I'm making an alternate way of generating characters for a roleplay I'm planning. The character creation system is inspired by Maid RPG , Fiasco, and
this episode of Being Everything Else.
The player has three memories and two quirks: a personal quirk and a weird quirk. These are all rolled for on a table. Let's talk about memories first.
Memories are short sentence fragments which represent an essential part of your character's life in three separate stages. Since the genre is Urban Fantasy, the categories are Normality (A moment, special or mundane, from your character's old life), Descent (The moment when your character started suspecting that something was up), and Nadir (The point where your character cannot turn back from the paranormal).
I haven't fully decided if this is a good idea, but one of the memories has to be shared with another player, which means that you would both have the same memory as the other. This means the two characters are linked by a singular event.
Quirks are either simple explanations of what your character can do (You're good at shooting, you have connections, etc) or the oddities of your character (You have a compulsive need to be near people, you have a pair of antennae). For the former, I roll on my own table, and for the other I use the
Metamorphica.
The job of the players from there is to fit the pieces together to make a character. It seems to generate psychotic lunatics, mutants that are so horribly deformed they couldn't function in any society, or a combination of the two. This is exactly what I intended, since the players are meant to be on the lowest rung of the underworld and stuck doing jobs that are too dirty, too crazy, or simply beneath those higher on the chain.
Here's a few characters I managed to generate. Without memories being linked, of course.
Character One
Memories
Missing the bus.
Putting a gun to your head, then hearing someone whisper in your ear.
Hoping that Jesus isn't watching.
Personal Quirk
Your character has connections.
Weird Quirk
Hollow Bones, Wings (Instead of arms, Gossamer), Adhesive Touch, Pyromania
When I saw this one, I assumed a pyromaniac fundamentalist who thinks God turned him into an angel when in reality he's just mutated and hearing voices. He goes through the slums and the highrises setting fire to corporate skyscrapers and crackhouses, using his sticky wings to climb up into high places and glide from there. However, he committed the sin of refusing to burn down a church that wasn't holy enough, and he thinks God has forsaken him. Now he's burning down all places of sin he can find to get right with God, which is giving him an interesting reputation with the church, especially it's more extreme members.
Character Two
Memories
Your lover's touch.
Your spouse coming home late at night.
Making a deal.
Personal Quirk
Your character thinks fast.
Weird Quirk
Attention Deficit Disorder, Decreased Mental Capability, Slovenly, Flaking Skin, Parasitic Infestation, Strangely Colored Skin (transparent).
I was thinking that this... thing is on the surface a dimwitted and easily distracted host for hundreds of parasites replacing his internal organs, all of which are clearly visible behind his dirty, translucent, and flaking skin. However, he used to be a genius scientist whose wife was infected by a bizarre parasite, causing her to enter a fugue state and wander around. He intentionally transferred the parasite to himself to save his wife, at the price of losing most of his intelligence, but not all of it: he still has a bit of his brain that means he can think on his feet when you wouldn't expect him to. The bugs replace all other functions of his body, however, and sometimes they lay eggs which hatch and burrow out from his skin to fly away to somewhere unknown.
Character Three
Memories
Serving drinks in a bad part of town.
A car accident that shouldn't have happened.
You didn't want to, but you had to burn it down.
Personal Quirk
Your character knows how to tinker with things.
Weird Quirk
Territorial, Strangely Colored Eyes (Tangerine), Sonic Blast
This one stumped me at first, but I figured it out. This girl used to be a bar maid on the wrong side of the tracks. The bar went through a lot of maids, but she stayed on because she knew how to fix the owner's car. She had that thing completely checked out when it crashed into another car. The cops said the brakeline snapped in two, but that was impossible. She did investigating, and she found out that in the small office across from the bar was the Department of Car Accidents: every car accident that ever happened was decided there. The existential insanity of this caused her to burn the place down against her better judgment, and when all the weird equipment they were using to cause the accidents melted, the weird fumes made her pass out. When she woke up in hospital, she had a pair of pure orange eyes and a scream that made the nurse's ears bleed. Nowadays she hangs around outside the burnt down office, waiting for whoever owns it to start repairing it, and screaming at anyone she believes to be suspicious.
What do you guys think? Interesting? Any criticisms?