Recently I've just had a session 0 for a campaign I am running in Savage Worlds where I decided to take inspiration from Cyberpunk RED, which I had ran the previous summer. In RED you go through what is called lifepath generation, where you roll for or choose various aspects of your character background, until you have a fleshed out Edgerunner of your own. My favorite part of the lifepath system is rolling for friends, enemies, and tragic love stories. With just these 3 things I was able to run my summer Cyberpunk campaign with little to no prep, and it was a blast. It also forced the players to work within limits, which as many of us know, limitation breeds creativity.
So while prepping this campaign I knew I wanted to do something similar. But, as I was now running a dark fantasy setting, not all the options would translate. So I took this as an opportunity to innovate on Cyberpunks lifepath system.
After a few hours I created the Your Storied Past table. with only 2d20 you can easily generate an invocative story from the past that frames your characters motivation. I have included this table below.
My table used this to great success, I'm happy to say. And all the player agreed afterward, most had never used random character generation, that it had led to very interesting characters which were slightly out of their comfort zone (in a good way of course).
In addition to this table we also used a slightly modified version of cyberpunks friends, enemies, and tragic love stories, as well as the relationships page from "This is Totally Not another D&D Fiasco" by Dyson Logos. Between the three resources, we are starting off our game with a lot of player cohesion and useful background details.
This table can be found here, on my google drive. It is Licensed under Creative a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY NC SA International License
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