For all of you who have been following, upvoting, commenting and even resteeming the Interactive Paintings - The Vagabonds: first of all A big Thank You! It has been a lot of fun already, there's been some awesome interaction and some hilarious, fantastical names, professions and artefacts have been made up! Thank you!
For those who have never heard about The Vagabonds: you can still check out and enter the wildly interactive and randomized game - at the time of writing this: this is the post where you can read all about them, and still join the game.
As we have had four Vagabonds already in season 2, and four more to go, I thought it was an apt moment to give you all a peek behind the scenes of how I'm running this game.
Introducing - my Master Spreadsheet (right click on it and select View Image to see it in full resolution):
These are my tables from which you can randomly choose 1-9 positive traits, 1-9 negative traits and 1-9 professions of all characters, neatly ordered per character/painting. These are all unique and the second half -of the paintings still to come- are unique as well.
So if, for example, for Episode 1 you would have chose 2-2-2, you would have gotten
the Genius but Deceptive Oligarch
9-8-7 would have given
the Formidable but Unhygenic Bodyguard
The winner was for episode 1 was 
the Formidable but Lazy Octogenerian
(By the way, 9 times 9 times 9 gives a wonderful 729 unique combinations of interpreting the painted character!) And that's not even adding the original first name and superpower/artefact/magical item provided by you!
Whenever a number is selected in a comment, I put it in bold, as you can see on the spreadsheet, that gives me a reference of which and how much entries have been selected. If you look at epidose 1, you'll see all 9 negative traits (Column D) were eventually selected. Checking the professions of epsiode 1 (Column E), you'll see two blurred entries (Rows 1 and 8) weren't selected. I may or may not re-use these professions in the final episodes - I just don't want to give them away here :)
Whereas Season 1 had 13 entries to choose from, this season only has 9, but that's still more that enough, as almost every time, there still are unchosen entries amongst those 9.
Still reading? Great!
I also collect the entries of all contestants of every particular episode alongside the traits/professions, in chronological order. That gives me a reference, and makes it easy for the dice (yes, it's almost always the dice that decides) to choose the winning entry.
Some little sidenotes, if you're still reading:
In the beginning of this game, I transferred an equal share of 1 SBD to every participant. I cannot keep this up, as I have no idea how much these posts are going to make (and I'm flat out of SBD). This isn't something I have to do, but I see it's appreciated by some of the players! Which is cool - but I've changed to splitting up 1 SBD amongst upvoting participants. Non-upvoting participants will still get my 75% upvote (I cannot handle a 100% upvote as it is draining my voting power), and will still be able to win the bragging-rights to any particular episode.
I'm seeing (as I asked for, woo-hoo!) participants upvoting other participants entries! That's the spirit of the game: if you happen to see a particularly cool entry by someone, upvote it, even if it's just a little bit. Get the conversation going and support each other. This is all good fun, nobody's winning anything except a good time with weird and fantastical results! Oh, in the same vein: don't guess - guessing makes it sound random in the opportunity to win something. Make a choice instead: choosing gives you more control than "guessing" which sounds like you're playing the lottery. This isn't the lottery, it's The Vagabonds, it's plain, silly fun and if you compete: you always win!
Did I mention: Have fun? Have Fun!
Oh, after four more of these Vagabonds, when there will be eight in total, we're entering Phase II. I haven't written anything about it, but it will be like this is the regular season, and Phase II will be like the Play-Offs following this competition. You'll see the eight winners back, but in a different format. It should be pretty weird, very interactive and a lot of fun! :)
Comments and feedback on the game are highly appreciated, even typing 3 random numbers (between 1 and 9) will get you some kind of reply!