The Short Answer
Professor High is locked. Everyone else is yours to cast. Every script in the library names its supporting characters — The Maximizer, The Oracle, The Old Head, The Clerk and the rest. Those are roles, not assets. If Cantina already has a character who fits the brief, use it. If you would rather build one, build one. If you want to swap the whole cast next month, swap it.That is the point of working in Cantina, and it is why this page exists as a set of casting briefs rather than a set of character designs. You do not need to commission nine characters before you can shoot. You need one locked character and eight briefs you can cast against.
What Is Locked And What Is Not
The Four Swap Rules
1. Silhouette must contrast
The teardowns are blunt that silhouette is a hook: recognisable at thumbnail scale beats detail. Whoever you cast must be distinguishable from Professor High and from anyone else in the same scene when the frame is 120px wide and someone is scrolling. Two characters with similar builds, similar palettes, or both in neutral clothing will read as one blur. If your first-choice cast collides, change one of them — usually a hat, a colour block, or a posture is enough.2. The role has to survive the casting
Each brief below names one thing the character does. A substitute that cannot do that thing breaks the joke rather than reskinning it. The most common failure: casting someone who reads as mean. Almost every archetype here is confidently wrong or sincerely lost, and neither is the same as unpleasant. Professor High never punches down, and neither does the cast around him.3. Consistency has to hold within a pack
This is the one that is easy to get wrong, and it matters more here than it normally would.The 100 is a designed experiment. A pack runs 5-10 reps of one format specifically so a median exists. If the cast changes between rep 3 and rep 4, the pack stops measuring the format and starts measuring the recast — and there is no way to separate the two afterwards.Cast once per pack. Write down who you cast. Change freely between packs, never inside one.
4. Compliance travels with the role, not the character
Whoever you cast inherits the whole compliance posture: nothing lit, held, eaten or passed on camera, no product or packaging in frame, no real brand or dispensary names, no medical claims. A stock Cantina character does not come with those constraints attached — the prompt does, and the prompt wins.The Recurring Cast
Nine roles. Each brief is written to be pasted straight into a Cantina character search or build.The Maximizer
Casting brief: A confident, broad-shouldered everyman in casual clothes who reads as decisive and slightly overconfident. Sincere, never mean. Silhouette must be distinct at thumbnail size.
The Oracle
Casting brief: A relaxed, reclined character who gestures while explaining things. Warm and generous, never smug. Reads as horizontal even in a still frame.
The Very Confident Budtender
Casting brief: A friendly retail worker in an apron with a name tag. Warm, fast-talking, endlessly confident. Must read as likeable — never as a con artist.
The First-Timer
Casting brief: A small, upright, earnest character who reads as new to the situation and genuinely curious. Sympathetic at all times. Never the butt of the joke.
The Old Head
Casting brief: An older, weathered, relaxed character dressed like the eighties never ended, with a distinctive hat. Reads as experienced and credible, never as a joke.
The Clerk
Casting brief: A grey, tired, entirely affectless office worker with a clipboard. Delivers everything flat, with no sarcasm and no reaction. The same character recurs across every institution in the pack.
The Clerk is the highest-leverage single casting decision in the slate. One character carries all nine Formal Systems episodes and appears in three other packs. Cast this one first.
The Outsider
Casting brief: A bright, tidy, upright character who talks straight down the lens like a phone selfie video. Sincere and self-deprecating. Reads as smart, never as foolish.
The Witness
Casting brief: A stylised anthropomorphic glass jar with a blank paper label. Empty, generic, resembling no real product. Confident and defensive when it speaks.
The Entourage — terpenes as characters
Casting brief: Workplace characters distinguished by a single colour motif and posture. Status and energy map to market share, not to any claimed effect.
Non-characters
Some things in the scripts read like cast but need no character file at all:Casting Order
If you are casting from scratch, this order gets you shooting fastest. Counts are the number of scripts in the library that call for each role.Cast the Maximizer first for volume, the Clerk first for a finished pack. If the goal is to get a complete format tested end to end, The Clerk is the better opening move — nine episodes of one format is a readable result, where 34 scattered episodes across six packs is not.
100 of the 172 scripts need no supporting cast at all — they are Professor High alone. If you want to start shooting before casting anything, start there: Look It Up, The Thought, The Counter Kit and Sections are entirely solo.
Recording What You Cast
Once you cast a role, write it down here or in the performance log. Not for ceremony — because rule 3 means a pack’s results are only readable if you know who was in it.Related
Character Config
Professor High — the one locked asset.
Production Spec
The Cantina prompt block and how casting appears in it.
The 100 — Design
Why casting has to hold inside a pack.