“Sometimes the time is right and stars align, casting a fortuitous path before a traveler.
At others, the time is wrong and stars are miscast, bringing despair and misfortune.
Mostly though, nothing special happens.”
I’ve always quite liked the birth augur and lucky roll system in DCC. We’ve more or less always just applied a bonus into the lucky effect (either +1 or 0-level Luck modifier, whichever is higher).
We did try out just applying the raw Luck modifier as is, but that created the problem of the lucky roll not meaning anything (if Luck mod was set at +0) or significantly hindering characters (in the case or negative Luck modifiers). I don’t like making meaningless rolls, and I find that player’s get more excited to start roleplaying a character with a minor bonus to some obscure thing.
Last summer I took part in a Lamentations of the Flame Princess -campaign which used a background table to flesh out characters to begin with: the gamemaster asked us little questions, the answers to which determined small bonuses and gave us an idea about the character’s nature before we started properly adventuring. In the “steal, beg and borrow” tradition of game design, here’s my take on a similar system. The rules in the PDF are intended to replace the birth augur table in the DCC rulebook.
Cheers,
AMP
UPDATE 23/2/2020: I’ve updated the layout and fixed some content errors. And added some illustrations, for flavour.
DCC Alternate Augurs