Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
The Thorsen Islands
At new year 2000-1 I was staying at the elegant abode of Christopher-James Leighton. Whilst there I ran a Call of Cthulhu scenario which was loosely inspired by a dreadful old Doug McClure film I once saw (I think it may have been The Land that Time Forgot, but I wouldn't swear to it).

This was the first time I really put my theory of group character creation into practice, and it worked really well. I gave the players a background sheet describing how a mineral with unusual properties had been found, and was said to come from a small group of almost uncharted islands in the South Pacific, the Thorsen Islands, and so had been named Thorsenite.

I told the players to create a group of characters who, who knew each other, worked together as a team, and who were going to the Thorsen Islands to find Thorsenite. Now I imagined that they would create a party of academics on a university research expidition, or the representatives of a commercial company looking to exploit the mineral. But instead the group they created was a film studio looking to make a film about the discovery of Thorsenite. The characters from the studio included the rich studio owner (an industrialist who was wealthy enough to finance loss-making films as his hobby), the director (an arty European sex deviant) and the leading lady (a teenage slut married to the director). Another character was a geologist hired by the studio to be the film's leading man. He wasn't particularly good at geology, but he was a strapping six-foot-two macho man who cut a dashing figure in a pith helmet and khaki shorts. This was a more important consideration to the filmmakers.

I thought this was a really good and imaginative use of the material I'd given the players and I was very pleased with it. It meant that I wasn't forcing the characters into a mould of my choosing; the players were creating their own charcters from character concepts that they had chosen themselves. But they were still characters tailored to the scenario lead that I was using, so I didn't have to somehow get a random group of unrelated individuals to the Thorsen Islands by some trick of dodgy plot writing.