[ianbicking]

Just pregenerate a large corpus of characters that is shared with everyone. Especially if you want human intervention in the creation (which is the right choice for now). Then you have potentially hundreds of characters. And you can invest in things like secrets... who wants to add lots of secrets to their NPCs now, knowing that maybe no one would ever discover them? But if they are cheap, then sure. Now any player has a real opportunity to discover something truly new in the shared world.