Hello there

For thos who are old enough to know old Task Force Games generics rpg books Central Casting. Are anybody tries to create a RT character using this book ?

Old enough to remember Central Casting... oh yeah, I didn't think I was that old.

My guess is that the HoT background generator would work best for Rogue Trader, wheras DH and DW might be a little bit too far to stretch. Considering that HoT vaguely implies a Traveller-style game setting, and that Rogue Trader is (to me at least) 40k Traveller, I think it'll mesh perfectly. In particular, the fact that Rogue Trader characters have a fair amount of exotic experience under their belt, as well as having all sorts of decreed-by-birth-and-fate early character histories, if you're immersed in the setting detail then it should be pretty straightforward to adapt the HoT background paths for a RT character.

That said, considering when we used HoT we would be pretty liberal with re-rolls when ridiculous results (or worse, circular redundant character paths, e.g. roll on table 3.1, result goto table 11.1, result goto table 3.1 etc.), you would probably have to use a fair amount of discretion when interpreting and re-rolling table results. Also, how the HoT character paths would fit into the RT (and DH/DW) character backgrounds (most importantly, with bonuses - I'm assuming that the loose HoT character background skill points accumulation is being discarded altogether, the chargen is mostly for colour) and their bonuses could be tricky - a LOT of GM discretion would be required, and new bonuses dummied up on the fly, without overbalancing the character even before intial careers are taken; from memory, you could very easily come up with HoT character generation paths which were enormous, with dozens of potentially stat- and skill-boosting events taking place even before adolescence, let alone afterwards... a limit on the amount of buffs that the GM could hand out (presumably in line with pre-existing background bonuses/penalties already present in RT, so what's that, something like 3 or 4 bonuses/penalties/skills?) would probably work best.

Also I don't know how easy it would work with DH beginning characters, as the chars are pretty much sh!tkickers from the get go and I always found that running DH characters was more interesting as you built up their character stories in play. DW would also be problematic as the choice of initial background options for Space Marines are much more limited than Rogue Trader backgrounds, and ALWAYS requires a series of particular events (namely, the biological augmentation necessary to become a marine during adolescence, plus endless training/battles for their early warrior careers) to occur during their development. The HoT background generator would be absolutely great at coming up with details for these stages of a Marine's development/prior battles, but it would have to be constrained (i.e. lots and lots of re-rolls for silly/inappropriate background results) to ensure that the Marine stayed on the right path (as opposed to branching out into the merchant marine, or being a farmer, or many of the other profession backgrounds one can find themselves inexplicably on when going with the super-random HoT system). In other words, you'd pretty much be rolling a lot of events on the military career path tables, which could be very interesting actually.

So I reckon - do it! I'm about to start a DW campaign and thanks for the idea - I might dust off my old copy of HoT and run it by the players if they want to add a lot of background to their characters, although as GM I'd be very heavily circumscribing potential options. Balancing out potential bonuses seems to me the trickiest part, but to be honest I think RT/DW are not very well power-balanced anyway (and I don't think that that is a bad thing), so as long as the bonuses, talents and skills (and penalties) that come out of the HoT system aren't too many (no more than 4-5 I'm thinking) then it's a great way to spur involved character biographies. Considering that most of the work is adapting the generic HoT rolls to the very detailed 40k setting I think it's great for players and GMs alike to come up with lots of great story hooks which personalise the characters as well as tying them very intimately to long running campaign arcs.

I'm going to give this a go, let me know how you go if you use HoT to come up with RT character paths, very keen to hear how you work yours out!