken up residence in Devil’s Hollow. The Emissary of Hope is the soulbright’s creation, trapping the souls of its victims into trees which become canker abominations. The soulbright then draws the canker abominations to itself and burns the wood, claiming the souls for itself.

NETRUNNER

Here’s a quick variant I threw together for using Netrunner cards to generate cyberpunk heists.

THE CLIENT (Identity): This is either the person looking to hire the PCs or the corporation the pseudonymous Mr. Johnson works for.

THE TARGET (Agenda/Asset/Upgrade): This is what they want.

THE JOB (Operation/Event): This desscribes the nature of the job. (You can draw this option multiple times to enrich the difficulty or the complications of the mission.)

THE PROBLEM (Asset/Hardware): This is a hurdle that is going to make finishing the job difficult. (You generally want to draw one problem for each job card you pull.)

THE TWIST (Operation/Resource): Finally, no heist is complete without an unexpected complication somewhere along the way.

 EXAMPLE SCENARIO

THE CLIENT (The Foundry): A lunar mining facility that produces the advanced materials required to build bioroids.

THE TARGET (Net Police): A division of the Lunar PD that recently executed a secret warrant on the Foundry’s databases. The Net Police now have a dossier containing information that the Foundry can’t afford to let out into the wild.

THE JOB (Traffic Accident): The lead investigator for the Lunar PD needs to be taken out of the equation, but it needs to look like an accident. Literally. The PCs need to sabotage her flier. Once she’s out of commission, the case will pass to her deputy.

THE PROBLEM (Deep Red): The deputy is clean, but the Foundry has access to the deputy’s passkeys. Unfortunately, the only way to use the passkeys is to gain access to the Lunar PD’s evidence databases. And those are hyper-secure. The only way to get reliable access from outside Lunar PD headquarters? Cutting edge Caissa ICE. You’ll have to heist a Deep Red unit with the latest Caissa releases.

THE TWIST (Rework): When they pull the file and burn the evidence database, the PCs discover that a copy of the secure file has already been made to a grand jury database. To finish the job, they’re gonna have to hit the courthouse!