(This post was originally written for the Tiny Library Kickstarter. You can still order the entire  deck at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/longtailgames/tiny-library-0)

I read and write about books for a living, so have the (bad?) habit of using whatever scraps of paper are at hand to mark my place as I read. Business cards often find themselves used this way because they’re the perfect dimensions: not too big to be cumbersome in a paperback, and rigid enough to find easily on the first try. When the Pleasure-Not-Business Card Jam first rolled around, I thought I’d marry this habit of mine with my love of role-playing games, a love that often has me daydreaming about how I’d build a character in the RP setting of a particularly engrossing novel. Since reality has yet to catch up and make systems for all the books I love -- and since my memory can be annoyingly porous once they finally do -- I thought it would be neat to have a handy way to keep track of what kind of character I’d like to make, based on the book I’m reading, till such a time as I can find a group and system perfect for the setting.

Ofc, since the modern RPG scene is filled with diverse systems, I didn’t want to lock my business-card-sized generator to any particular format. Which led to the question of how I’d categorize character traits, and how I’d rate or scale them without necessarily adding value judgments to that scale. For the first question, I thought about the systems I like best when creating characters (GURPs, AEG’s d10 roll and keeps -- yes, I’m a dice-chucking minmaxer from waaaaay back) and how they influenced not only stats but also personality traits. As I thought about all the different aspects of my past characters, this list of ten traits solidified as the ones that would most likely influence not only how a character behaved but also how others might react to them.

The second question was also important to me: I wanted to showcase the spectrum of possibilities without attaching an undue moral or value weight to the scale. I don’t believe that characters have to be perfect in order to be heroic, but I do believe in using inclusive language that’s precise without being pejorative. Hopefully, my imperfect attempt at this is closer to the mark than not.

I’m hoping eventually to use this concept generator as the basis for a full-blown RPG system, but in the meantime, it’s a handy way to keep track of your RPG fantasies as you read. This is also a great way to semi-randomly generate a character for a game when you’re out of ideas (and I may have also used this to generate a quick review to leave in the book for my own future reference.)