Built from Birth is a series on lifepath systems in tabletop RPGs through history. In each post I walk through the lifepath process for a given system and reflect on the experience.
Content Warning: This post has mentions of ableism, sexual assault, drug addiction, and racist conceptions of culture. I don’t linger on them, but I do note them as I encounter them in the book.
Central Casting is a series of tabletop game supplements published in the late 80s and early 90s by Task Force games. One focuses on dungeon generation, while the rest all provide genre-specific character generation systems.
The first, Heroes of Legend, focuses on fantasy settings. Like the other character generation books Heroes for Tomorrow and Heroes Now, it’s written by legendary D&D module designer Jennell Jaquays. It was first published in 1988, but I’m using the 1995 Second Edition printing.
Cracking it Open
There’s honestly not that much to say about this book before diving in. It provides a series of stats that don’t come up often in its own rules, but which are meant to be mappable back to an arbitrary game system for your campaign. It has a sense of alignment from “lightside” to “darkside,” and it seems to have the same basic assumptions about fantasy “races” as D&D and other games of its era.
Step 1 – Heritage and Origins
Finally! The series title pays off, as character creation in Heroes of Legend does in fact start from birth. In this section, I’ll generate the character’s race and culture, social standing, family, and birth information.
Race
Statistically, most characters will be Human, with a small chance each to be an Elf, Dwarf, or Halfling. Even less commonly, characters can also be a mixed-race between these options, or a humanoid beast, reptilian, or Orc. I roll Elf for my character, and I decide to name them Adriel.
Heritage
Also in this section is a table for how the character’s national and ethnic heritage relates to their current area of residence. For this, I roll that Adriel “is the child of recent immigrants to this land and still does not fit in with the dominant society.”
Cultural Background
This determines the general shape of the culture Adriel is from. This one’s kind of a minefield of dated cultural assumptions, with some cultures labeled “civilized” and others “primitive,” “degenerate,” “barbaric,” etc. I roll that Adriel comes from a Nomadic culture, which will give them a lot of survival skills in the wilderness.
Social Status
Next, we determine the class position of Adriel’s family within their culture. These range from Destitute to Nobility, but I roll Comfortable, which is roughly middle class.
Immediate Family
This section provides a whole procedure for generating a character’s immediate family. Adriel’s family head is one parent, their father. They have legitimate parentage, and are the third child with three brothers and a sister.
Birth
Heroes often have odd or notable circumstances surrounding their birth, so the supplement provides several tables for determining them. I find that Adriel was born on a voyaging ship, which is interesting given their Nomadic cultural background. There’s a table for unusual occurrences during birth (storms, unseasonable weather, all milk souring in the area, etc), but none of these happened for Adriel.
Parental Details
The final section of this step provides flavor for the head(s) of household of Adriel’s family. In this case, that’s their father, whose occupation within their Nomadic culture is Hunter. He also enjoys a hobby, fishing for sport.
Step 2 – Childhood and Adolescence
In this section, I’ll roll for specific events that happened in Adriel’s childhood and adolescence. There should be 1d3 of each, which came out to two in childhood and three in adolescence. Later, one of the rolls I made added an additional adolescence event for a total of six across both time periods.
I’ve ordered the events chronologically by rolling ages appropriate to each time span. Note that for an Elf like Adriel, childhood continues to the age of 20 and adolescence to the age of 58.
Age 1 – Magical Prosthesis
As with all these events, I start by rolling on the table for childhood and adolescence events. The result is “Something Wonderful occurs” and I am directed to the Something Wonderful table, where I roll
Character receives a severe injury that does not heal properly and almost kills him before he is rescued by a benevolent wizard who replaces the damaged limb or organ with a magical prosthesis, and this gives the character a magic power.
For more detail, I’m directed to roll on the Serious Wounds table, which produces “Impressive body scars,” with the most impressive scar on the right arm.
Trying to resolve this is interesting, since scars are kind of an odd thing to have replaced with a prosthetic. At first, I thought Adriel might just have a lot of scars and a prosthetic arm, but that seems too neat of a way to square the results. Instead, I took inspiration from kintsugi and decided Adriel should have magical scars, maybe silver in appearance.
As a baby, Adriel crawled into a strange bramble plant that no one could identify. They were covered in scratches, especially on their arm which they had gotten stuck in the brambles, and those scratches wouldn’t stop bleeding. Everyone thought for sure Adriel would die, but when a wizard came by to harvest the plant for alchemy, Adriel’s father begged her to help. She did, whipping up a silvery potion and using it to seal the baby’s cuts, leaving thin scars of silver. Even as they grew up, those silver scars have always remained.
The GM is directed to decide what superpower the prosthesis provides. I’m not sure yet, so I’m leaving that option open.
Age 5 – Jaded Tastes?
At this age, still a very young toddler by elf standards, Adriel “developed jaded tastes for exotic and possibly expensive pleasures.” I have no idea what this means, so I’m writing it verbatim and deciding to backfill later, if at all. Leave blank spaces and all that.
Age 26 – Learning to Hunt
Following their father, Adriel learned to Hunt with a competency of 2.
Age 27 – Rivalry
At this point, I roll that something “bad” happened to Adriel. There are four different options for broad types of bad event, and I rolled “character is molested by an adult” (which I’m not willing to go through for this post) three times before finally getting “character acquires a rival.”
Generating Adriel’s rival is interesting. First, I roll for their relation to Adriel, which could be friend, family, a former lover, etc. I get “Other” which directs me to generate a fresh NPC. The rival is determined to be an Orc woman who’s a professional adventurer. Rolling for the nature of the rivalry and the general feelings between the two, I learn that they are sports rivals who are generally on friendly terms. In the hobbies section, there is a table for sports, where I roll running.
Age 41 – Papa Herds
Adriel’s father changed occupation to Herding.
Age 47 – Blessing and a Curse
This is another roll on the Something Wonderful table. Adriel becomes Blessed to never fumble (critically fail) a skill roll, but also becomes cursed with two “darkside” traits, Angry and Foolish.
Step 3 – Events of Adulthood
This section provides similar events to the last, but these occur after the character comes of age. Characters who start adventuring immediately upon adulthood generate one such event, while older characters get 1d3 events. I decided to go for the latter and rolled a 3.
Age 59 – A Jake Chambers
Adriel saved the life of another character, who became their travelling companion for a while. Using some additional tables, I determine that this companion is a 12-year-old boy, who becomes a loyal friend to Adriel.
Age 61 – Falsely Imprisoned
A couple years later, Adriel was falsely accused of a crime. I roll to find that the crime was piracy, which carried a two-year sentence in a medium-security work camp and a brand denoting the crime. I’m then directed to roll some events that happen while they’re imprisoned.
First, disease ravaged the prison. Adriel survived, and in fact gained some fame for tending to the sick. Both fellow prisoners and guards came to see them as a hero.
Second, a general amnesty was declared, causing Adriel to be released from prison with only 20% of their sentence served (a few months). Their pirate’s brand is the only permanent mark from the ordeal, aside from lost time.
Age 63-66 – Romance
The final life event I roll concerns a romantic encounter. It’s determined to be with a friend’s sibling, which I decide should be an older sibling of the boy Adriel saved years ago. This romantic interest has an “appearance quirk,” which I roll to be “noticeably thin.”
Early, Adriel and this love interest are intense rivals, until that rivalry turns to open affection. They marry and spend a few years together. The relationship ends when the spouse is unfaithful to Adriel and the latter can’t bear to stick around.
Step 4 – Personality
In the final stage of character creation, I determine Adriel’s values, personality traits, and alignment.
Values
Each character gets a person, an object, and an abstract ideal that they value most, with a relative strength of that value.
Adriel’s most valued person is rolled to be “child or children.” At this point, we don’t know of any children they have. This could refer to a child born to their failed marriage, or to the boy (now a young man) that Adriel traveled with (who is also their ex-brother-in-law I guess). Either way, I roll to determine this value is “weak” for Adriel.
The item that Adriel values the most is a portrait. I have to roll the depicted person, and it turns out to be a professional adventurer. Remembering the sports rivalry from Adriel’s youth, and noticing the parallels in the rivalrous start of their marriage, I think that maybe Adriel has a strong attachment to this woman from their path. Maybe their motivation to go adventuring is even to find her. For the strength of the value, I roll a 99 out of a possible 100, making it an “obsessive” value.
Finally, Adriel has an abstract concept they value the most, which I roll to be Honesty. This will pull them more to the “lightside” for alignment, but I roll the strength of the value itself to be the lowest possible at “trivial.”
Traits
At this point, Adriel has a couple known traits (Angry and Foolish), but mostly I have a set of L, D, N, and R marks for each event of their life. These correspond to rolls from a given trait pool: Lightside, Darkside, Neutral, and Random.
Three of the traits are lightside, rolled to be Optimist, Thrifty, and Truthful. Two are neutral, including one of the random rolls: Rough and Follower. Three more are darkside traits: Lazy, Irreverent, and Cowardly.
The second random roll is determined to be an “exotic” trait from a separate set of tables. At first, I roll that this should be a “mental affliction.” Looking at the possible values for that and the ableism of their presentation, I decide to reroll. Instead Adriel gets a “behavior tag;” the first of these I roll is “chem addict,” which I’m not interested in portraying. Instead, Adriel receives the neutral trait Know-it-All.
Alignment
A character’s alignment in the system can be lightside, darkside, or neutral. This is determined by the number of traits of each type, plus influence from their valued abstraction. Adriel has five darkside traits and only three lightside ones, which would make them darkside overall. However, their valued abstraction of Honesty contributes +2 to their lightside rating, so in the end they receive a neutral alignment.
Along with alignment, the system asks me to pick an “attitude” for the character within that alignment. Seeing how volatile Adriel seems to be from their traits, and how little they seem to value anything besides their primary goal, I end up choosing the attitude “Anarchic.”
Now I can post the completed character sheet:
Reflections
Of the systems I’ve tried for this series, this was by far the weakest. Not only did it show some of the worst politics of its time in its depiction of cultures, ability, and sexual violence, but also the moralizing tone of the alignment system was hard to square with how I imagine characters.
More disappointingly, the process felt very generic. That might be because Heroes of Legend is designed to be system-agnostic; the safest assumptions are also the most tropey. But overall, I felt like I came away with a lot of mostly-unrelated data about Adriel, and only in a few places did it feel like the system created novel or interesting prompts for narrative.
There were a couple highlights: trying to solve “prosthetic scars” as a prompt, for example. The recurring connections between rivalry and intimacy also provided an interesting theme. But the real issue was that most of my time was spent generating a bunch of other data that didn’t really lead anywhere.
What Can We Steal?
For me, I don’t think Heroes of Legend offers much. The amount of extraneous, almost simulationist data the system generates doesn’t align very well with what I value in RPGs. For someone who did value that, there might be more there to steal, but I think I’d look for a Kevin Crawford table or something on itch.io before opening this book again.
Jaquays is in revisions for a total overhaul of this system, one that among other things is meant to address the representational issues and provide a more modern viewpoint. I’m looking forward to reading it, and I have hope that thirty years of perspective and learnings will make for a system I like better.
What’s Next?
Chronologically, the next system on my list is another Central Casting book, Heroes for Tomorrow. However, in order to space out what I think will be very similar experiences, I’m instead going to leapfrog to 1990’s Cyberpunk 2020.