Still languishing in reduced productivity from no laptop. Just so you know.
Now that you know that, on to the real purpose of this thread.
I had another product idea, and I want to feel you all out on the matter. I wouldn't be writing it myself, so it shouldn't hurt productivity much, but here it goes.
My funnest character creation experiences have been with games where you can randomize events in the character's past. The Cyberpunk rules, Twilight 2000, the heritage tables in L5R. I haven't worked out much in the way of mechanics issues, but I'm thinking of a character background generator. You can use it on NPCs or for PCs, either randomly or by picking and choosing with the help of your GM. Basically, you'd start out with an origin, (such as farmer, rural lord, city lord, craftsman) etc, and roll year by year the things that happened to your character. Things like love affairs, death of siblings, murders, winfalls, disasters, enemies, lifelong friends. There would be some twists and turns like, "Your parents are slaughtered and your local lord is so guilt ridden that he adopts you, move to the rural lord charts" (that would be rare). There would probably be seperate charts for WAR! and CHAOS! for years when countries are in turmoil. If we do it right, I think that it will be fun enough that all the players will want to gather round to watch each other roll (that's what always happened when we played cyberpunk.)
Anyway, this would be several months down the line. I don't even know if it will technically be EoH (that will probably be the model world, but until the writer starts working, I don't know how much setting will be on the charts). I'm determined that it will be useful to every fantasy RPG player that plays a roughly Rolemaster like milleu, but other than that, it's too early to tell.
Anyway, this is here so you can put in wishes for the product and sound off on whether you'd be interested in buying it. I suspect it will be short enough to be a low Price Point (not too much longer than a datanet or quarterly). Then again, if it takes 96 pages chocked full of different interesting happenings, that's just more reuse value, so we'll see when we start outlining.
So pipe up with opinions.