Central Casting: Heroes of Legend Review

by Paul Jaquays

 Ah, the Tour de Force of random tables and charts for your fantasy roleplaying game.  Central Casting: Heroes of Legend was written to help you as a gamer figure out the background of your character.  From unusual births (such as, being born exactly at Noon or Midnight), to childhood events and events in your adolescence.  To events in young adulthood, this book has it all. Although it's dated (like how it treats homosexuality, we now know that there is nothing wrong with a homosexual). This book is still useful in creating a 3D character.  Although some roleplayers tend to think up their characters whole cloth for fantasy roleplay, others could use a little bit of help.  As such this book is out of print and buying a copy from Amazon is way expensive: it costs almost a thousand dollars on Amazon.  So it's best to download it from the Internet (as if anyone is willing to spend that amount of cash for this book.)

What's in it?

Paul goes over how characters in most roleplaying games are one dimensional.  Actually, characters are often one dimensional.  Even characters I created do not have the depth to them.  I just go with a character with a small background and then proceed to play them.  The tables and charts in this book proceed to change all that.

The book takes you through some considerations for your character. The book talks about survival skills (something that equals the skill survival in Pathfinder first edition and Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition). Literacy, motivations, and generating NPCs using the tables in this book.  The tables begin with your character's race.  Of course you could choose your race, or randomly generate the race. Races in the book include humans, elves, dwarves, half-elves, halflings, beastmen, reptilemen (Dragonborn or lizardfolk), orcs, and half-orcs.  Although your fantasy campaign might have their own races.  

By DomCritelli from Shutterstock.

The book continues with a random table choosing culture (and this goes from neolithic and stone age cultures to decadent cultures). Then you can randomly choose your social status and whether or not your character is legitimate (bastards are possible).  Reasons for being illegitimate (like your character's mother might be a harlot), then your character's family, your character's siblings, then birth order.  The tables are relentless -- birth order, your character's time of birth, place of birth, even exotic birth locations.  Then you see whether or not your character had an unusual birth.  After that, your character's parents and important NPCs can be randomly generated.

After that, you can randomly generate what happened during your character's childhood and adolescence.  First, you figure out how many events happened during your childhood and then you roll.  This table, unlike other tables in other products (Ultimate Campaign, for instance); does not pull any punches.  It is very detailed and controversial.  One of the events that happens in childhood or adolescence (since you are using this table twice) is that the character could have been sexually molested.  There's even one where the character enters a political marriage with another (arranged marriages can happen).

Besides that, certain events require you to go into other tables. And there is a lot of them. But, the book maintains that in childhood and adolesence a personality develops -- so you may get certain traits based off of your character's history that you roll up.

From Shutterstock.

After that there are many tables with which you can generate your character's history and personality.  A lot of them.  From randomly generating personality traits, to love, to others, to non-humans, to time in the military, to being enslaved, to unusual skills, this book has it all.  Even something that is GM only.

Conclusion

If you are looking to go beyond what Ultimate Campaign and other similar character generators offer for generating your character's background.  This book provides that.  Unfortunately, unless you are ready to pay a small fortune for this book, I suggest downloading it off the internet.  It may be illegal, but it's the only way you're going to get it.  The book is worth it to get off the Internet, or to pay for the near one thousand dollars for a copy.  It's an excellent resource for your fantasy campaign; even though it's jaded and dated.