Rahn D'um
Appendix I: Where Did These Guys Come From?

Well, where do I begin this time?

The whole concept of Rahn D'um was done as an experiment on my part, more or less as a way to get my writer's mojo flowing again. It was during one of my slow times, known to many as writer's block. I decided to put some of my programming knowledge to use; contrary to popular belief, I actually did learn a thing or two from computer science. What I concocted was a program that randomly generated character profiles; I purposely kept things fairly generic, so I would have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks. My task was simple; take these profiles, and work these characters into a story.

For example...

Character is a Human (Mongoloid) Female,
A Thief (Thief), Mischievous and Flirtatious,
Who Is Paranoid, and Has a Skeleton in the Closet

The first step was to generate a race, ethnicity, and a sex. Seeing as this was a fantasy setting, I had to include the fantasy mainstays, that being Humans and Elves. Of course I had to be a bit more specific as far as their ethnic backgrounds, and so we have Dark, Wood, and High Elves, along with Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid for the humans (I would have named them by their region of origin, but at the time I wrote the program, they didn't have names...). I also set it so that it was possible to have an ethnically mixed human, ethnically mixed elf, or even a half-elf. Sex was pretty simple, that being either male or female. If there's a third sex, then please, somebody warn me.

Next up was to get a class; instead of just having one, I decided to generate two in order to get some diversity. After all, having just a pure class is pretty boring. Besides, who says that you can't have a thieving mage, or a healer that happens to know some martial arts? In the above case, our lady apparently is just a thief, plain and simple. Next up was to come up with two random traits in order to better visualize the individual. The very last thing is to generate a pair of personality quirks, in order to round things out. Sure, you get the occasional jacked-up case, but nine times out of ten you end up with some pretty interesting individuals.


That's the gist of things. Each of our four heroes came from a randomly generate profile, just like this. I'll better detail the decision process in a future update.