Fate Random Tables II: The Randoming

I'm back with more random Fate tables!

Beat Cops and Hired Goons

Goons. Hired goons.

When you've got a bunch of mooks, you can use this table to quickly spice up a few of them. This works well if the PCs need to interact with one (like in an interrogation, or to get past some guards), just to give the poor mechanical speedbumps a little personality. You can adapt these entries pretty easily to fantasy city guards, sci-fi mercenaries, or what have you.

	0	+	+	+	+
0	Snitch / Undercover	Too Dumb to Quit (takes an additional consequence)	One Good Cop / Honor Among Thieves	Hungry Rookie	Don't You Know Who My Father Is?
-	Hiding an Addiction	Looking Out For Number One	Family Man	One Last Job / 2 Days Till Retirement
-	Loves This Job	Nothing Personal	Trapped By Gambling Debts
-	Sadistic Psychopath	Hates This Job
-	Catastrophically Incompetent

Random Quirks

In the same mold, here's a table for quickly determining distinguishing features for random NPCs, so it looks like you planned it all along. Yeah, planned it all along. That's the ticket.

	0	+	+	+	+
0	Crying Game	Bald	Ridiculous Hat	Bad Plastic Surgery	Supermodel and Knows It
-	Ginger	Skinny	Brawny	Tats and Piercings
-	Limp	Twitchy	Ponytail Express
-	Rat-faced	Scarred
-	Shop Class Accident

Putting it Together

Let's give it a few tries and see what we get.

The PCs roll up to the club's side entrance. It's guarded, but there's only one guy out there. Two rolls of 4dF give us a -1, +1, 0, 0, followed by a 0, 0, 0, -1. The guard's a ginger who's looking out for "number one". Maybe he'd angle for a bribe right away, since he's looking out for himself. Maybe if the PCs put on a strong enough show of force the guard won't stick around.

Let's do it again, this time with a +1, 0, 0, 0 and a 0, -1, 0, -1. The guard on the side door now has a limp and is "Too Dumb to Quit". He's probably not going to just back down from the PCs, but they might be able to trick him pretty easily. If they resort to violence, the guy will be tough but with an easily-spotted physical vulnerability they can take advantage of.

I'm not a fan of letting random tables guide the entire story, but when it comes to details that might have otherwise been overlooked or glossed over, I think they can guide your game into places you might not expect. Have fun!