Goodman Games

I was digging through some of my old RPG books, and I unearthed my old copy of Central Casting: Heroes of Legend. As I was flipping through it, it occurred to me that the characters generated through the book could be easily compatible with DCC with only very minor tweaking. I doubt it would be worth the effort to build 0-level dungeon fodder this way, but it could be a lot of fun fleshing out some higher level characters.

Unfortunately, the book is long OOP and goes for insane prices online, but I know that there are PDFs out there. It's worth hunting down, if for no other reason than to read some of the bizarre characteristics and histories that one can roll up. Where else can you roll up a destitute pig farmer who was born in the back of a wagon, has glowing green eyes, a criminal history, was drafted in the military on the losing side of a holy war, carries around a cursed magical trumpet, is afraid of the dark, and has a bizarre elf fetish?

Task Force Games? They made Starfleet Battles back in the day before Amarillo Design!

I used to think those books were a cool idea for building up PCs -- but after using them just a bit, I realized that it always felt like the characters story was done before you actually played the character in a game... The system generated so many twists and turns in a character's backstory, it either became hard to reconcile them all together, or they developed obvious motivations that would conflict with playing adventures. A case of covering all the bases, instead of the bases that needed covering for the adventure/campaign you were actually playing.

You could strip the results down, but then you've spent a lot of time to just settle on a couple of ideas.

Using them for NPCs, on the other hand...