The year is 1934.
Increase every character’s age by 10 years.
If any of your characters are older than 60, roll a ten-sided die to see if they died. If you got 7-10, they are dead. Otherwise, they are still alive.
Relationships:
Roll a six-sided die to find out what happened to the parents’ relationship:
1-4: They are still married
5: They got divorced
6: One parent died
If one parent died, roll a six-sided die to see which one.
1-3: the father died
4-6: the mother died
If you had a divorce or death, roll a ten-sided die to see how long ago it was:
- this year
- one year ago
- two years ago
- three years ago
- four years ago
- five years ago
- six years ago
- seven years ago
- eight years ago
- nine years ago
If the divorce or death was more than two years ago, any living partners can have a new relationship. Anyone else who is single and over 18 can also have a new relationship.
Roll a six-sided die for relationships:
- single
- dating
- engaged
- married
- married
- single
If the character is dating, engaged, or married, add their new partner to the family.
Children:
Any woman who is older than 20 can have children, if you want.
Roll a six-sided die to see how many children she has:
- 0
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
If she already has children from a previous round, only add more children if the number you rolled is bigger than the number of children she already has. (For example: you have a woman with two children, and you roll a four. The number for 4 is three. So you give that woman one more child.)
Then you roll a ten-sided die for the children’s ages. The children can’t have been born before the mother was 18, or after she was 50. If you get an age that doesn’t work, roll again.
- newborn
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
Then roll a die with an even number of sides for the children’s genders. Even numbers are girls and odd numbers are boys.
Character Names:
Roll a ten-sided die for new characters’ first and middle names.
- Boys: Old Man Names | Nameberry Girls: Old Lady Names | Nameberry
- Serious Names | Nameberry
- Most Popular Spanish Baby Names | Nameberry
- What’s a Classic Name? | Nameberry (Deep Classics only)
- Vintage Nicknames Refresh Classic Names | Nameberry
- French Baby Names: Classics making a comeback | Nameberry
- Old Hollywood names | Nameberry
- For a child: a name that honors a relative. For a partner: roll again
- Clunky Quirky Adorable Names | Nameberry
- Top Middle Names | Nameberry
Optional:
If you are choosing to play this game with careers:***
The Great Depression caused a lot of people to lose their jobs. So you should roll a die with an even number of sides for every character with a job to see who lost theirs. If you roll 1-3, that character lost their job and needs to generate a new career. If you roll 4-6, they keep their job.
Career generator:
Random Job Generator (randomgenerate.io)
If you are choosing to play this game with pets:***
You decide what happens to pets each round, it can be realistic or not realistic. If you want to keep the pets’ ages realistic, here are the lifespans of some common pets:
Dog: 13
Cat: 19
Parrot: 80
Tortoise: 100
Rabbit: 12
Guinea Pig: 5
Goldfish: 10