Stages

You might call 'em terms of phases or whatever, but "term" comes with a bit more military baggage than I'd like, so I'm calling 'em stages, to be a bit more westerny.

So this is character creation. I'll deal with core characteristics later, if indirectly.

One of the OSFRPG's most distinctive features is the lifepath section, and I'm leaving it in. Kinda. The skills are much less granular, and there's no roll required to change careers: you want to move on to the next town to try your hand at something new? Feel free, nobody's checking your references.

First, determine your background: where you were brought up, and write it down. Not necessarily the specific location, but the sort of place it was, at least. Anything that would be common for that sort of person to do would get a +0 modifier to a skill roll.

Then go through four stages. Each stage, select two different skills, at least one of which must be a career, and one may be for violence; they may both be careers, if you like. The first time a skill is selected, it gets a modifier of +1; each time after that, add 1 to its modifier.  Career skills cover just about anything someone in that role would normally do (except for violence), and aren't necessarily professions - Town Drunk and Kid are possibilities, along with Cowhand and Politician. During play, you won't add skills to each other, so it's more effective to only select careers that don't have a lot of redundant abilities. 

...and that's the part where I realize I may have just recreated Barbarians Of Lemuria. Erk.

Doing something without a suitable background or skill means you get a -1 penalty to the die roll.

Stages can be any amount of time that makes sense for your character.  If you don't have an age in mind, you can start at age 16 and roll a d6 for each stage to see how many years it is. Some folks go through a lot in a short amount of time.