A Wild Backstory Appears!
If you’re new to Handbook-World, you might not realize that our girl Thief has a history with piracy in general, and Swash and Buckle in particular. If you don’t feel like working through 678 comics worth of backlog, rest assured that our purple pilferer has plenty of reason to flex her grappling skills in today’s comic. One can only hope that Buckle’s physiology is based in 5e dhampir rules. Unfortunately for our semi-undead swashbuckler, recent history would seem to indicate otherwise.
Any dang way, while our Heroes are busy negotiating passage to the distant shores of Who-Knows-Where, what do you say the rest of us talk about backstory? The subject is on my mind as, for the first time in many a long year, I’ve been invited to join a Pathfinder game as a player rather than a GM. I find myself returning to form, scribbling page after page of convoluted backstory. No doubt Wizard would be proud. And yet, the forever GM in back of my head seems to have antithetical opinions.
Skimming back over the draft of my novella, I started to ask myself questions. “How would a GM actually use this information? If I want these ideas to see play rather than getting swallowed up in the 3 Ring Binder of Forgotten Notes, how should I structure my backstory?” The thought occurred to me that bite-sized chunks with clearly-labeled plot hooks would be a good start. I’ve written plenty of these things for published modules after all. So why couldn’t I, as a PC, do the same thing for my GM? Here’s what I came up with:
- Important NPCs
- Family: Beloved father was a skilled stonemason. That made him uncommonly valuable as a slave. He was sold deeper into Evil Empire mere weeks before emancipation. Though my PC hopes to find and free him one day, she has no idea where to start.
- Ally: Best friend from girlhood still works in the kitchens of House [Slaving Jerks]. Quiet and meek, the human nobility think nothing of letting their secrets slip in front of her. She’s a valuable source of information for my PC’s struggling detective agency, and I make sure to tip her handsomely for the latest gossip.
- Enemy: Pampered Daughter of House [Slaving Jerks] hates my guts. With Pampered Daughter’s family losing influence and struggling for cash in our newly independent nation’s upper class, the release of her latest book was supposed to help maintain prestige. The ‘literary event of the season’ was ruined when I crashed the release party and revealed myself as her ghost writer.
- Struggling Business: Thanks to the notoriety I earned at the book release, I’ve since opened my own “poet for hire” shop. Unfortunately, it keeps getting vandalized. I can’t prove that the thugs are on the payroll of Pampered Daughter, but business is bad. I’ve had more luck using my knowledge of local nobility to peddle information. All those years writing scandalous epigrams about Pampered Daughter’s enemies has gained me a reputation as somebody who can find things out.
- Relationship to [Other PC]: After a bungled attempt at recovering [Other PC’s] McGuffin, the pair have decided to leave the city behind until the heat dies down. As the campaign begins, these city kids have just survived a wilderness misadventure involving hallucinogenic mushrooms and a pair of carnivorous plants. When they wander into town, they are in dire need of a bath, a hot meal, a cure for a hallucinogenic hangover, and perhaps a pair of tweezers to pull out the remaining thorns still stuck in their flesh.
- Motivation for Adventuring: After reading so many fanciful poetry books describing natural wonders, I want to see them for myself. If I can raise enough funds to reopen my storefront or buy my father out of bondage, so much the better.
I’m sharing this with you guys for a couple of reasons. In the first place, I’m super excited about my character and let me show you my pokemans. But as a GM, I look at those bolded section titles and think, “OK. I could work with this.” The father is an obvious rescue mission. The ally and enemy are both potential quest sources, as the one could need my help while the latter could send any number of ne’er-do-wells to seek restitution. The wilderness misadventure is an immediate hook for session 1, while my motivation for adventuring is a long-term arc. Dangling natural wonders or a publishing deal in front of my character will likely get her attention. All of these are at-a-glance tools for my GM. They’re accessible shorthand for a menu of quest objectives. And just as important, they’re reasonably tied into the starting campaign lore.
So here’s my question for today’s discussion. How do you go about giving your GM hooks for your character? Is the full-on novella useful? Do you prefer to go in with a minimal backstory, the better to hook in to an existing campaign? Or are you one of those sad souls who hopes vainly to see their ideas included in the plot, only to be disappointed session after session? Whatever your take on PCs backstories, sound off with your own approach down in the comments!
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It’s nice to see Thief get some resolution on this dangling plot hook. 😀
She’s definitely more hands-on and direct than Jack Sparrow.
> more hands-on
What you did there. I see it.
Characters whose parents are killed/kidnapped/enslaved/estranged/never known, and thus needing to be avenged/rescued/freed/found are almost getting as cliched as the Only Good Drow Who Wants To Redeem Themselves.
So naturally when I had a character whose parents were alive and well, and they even invited the party for dinner cause they are taking so good care of their son, it did hit the players in a totally new and different way. Suddenly stopping the Big Bad wasn’t just because he was a threat; it’s because he was a threat to someone who were kind to them, who were worth living for. Suddenly they weren’t just a plot hook, they were motivation.
Also a bit more relevant to the original question: I used to try to write short stories for backstory, but now I try to be somewhere inbetween. These days I prefer a bulletpoint list of important life events and relatives, and then check with the GM if they are fine with them, and how much do they allow for me to invent later when the question arises – with the obvious right to veto anything for them. As normally memories fade and alter, I think it’s natural to come up with details later (and they can even kinda contradictory).
Also when I create a new character, they are usually half-cooked, and I need to play them a couple sessions before I see how my original idea actually works for me and for the group – quirks might harder to play or remember than originally thought, or not sitting well with players and thus toned down or altered; mannerisms and behaviour are sanded down to a smoother entertaining experience. That doesn’t mean that I remove all possibility for argument or disagreement; I just make sure that if the character pisses the other characters off, I’m not pissing the other players off in a bad way as well; and I’m not keeping myself from having fun just because I have to pay attention not to forget a certain quirk.
It raises the stakes of character danger too, if “roll up a new character sheet” also means breaking the hearts of NPCs we’ve met and liked.
I remember a campaign where I played an old widowed farmer who had taken to druidism late in life. The other PCs were mostly young folks who’d grown up on nearby farms or in the local town (with one visitor from the Big City University who had brought the initial campaign plot with her.)
The druid’s kids had all grown and moved away from town, so the old man traveled with the PCs to stave off empty nest syndrome and because he was sure that unless someone kept an an eye on these crazy reckless lads and lasses, one of them was gonna get themselves killed.
Which one of them promptly did, courtesy of a vicious trap. Having to break the news to his parents and siblings was heartbreaking, and hit my old druid especially hard. “I had ONE job…”
Oof. That’s pretty dang heartbreaking.
I guess it goes to show the utility of being from the same location, as opposed to pulling the “out of towner” thing.
I uh… Have you seen my comic? 😛
For real though, I imagine my dude has aunties and cousins and such in the ghettos around town. It’s just that the unlucky father gets called out as the potential quest hook. I did toy with making him a favorite uncle or a lover or some such instead. Not sure if one of those options makes the character more interesting though.
No I haven’t, where can I read it? 😛
I should have mentioned I am not against cliches, they can both be used to give a crutch of familiarity, or to set up a big surprise when they are broken. What I find more appalling in “orphaned during backstory” characters is their rigidity. Unless, of course, they are adventuring to gather funds for a Raise Parents spell, but have you ever met any players who actually came up with that idea instead of using the loss of family to fuel a sense of revenge or ennui?
Oh, the bullet point list is brilliant! I’ll sometimes do a short story / writing piece, for vibes, but I’m also guilty of a kind of scattershot approach where I just have a bunch of ideas that aren’t super well organized—I may borrow thos format to make it easier for everyone involved
Cheers! I hope my GM agrees. I should probably show it to her at some point…. 😛
In King Arthur Pendragon the backstory, and hooks, are, (or can be, depending on the players and GM) part of the Winter phase. As you, as a knight, are only adventuring for about 60 to 90 days a year (as part of your feudal obligations to your lord), the rest of the year you do all the stuff that keeps you a knight. So training (i.e. raising skills with experience checks, and spending skills points), economics (how does your manor\farm do this year) and last family events (what happened to whom in your extended family) take place during this phase. Usually something in the family events will trigger a quest. Your sister married below her status? Go and find the scoundrel. Your uncle went missing? Where was he last seen? Your mother eloped with the neighboring lord, one year after your father died? See if you can fix all the economical, religious, courtly and feudal complications that this would bring.
In RQG (RuneQuest in Glorantha), part of the whole character creation process is determining your backstory, at least two generations back. So what did your grandparents and parents do during the “recent” history, and on whose side were they when? This gives a lot of connections, obligations and resources for the player characters, and places them firmly within a social web. That usually gives the GM plenty to work with.
In the old Star Trek FASA RPG your character creation was sort of like doing Star Fleet academy. And then you usually had to do tours on space ships and such before you became the crew of the ship that was the focus of the campaign. This whole “education/training” thing would give you old school comrades, or bullies, or other contacts, and hooks like some of the episodes of TOS.
All of the three systems mentioned above encouraged you to at least think about your past life and what you were before the moment that the GM says: You all meet at an Inn.
As both a player and a GM I usually want to incorporate some of that during play.
The Pendragon makes a lot of sense to me in terms of an ongoing campaign. But how does that Winter phase work with character gen? I mean, I would assume that you’ve got some ideas about character backstory going into a game…?
That depends on how you go about it. There is the normal character generation, in which you make a knight, usually from Salisbury, but might be from anywhere else within the boundaries of the Arthurian World. If you are a household knight, you will not have a manor, but can strive to earn one. Which will then mean that you need to start a family to ensure your manor stays in your family. So that will give you a family right there. No backstory needed. Being a knight also embeds you in a web of connections. Fealty, obligations and (religious) mores.
All this means that, even if you only have a name, a character idea and an area that you want to come, you get “backstory” thrust upon you, because you will not play just one guy\girl\other, but will strive to become the founder of a clan, that holds land, and you will play as several of your descendant(s), before the last battle.
Or, you can buy a book! As RuneQuest and King Arthur Pendragon were (partly) made by the same guy (Greg Stafford) there is some cross pollination between them. The whole RQG character creation, with what your (grand)parents were up to, and went through, is also possible for (most of) the regions that are covered in the KAP Arthurian World. It is called: The Book of Sires. And in it you can dice your way through all the happenings of your (grand)parents, and emerge with a tailor-fitted backstory!
So: Either have your own (or not), and get more thrust upon you during play and Winter Phases, or dice your way through The Book of Sires, and get one that is fitting seamlessly into the Arthurain/KAP metaplot.
Personally I prefer the first method, but some of my friends had so much fun with that book, that they made it into a sort of prequel play for a session or two/three before the “proper” first KAP session
I’m more familiar with random character gen from Traveller, mostly because of its famous “you died before session 1” outcomes.
How do you sell random character gen to folks who are used to turning all the knobs and dials of narrative themselves? Is it more of an RP challenge? The excitement of the random roll?
This is not a complete random dicefest, unlike the “Central Casting” Heroes Now/of Legend/of Tomorrow series from the early nineties. Part of the charm of those books was to bend all those random results in something of a proper and playable narrative. Both the RQG and the KAP tables tie into the metaplot, and invests\inbeds your characters into that plot. For instance, when you roll on a particular year table to see what your (grand)parents did, it will be 80% that they were at a special occasion (usually a battle or campaign) that is relevant for the meta plot. And even if they roll the 20%, and do not attend that, then there must have been a good reason for their absence, no? So they can expand their own backstory from there. It will also build up their family name, so that the player characters will not be the unknown anonymous drifter from quite a lot of westerns, but the spawn of this hero, or that fool, or the other clan that is famous for this or that.
Also, and this is on a more fundamental player level, there are players that desire, and need, complete freedom in their player character, and narrative. And there are players who need, and want, (more or less) extensive connections to, and within, the larger gameworld. Most of the players will be somewhere between these two. And if you need some connection to the world, but are not willing or able of providing your own, these charts are a good way to do that.
When I get the chance to be a player, I go as bare bones as possible for backstory. Two sentences tops, I only say why they are with the party and a little about what they are like. The thing is, I don’t make my backstory for the GM, I make it for myself, and I never have any expectation that they will use what I wrote at all. In fact, I would really prefer they didn’t, it’s always just a distraction to the main quest that forces me to be in the limelight, when I prefer to play a supporting character.
I didn’t realize that this was weird until I started GMing for a while, and although my players had expansive short stories for their characters, I never touched it because when I’m a player I don’t enjoy that. My players ended up forcing the issue, and I worked with them to make something that they would enjoy, but I still don’t quite get why people prefer the side quest that’s only directly relevant to one person to the actual meat of the campaign. I guess it’s just a style-of-play thing.
It’s cool that you have such a clear idea of your playstyle. Ain’t nothing wrong with wanting to do the “main storyline.”
I’m more aligned with your players though. If I get the sense that my dude is replaceable, and that any shmuck with a sword could just as easily step into the protagonist role, the experience begins to feel a bit empty to me.
It’s funny actually… My GM buddy was visiting Laurel and I, and we got to talking about starting a campaign. When we picked up the Pathbuilder app, I immediately gravitated towards the most ridiculous thing I could. After toggling a few options, I had a leshy private investigator named Inspector Zenigourda. He was closer to your style: Just a little plant dude in a trench coat doing a Scruff McGruff voice and making plant puns.
“Be careful on the mean streets. There are a lot of bad seeds out there.”
I was asked to make something more serious when it became clear we were actually planning a campaign. 😛
In general I’ve a similar attitude to you, but as to this:
> I still don’t quite get why people prefer the side quest that’s only directly relevant to one person to the actual meat of the campaign.
Done properly, it’s *not* a side quest… a good GM will tie the various threads together such that details from character backstories become important parts of the campaign, and if they’re really good, you can’t even see where they’ve made the changes.
The guy running our current campaign is very good at this… it’s a pre-written campaign, but he’s expanding and customising it a lot, and it’s almost impossible to tell which parts come directly from the source material, and which parts he’s added to better integrate our characters.
Our DM in Curse of Strahd was like this. Dude changed the setting into an industrial revolution one, and replaced all of the first dungeon with his own urban adventure involving my dude’s traitorous family. Actually, that story is on this one now that I think of it:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/handwave
It wasn’t until months later that I heard of the Death House that was supposed to start the campaign. I’d had no idea.
The last party I was in was a trio of siblings from a religious upbringing, so that really helped the GM include backstory elements that the whole party could be invested in.
We gave a little line or two about what we had been doing before the reunion at the start of the campaign, and made use of GM-provided hooks to help them each mesh further. I had a hook where a mercenary/rival was in town, and I decided that I had been part of the same mercenary outfit but had left them on unfriendly terms.
Usually my backstory is pretty light with a lot of intentional gaps to take setting elements and mash them in there. If the GM has a good setting/campaign in mind, I’m much more invested in getting as seemlessly intergrated as possible rather than writing my own story elements in.
Love that shared backstory.
You ever hear of the Dresden Files RPG? Part of character gen is generating a short adventure that you accomplished with the aid of (player to your right) as a supporting character. (Player on your left) does the same thing. The result is a web of connections.
The Avatar Legends RPG that just came out has a somewhat similar thing in the rulebook where the players and GM get together and use some prompts to write the party’s “pilot episode” first adventure. So even though it wasn’t played out using the normal rules, everyone now knows the first team-up of the party and probably some plot hooks to investigate more thoroughly.
…Naturally, the group I am playing with immediately disregarded this in favor of a more traditional, D&D-style opening.
Yeah, I really like when games help build the party with some premade guidelines. It can be very easy to make a party of disparate strangers who focus on their own goals primarily, but a central starting point always helps get things past that potential area of friction a lot earlier.
I’m generally of the opinion that the current adventure should be the most interesting thing that has happened to your character thusfar, otherwise why aren’t you playing that other moment instead? Your backstory should be to get you involved in the current plot, not generate distractions from it.
We’ve tried doing it the other way, where the backstory plot was its own private thing, and it turns out when youre the only one who cares about a specific story beat, its a lot harder to get everyone else onboard with dealing with it, to the point where even the players whose sidequest it was, ended up asking the DM to drop it so we could get on with the main story.
That’s too bad. Ideally, the “side quest” gets tied into the main quest. It just take a bit of planning between player and GM.
For example, my enslaved stonemason NPC is in there because of the “mysterious organization of slavers” mentioned on page 3:
https://paizo.com/products/btq01zth?Pathfinder-Adventure-Path-Age-of-Ashes-Players-Guide
He’s a stonemason because “your group is likely to have earned the right to dwell in and rebuild the abandoned castle” we’re set to explore in our first adventure.
I’ve also been given to understand that the adventure eventually heads back to the city where my enemy resides / shuttered shop can be found.
In short, the these are elements designed to hook into the main storyline, not lead away from it. That’s part of the reason I’m so enamored of player guides like the one I linked. You get to have your cake and eat it too. I mean, just look at the campaign-specific backgrounds. My “emancipated” backstory comes directly from that.
…
This probably ought to be its own blog now that I think about it. The difference between the “selfish” and the “cooperative” backstory hook.
Ideally, that’s how I try to run my “sidequests” as well. When theyre just different aspects of the main plot that your character is in a position to know about more than others, it generates good feels, lets you be in a leadership position for a bit while you tackle this aspect, and you get a prize a the end (hopefully).
The problem came about when we were instigating a rebellion of sorts as the main plot, and then we had side quests like “Oh, my wife is kidnapped by unrelated pirates.” We cared about it because we liked the character whose quest it was, but there was very much a feel of it being a distraction the whole time.
Why couldn’t the pirates become privateers in the employ of the evil empire you were rebelling against? I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to do it, but that’s the first thing that pops into my GM brain.
They probably could have, although given that the wife was a sorceress and the empire we were rebelling against were the magic police, it would be hard to explain captivity versus execution.
This DM though, unfortunately, took no notes and relied exclusively on his fairly notoriously bad memory to keep track of everything. It may have been something he intended and simply never telegraphed. There was a LOT of that going on that campaign, which is one of the reasons it crashed and burned.
But i think the biggest reason is that he just didnt see the need to have it tie into the main plot at all. It was a Thing That Happened, and I do think that a small amount of that can be healthy for a campaign. Its a big world after all. But there was too much of that in this game, and it threw everything off.
Your approach makes sense, but it’s one of many ways to run a campaign. I’ve played in campaigns that are a tightly focused story, and others where the “main plot” is just the most brightly illuminated bit of a museum full of stories. Most sessions focused on the main protagonists in the here and now, but other times (often when we had less than the full complement of players present) we would play a session set decades in the past or future, or play as characters who the PCs had never met, or had briefly crossed paths with. The stories always related in some way to the main campaign — maybe the players now know the real story of how that devastating war started, and have played it out from the side of the hated villains…but in-world, the story remains lost to history and our main characters will never know.
In a campaign like this, extensive character backgrounds, should the players be inclined to write them, are great fun. One of my favorite memories of that campaign was a session where we played an archaeological team led by Henry Chesterfield, whose daughter Elizabeth was one of the PCs. Dr. Chesterfield had died of Abysmal Victorian Medical Knowledge (OK, technically of mercery poisoning) several years before the main action started, but this story was set at the prime of his archeological career.
The dig kept getting weirder and weirder, with elements like shambling mummies that simply didn’t exist in that world. We played along because we trusted the GM, but everything made less and less sense with each new scene…until at the crucial do-or-die moment of the mummy fight, the DM switched to the “voice” (OK, the online name and icon) of Elizabeth. “Daaaaaaad! Mummies aren’t real!”
Turned out the whole session had been a bedtime story Henry had told Liz when she was nine, twenty years before the main campaign started.
The best bit was how the roll20 dice seemed to play along. Henry (helmed by Elizabeth’s player) rolled abysmally the whole session, until in that last pivotal fight the dice caught fire with repeated crits. Which fit the old man’s character perfectly; he cast himself as a clown to make the little girl laugh, but then when the story got exciting, he couldn’t help but switch over to bragging! (And Liz, as a future proud nerd of Team Science, was only riled up about the inaccurate portrayal of mummies.)
As players, we now had new insight into the history of that archaeological team (some members of which were still alive and plot-crucial), though we had to take everything we “knew” with a grain of salt, because Henry.
*mercury
Our DM in a homebrew 4e game helped themselves with backstory-forging by letting everyone grab the ‘One Unique Thing’ rule from 13th age. It’s a plot hook coupon on what makes our PC unique in the world (e.g. mine is the only person who can read a mysterious language/script – which is somehow tied to him being revealed to be a time traveler with no memory of their ‘past’ life).
This rule?
https://www.13thagesrd.com/character-rules/#:~:text=Your%20character's%20One%20Unique%20Thing,your%20player%2C%20and%20markedly%20unusual.
Dang man, I like that rule. 😀
I predict bad tidings for the ‘Untamed Pirate Ship DCLXVI’.
Also, those fools – they should know better than to get on a boat rife with plot hooks and combat-capable (theoretically) PCs.
*Unnamed
…”Untamed Pirate Ship” would be a good name as well.
On the one hand Thief Rogue probably has mediocre strength. (It’s the most popular dump-stat in point-buy since only the Barbarian/Paladin/Fighter benefit directly from it). On the other hand she could have expertise in Athletics, and expertise is mathematically better than having a high ability score in higher tiers.
What does the asterisk on “1 sp/mile” say? I can’t get enough resolution when I zoom.
I like to give enough of a backstory to allow for plenty of potential hooks, while also filling in the basic blanks that a character ‘should’ know.
So, I created a personal questionnaire for my characters to answer some basic questions about their backstory and help me establish who they were before level 1 and the adventure begins. My current DM helped to polish it down from what it was, and while still a little long-ish, it really works to quickly flesh out a character and also provide plenty of potential hooks.
feel free to use it if you like:
—
Please answer the following questions about your past. Be as detailed as you can be in your answers and please explain any additional information an answer might create. It is fine if an answer is “no” or “I don’t know” or “n/a”, but try to explain why that is the answer your character is giving.
The Questions:
▪ Where were you born (does it matter to you)? ▫
▪ Who raised you (do you care, do you think they care)? ▫
▪ Where did you grow up (does it matter to you)? ▫
▪ Do you have family (do you care, do you think they care)? ▫
▪ Do you think of any place as “home” (does it matter to you)? ▫
▪ Do you have friends (do you care, do you think they care)? ▫
▪ Where do you currently live (does it matter to you)? ▫
▪ Do you have any acquaintances (do you care, do you think they care)? ▫
▪ What was your life before you left for adventure? ▫
▪ Why did you become an adventurer? ▫
▪ Why are you a [your class here] (if you have a faith, why do you follow that faith)? ▫
▪ Are you trying to complete any tasks or goals while adventuring? ▫
▪ Do you have any secrets you do not want anyone to know (if so, why don’t you want anyone to know)? ▫
▪ Do you have any specific knowledge of, or strong opinions on, the following:
– races? ▫
– cities? ▫
– politics? ▫
– religions? ▫
– anything else? ▫
▪ What is the most embarrassing moment of your past (would you share that moment with anyone)? ▫
▪ What is a moment you are most proud of in your past (do you share it with people, asked or not)? ▫
▪ If you can think of a question you want to answer that was not asked, please ask it… and answer it too. Thank you. ▫
—
credit to ME [CasuallyChallenged] (mostly), Alex (the DM that made it more simplified than what it was originally), and MusiFops (for the embarrassing moment and proud moment questions)
My take on “the character questionnaire” lives on this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wizard-quiz
The link from the top comment on that page remains one of my favorite backstory generators. It’s short enough not to be intimidating, and open-ended enough to generate actionable hooks rather than raw details.
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?91813-10-Minute-Background
Typically (when I do get to play) I keep the novella on hand “in case someone asks” (they rarely do), but I try to have a 1-3 sentence elevator pitch summary for the DM:
-) The half-orc baby was abandoned at a temple to Heracles (who traditionally takes in orphans). His prime stats are Strength and Wisdom, as the monks see his prodigious Strength as a blessing and raised him as a priest.
-) He’s a halfling rogue who reveres Brandobaris– power is temporary, stuff can be stolen, money just allows you to buy more stuff, but FAME can make you immortal.
-) She’s a gnome illusionist who was raised by halflings, identifies as a halfling, and has the Disguise ranks to pass as a halfling. She sees herself as an entertainer, but she wants to see the world before she settles down.
(etc.)
Once, however, in college, I was pleasantly surprised when the LARPing group picked my humble bartender to be the focal person for the Crisis on Two Worlds event precisely because they looked through all the character bios on file and liked my (largely unrevealed) backstory the most!
Must have been a rewarding moment in the LARP. What was the detail that attracted their interest?
Apparently, the surprise was that they thought they knew him at all.
He had introduced himself two years before as “Larry,” was called “Lawrence” by an officious nobleman, and (out of polite deference to his new liege) never corrected him. My character frequently appended a person’s job or chief Craft skill as their surname: a ginger-haired elf who made cookies became “Sgt. Red Baker,” and Larry became “Lawrence Brewer,” even though that hadn’t been his name until he moved to town.
Once the plot committee found pages and pages of narrative detailing his true-name, travel-name, and the origin of his nickname “Larry,” they decided “This is the one.”
The plot hook was that I wasn’t informed that the entire weekend would revolve around my character –I was as in the dark as every other PC and had to pretend to be my own mirror-universe doppelgänger as we all figured out what our objective was and how to best go about fixing things.
It was VERY rewarding, though I’d only give my success rate about a B+: two very nice NPCs died to give us the happy ending, and if we’d 100% it, they would have survived. 🙁
As a DM, the most mileage I’ve gotten out of character backstories has always been through their families – even when said families are dead. Your poor deceased mother? Secretly slain by someone you thought you could trust! Your poor deceased father? Secretly alive, working as a counter-terrorist! Both parents long dead? Killed in a political war started by the baddie! (All real examples, same campaign!)
I think the key, for me at least, is to create a backstory that not only interfaces with the world the GM presents, but gives opportunities to add to it. Adding NPCs is the perfect way to do that. They make the world feel much more alive and interconnected, but don’t (usually) force any unwanted changes in the story by their mere presence.
Of course, the downside is that PCs will occasionally create orphans just so “the GM can’t mess with me anymore.”
Case in point: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-13
When I write a character document, I split it into sections. One for general backstory (Usually around a page), one for Character description, beliefs and such (About half a page) and then a list of important NPCs to them. This both serves as a good way to introduce the DM to my character, and as an easy reference document for myself. Usually I split up each section with a quote from my character, which I mainly use to get into its mindset.
A recent character I played was a lady who had been widowed 12 times. Always right after the ceremony. At this point people considered her to be cursed. On the other hand she was the cousin of the king, so she was still an attractive marriage prospect. I listed her former spouses, and the most important bits about them (Such as cause of death). Which allowed the DM to expand on them, their families and their goals as needed. At the same time her main theme was her constantly tragic marriages, meaning that every now and then someone convinced her father to let them marry her, leading to the party trying to prevent the grooms untimely death at the wedding (None of them succeeded).
So basically the first section went through her overall backstory, the second part went into who she actually was as a person and finally a list of her family and former spouses.
She was an warlock of undeath, and every time she called upon her powers the ghostly forms of her spouses would appear around her.
On the other hand of this I have played characters whose entire backstory can be summed up with “He is a fighter” or “He has a gun”.
How did sharing the spotlight go? Did your GM feel pressured to give your screen time as opposed to their A-Plot? And did the other PCs have equally diverting and useful hooks?
As usual with that group it was an even split. Two of the players usually prefer to not have too much spotlight on them/are more mechanics focused (Through they still get some), while me and one are more social.
But generally it was a just a thing that came up every now and then. Most of the time we ran around trying to save the kingdom, do typical adventure stuff. The whole marriage thing was basically small side-quests that cropped up every now and then. Often as humorous interludes. I actually got less focus in some of them, because the others were busy mingling, meeting their long lost twins, finding out intrigues and trying to exorcise the curse, while I was planning out my soon to be grooms funeral.
As a player, I try to aim for ‘short story’ rather than ‘novella’ although in practice the detail is to inform my RP and the GM gets the relevant bits at the top as a TLDR.
I never expect my backstory to come up, but it is nice if it does become relevant to what we’re doing at some point. I try to put a few things in there a GM could use.
As a GM, the one thing I want out of a character backstory is why do they care? Why are they here, why are they engaging with the plot? Everything else is the icing on the cake. NPCs they care about are up there as good icing, though.
> to inform my RP
> I never expect my backstory to come up, but it is nice if it does become relevant to what we’re doing
This strikes me as a healthy attitude.
I go for no backstory or revealing small parts at the time to not take the spotlight 🙂
But you DESERVE the spotlight!
No i don’t 🙁
Spotlight = BAD 🙁
Only in prison break scenarios.
For me on real life too, don’t like to have the spotlight never 🙁
I agree Spotlight is bad, it makes you a target. Instead wait in shadows and then pounce on any character developement arcs DM has in wait and ravage the body so thta he won’t try again soon.
My DMs and myself are not the „incorporate backstory“ type.
My 1st level Characters get a bit of it, but usually I first chose the campaign trait and then spin a story for it.
Any spare characters get the backstory of a past character plus past aborted campaigns to fill the levels (I write down encountered creatures of the campaigns so I can point to my list and say „I‘ve encountered this creature before“ to not need a knowledge check to know weaknesses.
> (I write down encountered creatures of the campaigns so I can point to my list and say „I‘ve encountered this creature before“ to not need a knowledge check to know weaknesses.
Is this a gamesmanship thing, or a “this is the monster lore a reasonably leveled PC would know” thing?
it’s „I haven’t got to level 5 just by slaying rats in the sewers.“
Some stuff I should have encountered by whatever level I enter a campaign.
I‘d call it gamesmanship if I went and cherry picked more obscure monsters to gain an advantage. This way I just pick an AP up to the appropriate level and call it backstory.
I’ve been trying to do something like that to make my characters. Here’s one I made lately.
Character: Dragonfolk Magus Paladin Prince.
Important NPCs:
Brother 1: Enemy, framed the PC for murder to get him exiled.
Sister 1: Enemy, helped in the framing.
Sister 2: Ally, too young to know what was going on at the time of the murder.
Best Friend: Possible love interest before being brutally murdered.
One ally and two enemies makes sense to me. Of course, this reads to me as a single hook rather than four different ones. “I was framed for murder, here are the relevant players.”
If I was your GM, I’d ask a couple of questions to further flesh this guy out:
— What has he done to survive in the meantime? (Example Hook: Secret identity)
— Has he picked up any skills since he’s been on the run? (Example Hook: Inability to lie means a string of witnesses might lead back to his current location)
— Who trained you as a magus? (Example Hook: Your friend and fencing master Syrio Forel may still be alive!)
— How has your ordeal affected your faith as a paladin? (Example Hook: You’re considering conversion to a god of vengeance.)
— How did you first meet [other PC]? What is an adventure that brought you together? (Example Hook: This unscrupulous bounty hunter hates Brother 1 and Sister 1. He’d normally turn me in for coin, but threw in with me instead on the promise of richer rewards once I reclaim my birthright.)
Those internal conflicts and intraparty relationship are especially important, as they’re stuff that you an bring in from session-to-session regardless of the GM’s plot.
As a GM, I like to work a lot of PC backstories into the main plots. It helps that as The Guy Who Knows Almost All The Rules, I’m usually heavily involved in the players’ character creation anyways. As I help the player put their mechanical pieces together, they usually express their desired characteristics and story and I offer suggestions based on the world and my foreknowledge of events. From there it’s usually pretty easy to find a middle ground between their ideas and my plans.
The most interesting version of this was how I approached the book In Search of Sanity in the Strange Aeons AP. The book gives a lot of leeway about the PCs’ amnesia, so I decided that the players would tell me what their character is like and provide ONE memory they have, and I would make up the rest of their backstory for them to discover. I was originally going to have the backstories be somewhat separate, but opportunities arose and I weaved them all together into a backstory incident that they all slowly pieced together through clues and dreams.
In another campaign, almost every PC had an organization they were connected to (a group of wizard scholars; a punk social club/casual cult; a family of leshy siblings; the evil cult that raised her before she escaped), so that made things a snap. One group of allies they can aid, one oft-maligned but relatively harmless intrigue faction, a location for one of the main quests, a substantial enemy force. And presenting them like that makes the other players feel invested in the parts that aren’t from their backstory – everyone in the party hates the Church of Cassilia, not just their former member. I highly recommend PC connections to organizations (GM-made or player-made) to provide story hooks.
Strange Aeons demands an unusual amount of trust. I had to ask my players up front, “How much backstory do you want to create, and how much should I create? To what extent am I allowed to alter it?” Interesting conversations to kick off a campaign.
I’ve been playing Mutants and Masterminds a lot lately, and Complications are perfect for this sort of thing, including backstory elements as well as other character details in short little notes that are easy on the GM. My latest character has… Let’s just say she has a couple more than the maximum of five that the game recommends that you allow on a character.
– Motivation (Escape Sire, Lord Silas DiMaggio)
– Addiction (Weekly Blood)
– Fame (Vampire Fans)
– Identity (Scarlett Giordano, Blood Clinic Assistant)
– Phobia (Garlic, Holy Symbols, Sunlight)
– Quirk (No Reflection, Rots Food & Drink, Wolf Form, Won’t Cross Running Water, Won’t Enter Homes Uninvited)
– Relationship (Dr. Lucia Ferrari, Friend & Boss)
– Reputation (Blood-Drinking Monster)
– Weakness (Holy Water, Silver)
…Now that’s technically 16 complications. A little bit more than 5, but hey, a vampire’s not a vampire without a ton of finicky restrictions.
> …Now that’s technically 16 complications
Oh I dunno. As a GM, my brain sees “blood addiction” and “phobia” and “quirk” and converts that all into “is a vampire.” Through that lens, you’ve got exactly five actionable hooks.
–Is a vampire [composite of the minor hindrances]
–Motivation
–Fame (This one goes beyond the standard vamp weaknesses. I imagine LARP and Anne Rice fans interfering with your missions.)
–Identity (A secret identity when you’re not out Morbiusing it up)
–Relationship (An NPC)
While it’s amusing to imagine all those little weaknesses constantly entering play, I suspect they’ll quickly drop from view in moment-to-moment gameplay. See the “minor character notes” discussion here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/ailurophobia