http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html

'Beta' version.

Pick and age and sex, or go for full random, and click and you get a character backstory complete with name, family, and all sorts of trouble.

For Shadowrun, choose the 'fantasy punk' radio button first.

It started as just a name generator for my own Cyberpunk setting, but quickly grew into something vastly more.

Presently I've been adding support for other subgenres / settings of Cyberpunk and of those Shadowrun is the one I've come furthest along with - with only a few minor problems left to work out.

Least functional at present is Transhuman, as I still need to remove gender and romance creation for things like gender-neutral Cybershells.

I have had no luck with the program under Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4. None of the menu items or activation buttons (I assume there are some) display. However, the descriptions of the buttons which appear in the center do show up from time to time.

Sounds like a cool idea though.

You've probably got an older version of Flash installed.

Check to see if you're on flash player 7 at macromedia.com

I built it in flash for three reasons:

1. It's cross platform portable and faster than things like Java.
2. It compresses about 1mb of code down to at present 73kb's - half of which is the two images.
3. It's what I know - which is a very important reason.


EDIT: Put in Flash version detection. Tested it on Firefox on my PC, IE on my PC, and Safari on my Mac. It's a little 'footprint big' on IE (vertically about 10-15 pixels larger than the screen), but fully functional.

the only thing i can think of is that it seems that the proportion of homo/bi sexuals is rather disproportonate to what i would consider norms.

Oh, one other thing, though it's less of a problem if you figure SR ignores/abolished age of consent laws, but i saw quite a few lines like:

10-14: blah blah, he was 26, could you resist him?

maybe yo could add in an age limite to anything that's described as a teen/choldhood event?

Consider the mindset of those who would voluntarily enter into a career of Shadowrunning. I don't consider lines like that improbable at all—hell, they happen today.

Though I do find it amusing (if not impossible) that I can be a 51-year-old human female on good terms with my 80-year-old mother but distant from my 14-year-old brother. Incidentally, race for relatives would be good.

Oh, and my parents apparently got back together, as they split up when I was 11 and then again at 14.

Woah. Shapeshifter families putting contracts out on me? I guess I'd better stay away from the woods

Very entertaining, though not necessarily useful in a serious game except for inspiration… so I guess it is useful. Serious bug, though, I can't get the pop-up extra info thingy to go away, resulting in a lot of blocked text (I ended up copying it off and pasting it into a text file to read it). This is with Safari 2.0.

Another note: I got the thing to go away, but I'm not sure how. Either way, still a bug.

~J

Hilarious! Great work!

i think the pop up is just REALLY slow to load off.

This thing is bitchun. Keep up the good work.

added: Seems like everyone that gets rolled up has been molested or pimped out at some point, though.

There's a 1 in 30 chance that age boundaries get crossed.

When they do, the age of the NPC is determined randomly.

The 14 year old sibling could also be from one's father and someone other than one's mother.


Sexuality is based on the idea that hetre and bi is about even, and homo about 1/3rd of each of those (or 1/6 of the total). That said, there is a chance that teens will date outside their sexuality, and an even greater chance that children will get a crush that is not based on their sexuality.

popups work on the notion that rolling over the same item again takes them away, but rolling over another item changes to that item. Rolling over the button at top removes any popup, and there are spaces above and below popup-triggers that remove them (so if youmove the mouse to the area of the horizontal bar above the list of genres any popup goes away. likewise the ten pixels of height above the 'what is a bioroid' and another ten pixels of space below the last genre radio.

I will put a little [X] above the popups - that's a bit clearer to understand. The present triggers are just 'chance' things.


I didn't give race of relatives as I assumed it would be the same as the character - is that not true for Shadowrun? What't the rough chance it might be different?

I don't remember what if any rough odds are given, but it's definitely possible to have a child of a different race than its parents and/or siblings, or indeed different from anyone else in their immediate ancestry.

~J

One of the books also listed odds for how many people are elves, humans, orks, dwarves, or trolls - but I don't recall which.

As a result, I went for something like 6% for all the nonhumans save for Orks, which I put at 20%.

Soon as I find where I read that info years back, I'll be adjusting that.

If anyone knows, toss me a page number, I've got most everything put out before Fasa sold it away save for the 2E rulebook itself (which I lost years ago, not sure if I sold it or if it was in my 'rare books' box that went missing).


On sexuality, I set bi and hetro at near the same on the theory that many hetero people are bis that have had it socially conditioned away, and that future changes might remove social pressures over that and leave a more 'natural curve'.

That's a bit of a left-wing theory, but it has right wing adherants too. They hammered it into me when I was in high school in the 80s during sex-ed. No idea if it's true or not though. I might look into a bit though and tweak the numbers.

Off the top of my head, I remember I set homosexual at 12 percent, and then split the remainder so that one got 43 and the other 45 - but I'm at a relative's right now and don't have the code in front of me.



A lot of the backgrounds are ultra violent or nasty. I keep reading that Shadowrun characters are criminals, and so I made the backgrounds into the kinds of things that would lead a person into choosing a criminal life when they might otherwise be able to make a less 'deviant' living.

So they do or have done to them a lot of bad things, and the list of bad things is three times as long in the Shadowrun / gamer-punk options than in the others.

Though the chance for trouble is the same - the kinds of trouble are much worse. Likewise the chance for fortune is the same, but the fortunes are often twisted - involving getting something great by hurting somebody.

Nice - my contacts will be fleshed out that much faster.

Firefox 1.0.4 with Flash 7 is working just fine btw.

I thought it was pretty cool. But can anyone honestly say that a restraining order would do much to keep an angry 'runner away from a Fixer or Johnson?

Or why an 8 yr old contact is a fixer who gives out her number?

Restraining orders are like that...

It's kind of like telling a Dragon 'shame on you' and spanking his nose...

Doesn't mean people don't try.

Sometimes the results are a little funny. But I can see explainations for an 8 year old fixer. I've seen kids younger than that dealing hard drugs. I've even known people as young as six to use mob tactics to assault and mug adults - or perform gun hits.

I've had a good laugh at some of the things in the generator though. Some of which has led to bug fixes, others of which had been made a little rarer but still there as 'features'.

Over time, I'll be tweaking it to get it more and more inline with the desired goal.

This is bloody fantastic. It's a great launching pad for NPCs, a sort of 'one-button inspiration' tool. I also love the fact that you've addressed sexuality, a sorely under- and misrepresented topic in most games. Tweaking with the actual percentages is (IMHO) a waste of time though, as these things are notoriously hard to quantify & adjudicate IRL. Regardless, I'm just glad it occured to someone that sexuality is at least as significant a contributing factor to identity as, say, race (in the fantastical sense) or ethnicity.

Good on ya, I'll be using this tool a lot.

Have they said anything about non human lifespans? At present they're all fairly young as it's only been a few decades since they were all humans - so unless they've said something we've only got speculation.

Humans average 55, Orks average 35-40, Trolls average 50, Dwarves theoretically reach 100+, Elves there are conflicting reports but generally accepted longer than Dwarves.

SR3, page 47. Note that A) these are all worldwide numbers, developed countries are likely to be higher across the board, and B) Shadowrunners tend to have bucketloads of contraindicators of long lifespan—more so than people in the countries pulling down the worldwide average.

~J

Also, more hairstyles, and please, no balding women en masse! I got three balding women in a row ... it's not like EVERYONE lives in Glow City!

And add a bit of SR flavour clothing. Like add "Zoé", "Mortimer of London" and the other ingame labels to clothing adjectives (so we get stuff like "Mortimer of London" "Leotards", hehe).

And finally, more options, simply. With CP2020, this irked me most about the tables, there were too few different things that could hapen. Also, tie in some well-known SR background events in (Night of Rage, Dunkelzahn death riots, SURGE, ect.).

And make it possible a character can turn out a mage. Also, maybe add a "magical encounters" type event.

Just suggestions, really. If you need events, just ask on DS, you'll get more stuff than you could ever handls that way.

Okay, oddness ...

Another observation: "X" was/is most important not always holds a person featured in the yearly events or family.

Well, if she ever had a desire fro her own sex, she's bisexual (just not very much) in my book. Sicne the generator produces a quite astonishing number of bisexuals (some 50% total), I took that as me and the generator agreeing on this. *shrug*

There is a small chance that teens will 'experiment' (I think 1 in 10 or 1 in 30) - when they do they get a 50-50 odds on the sex of the relationship. An even greater one that children will get 'Crushes' tied to 'random chance' rather than sexuality.

Social science actually holds that a very large percentage of people experiement outside of their sexual identity at some point in their life. Its one of those 'Kinsey Report' kind of things - everyone denies its true but the studies say otherwise. Much like the now commonly accepted notion that more than just psycho killers and peple will hair palms engage in 'solo performances' - but at the time of his report, the idea that normal people 'did that' was considered so shocking as to be dangerous - enough so that they used to give 'female circumcisions' to girls caught doing it - and sometimes even hysterectomies (sp?).

Current odds on sexualities in the generator are:

Thanks for the breakdown of your methodology, that was extremely helpful.

For more hairstyles - got any suggestions.

I typed in everything I could come up with.

Here's the actual current listing:

(subject to get added to as ideas hit me of course)

// ----------------HAIR the natural colors of "Black","Brown","Red","Blond", and "Platinum blond" are hardcoded.
&hairDyedColors=Blue,Green,White,Grey,Pink,Violet,Rainbow,Silver,Gold,Light Emitting,Purple,Orange,Glassy&
&hairStyles=straight,curly,in an afro,dreadlocked,braided,frizzy,ratty,with a mohawk,wild,unkempt,greased back,in pigtails,ponytailed,clean cut,oily,over one eye,shaved on one side,spiked,wavy,prehensile,kinked,wavy,curly,straight&
&hairLengths=long,short,medium length,waist length,very short,shoulder length&

The hairlengths of "long","short","but bald" are then 'concat'ed onto the end of the above list (which makes long and short appear twice).

Yeah... messy... Flash only imports straight text that it can assign to something, and then I have to tweak that something into actual useful data.





Oh, I was reading my SR3 book last night to confirm a few things, and far as I saw, non humans are only 10% of the population. Is that right or was it only true at the beginning when 'globinization' first happened?

Largely bug tweaking, but I add events as they occur to me.

At present I'm working multi-genre events. The idea of placing flags for subgenre specific events is something slated for after some of the current problems clear up - like that 'Person X' bug.


EDIT: Fairly confident I've knocked out the 'Person X' bug.

Ok.

More bug reports:

Other than repeating twice, that's about right. No names or bio info if the twins both miscarried.

The output looks a little funky that way though.

aaah, okay, I thought it just repeated. Twins. False alert.

I've added in the careers of 'Shaman' and 'Mage' but also set the populations such that 90% of all characters are humans - as per SR3 - the page that introduces Goblinization.

The others are all 2% each for Elf, Dwarf, and Ork, 1.4% for Troll, and 0.8% for Ghoul and Shapeshifter.

Subraces at present have a 1 in 5 chance of appearing if the race they come under pops up (save that all Shapeshifters are assigned a 'subrace' or animal form).

So the chance of -as an example- a Satyr (Ork subrace) is only 0.4%. Maybe that will change with 4e, but at least under the 'priority' system of 1-3e I've never once seen a player pick a nonhuman, so it's not all that off.

That still means that the subraces are 20 times more likely than a Native American in the USA of the real world today, and about 1-2% under the chance of an African American.

I noticed the racial demographics for Seattle last night and will be adjusting for them in the next update.

I'm deep in the middle of a bug at present though, so it will happen a bit later in the day.

I'm trying to add tracking of how many years ago a person who passed away died, and while I've got good numbers for parents - sometimes I get a sibling being born after both parents have died, or a contact / romance dying years before the character met them.

Flash only lets you return one variable from a function, so I need to start returning longer arrays in places I was only returning strings or small arrays in order to do this.

Not a hard bug to track out, just a time consumer to make sure I get every places I used the relevant functions.


I'm not going to comment on this or that social study much further - the ideas and info come from my high school and primary school education - when the stats were even lower than they are today. At university, I've studied 'the politics of sexuality' but the focus there was a bit different - more on the lines of how we define normality and deviancy.

I do recall that as of the late 90s somewhere the newspaper here was claiming SF had a gay population of about 35%, 2% higher than the caucasian population btw - just to give some perspective. Of course a lot of people move here for the fact that a lot of people like them are moving here...

Asia is more liberal than the USA on these topics from my experience living there - more open for hetero's also (which includes myself although I do come from a lesbian household on 'one end of things').

Europe is famous in the imagination of Americans for its 'openess and diversity', though I have no idea how much truth there is to any of that.


Oh, I've been out of the buying curve on Shadowrun since about 1999/2000.

Man and Machine for 3E came out just before I stopped buying.

I got a nasty munchkin player (accused me -as GM- of cheating for requiring him to add up his points correctly -he didn't deny they were off, he just insisted he was not required to- not use 2E gear, and then threatened two other players) and that killed my game, and then I got dragged into a d20 game ()

Which books are SSC and SSG in their 'full not abreviated titles'?

SSC - Street Samurai Catalogue

I was taling about SSG though - Sprawl Survival Guide - one of the better SR books after FanPro, after Loose Alliance propably my favourite. It deals mainly with how life works in the Sprawls of the 6th world, has rules on lifestyle customisation and IDs and such things. Pretty neat, if you ask me.

't was a typo. Sorry. Corrected.

Now that that's settled ...

I -would- include China. Also most of south east Asia, Japan, and Korea.

All countries with a -lot- of diversity in sexuality, a much greater acceptance that people will engage in sexual behaivoir, and a greater tolerance for what we in the USA refer to as sex crimes - such as prostitution, pedophilia, and so on.

Maybe not in law, but its often openly out there. A roommate of mine who was a cop in Korea had his station across the street from a redlight district - and those sorts of disctricts can be found openly displayed next to many major transportation hubs.

The first world Asian nations (Korean & Japan) are not tolerant of pedophiles, but if you spend much time in them or the others you will encounter camps full of western ex-pats who come there to 'indulge' in things they cannot do in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere.

Can't say I have experience with Malaysia, but I do know prostitution is rampant in South Asia. Human trafficking marks all of these countries as both import and export locations for the slave market.

non-hetero preferences are not discussed much in these places. They might be seen as wierd, but they are also not a part of the dialogue - and by not being 'defined' they largely go unpersecuted. As long as people 'do their family duty' they can then go about their preferences within the remainder of their time.


And I am -NOT- using the San Francisco Bay Area as the example or basis of my logic about the present day. But it does make a good example of a metropolitan region that is inclusive in its diversity rather than exclusive like New York or LA (which have 'ethnic' regions).

As time moves forward -places that do not make an issue over ethnic conflict will be more resembling of SF than NY or LA with regards to trends like intermarriage. If sexuality moves off the 'hotbutton' list and becomes more mainstream acceptable, it will follow the trends that race has. We can see this already in work in the acceptance of media like 'Will and Grace' and the ever growing presence of an acceptance of 'alternative lifestyles' in mainstream media. When I was just out of high school TV was taking flak over Murphy Brown - a woman who chose to have a child out of wedlock. Now, not that much later, we don't bat an eye over that topic and it becomes a joke on Friends and present in countless other media sources. As well, 'alternate sexuality' protagonists become more and more common with less and less dialague over their presence.

So SF may not be a norm now, but it's attitude over the issue might well be in time.



---------------------------------------------------------------------

Plus there is one other great value to this.

To people stuck in 'old era thinking' the greater diversity in this thing helps to set up the alienation so needed to get across the Cyberpunk genre well.

If the characters always seem 'just a little off' from normal, it helps make them 'disjoining' and thus more Cyberpunk.

Arcady, we're talking past each other.

In many Asian nations, prostitution is not persecuted as harshly as in the US (in fact, save for Islamist states, noone does). But that doesn't nescessarily indicate tolerance, especially towards homosexuality, which is whatn I am talking about. It is more about a different appriach to morality. But it is being persecuted. The only countries where prostitution is (somewhat) legal are Western European states like Benelux and Germany.

Just did an upload that includes a basic listing of Cyberware (the list from Ex Machina, with a few add ins from Shadowrun that didn't have equivalents).

This thing is now -real close- to an official 1.0 version. I just need to give it a day to uncover bugs...

I've got a list of ideas for a later version, but the core of what it -needs- is there now.

It will need a basic glossary before release though, to define some of the terms that are not constant across game systems. For example SIN in Ex Machina refers to 'Sensory Interface' as in the ability to record feelings and sensations, I think the same letters in Shadowrun refer to your government ID number, and they call the sensory thing a 'Simrig'.

There are other terminology issues as well, and I'll have to think about where I can fit the glossary for it all.

I've also extracted the chances for different sexualities, as that seems a hot topic for some odd reason. This way people who download it once 1.0 is up and set them as they like them.

One more thing: could youn add a function that makes professions/careers selectable?

Ah, and ... about the cyber ... can you set the cyber propability for a mage as low as possible? It happens that mages have to get cyber, but in Shadowrun, this SERIOUSLY messes with their ability to work magic.

Also, tying cyber propabilities to career (or roots) would be nice. A delivery driver wouldn't need two cybered legs, a throat tentacle and other implant weapons ... a street warrior, on the other hand, might look odd without any cyber.

In the same directory as the lifepath's website, the data files are:

DATA_names.txt
DATA_facts.txt

Before it goes live, I still need to add 'French personal names'.

And I have one more planned change to the structure of the facts file.

But I'm letting you see that here so you can see what events and such are possible at present and then make some suggestions for additions before I put up 'v1.0'.

Damn, I urgently need to get my MrJLBB back (Mr. Johnson's little black book, a SR GM guide type book), it had a looong list of personality traits and quirks for NPCs as inspiration fro GMs, I'm sure you could use these. They were pretty egneric, so they would be of good use to the other systems as well.

Oh, and I read a bit in your Spacepunk setting. Quite nice! Makes me wish I had a group to play a real CP game with again ...

An official downloadable version 1.0 is now here:

http://www.geocities.com/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html

The older copy on my other website has been removed for now. The above URL has both a zip download and an online usable version.