Dunstabzugshaubitze

Random stats, pick class based on that come up with a one or two sentence background, ask gm how much gold/points/credits i can spent on starting equipment and if there are any restrictions they have in mind for my background.

my last solo characters were an ex townsguard who helped his brother escape from prison, after his recruitment job for a local gang went side ways, so they fled the town and are now trying the adventurers live.

i think i'd be fine with also randomizing equipment and then coming up with a background, but i'd hate to fully randomize a character and end up with a line cook who owns nothing but a fancy suit and roller skates for some reason.

ha, jackpot now you can prep for the trip to the fae and for the use of your phylactery of phylacteries and can pretend to allways have thought of this :D

hmm in this case:

it sounds like that D would need the power of most their contractees to shatter his prison, so a fun thing could be to drop hints to a powerful artifact, that consumes powerful undeads with wich the players could bind their power before it reaches D.

that artifact could come with great costs, that makes the players want to get rid of it eventually, or atleast paint a target on your party, becaus now they carry a lot of D's power with them and an Agent of D would love to destroy that artifact to release the power, later on it could even be a tool to trap D in if they manage to escape.

maybe it's not an artifact but an old temple where a ritual could be performed to bind an undead to the place, if your players are into kidnapping powerful beings, that would also be a fun twist on player strongholds, because who knows what they'll awaken when they bind to much power to such a place?

ask your players about their plan, you've given them atleast one obvious goal: get into the fae realm, what are their ideas how to get there? or would they like to explore other avenues how to get people out of their contracts without dieing or could another powerful entity claim that power? hell what would happen if one of those lords die and is brought back to life?

steal the coolest idea your players have and run with it ;)

they might be symmetrical, but the dimples themselves are often grouped together in patterns or even vary in size. golfballs are crazy, i don't like them.

yes, two balls of the same model will be the same and they are afaik made with molds and many balls will have an aequator where no dimples are placed to ease that process.

i just remember being surprised that not more measurements of the balls are specified for tournament use and if a model is tournament legal boils mostly down to a set of standardized tests by golf associations.

golfballs come with different amount of "dents" those fuckers are not normed outside of their minimum weight and diameter, and evey kind of ball has to be tested to be allowed for tournament golf.

those dents might not be spread evenly across the ball to get specific flight behaviour and thus this wont be a fair die in most cases.

help me, i never swung a golf club in my life why do i know shit about golf ball!

oh no, someone discovered that they can farm me for luck tokens with stupid word plays.

depends on how you define "adversarial"

I've given out powerful items, that had downsides when used, but my players enjoyed figuring out stuff like that.

I've also ran dungeons that featured potential lethal traps, but i think thats ok if the presence of such a trap is telegraphed enough that players know they better go slow and ask questions about their environment or describe how they are checking a room. I did not plan that you could get a pressure plate stuck by pouring sand between tiles, but you described doing it and explaining your intention so it became the solution. if you'd chosen to rush through the room filled with gore or strange scratch marks on the floor or obvious vents in the ceiling, then i'd have rolled if you trigger a trap, and then you might die trying to escape poison gas or being crushed by a moving wall, if the dice keep falling that way.

i only create situations (and those are often dangerous, and have a chance of characters dieing), but at the table i am the biggest fan your characters have and can't wait to see how they crawl out of the dungeon with treasure beyond believe.

if centaurs are common i'd have to think about centaur compatible cities, houses, baths and what not, and tbh my cities, houses baths and whatnots are barely human compatible.

if they are super rare you'd constantly be left behind outsides of buildings because you dont fit on a spiral staircase or you've got thrown out of the tavern because your clopping annoyed the other guests, hell evey npc interaction would probably involve explaining the strange horse dude to someone. nope no centaurs, we can compromise on satyrs, teacup minotaurs or inverted merefolk. two legs maximum, sorry.

from my experience i'd say players expect that certain monsters behave a certain way,

e.g. trolls regenerate, displacer beasts teleport around and a vampire can suck your blood, rather than a bear has 16 strength 60hp and so on and players value consistency, so if a kind of monster had no fire resistance the first time they've encountered it they should not have it next time only because the wizzard destroyed 5 of them with a fireball.

some players read published adventures though and get irritated if a game master changes stuff, but those guys can run their own game where everything is straight from the book rather than adapted to the group.

the lore? half of it are the crazy ideas of my players i've picked up during the sessions.

You give players one sword possesed by the soul of a paladin and they dream up an entire order that puts their fallen brothers and sisters in weapons for over a century.