Origin Stories: Team Bounty Hunter
Shockingly, the ladies of Team Bounty Hunter didn’t spring into existence upon meeting The Heroes. If you’ve been paying attention, you already caught a glimpse of their origin story back in “Dropping Some Knowledge.” In retrospect however, we thought it deserved more attention than a belated update. That’s because first impressions are crazy important, and their effects reverberate throughout a campaign.
When it comes to the setup in session one, everybody at the table has an agenda. GMs want to show that they’re more creative than “you all meet in a tavern.” Players want to establish their intraparty relationships. New groups want to make a good impression with an unfamiliar table of gamers, and characters want to advance their personal goals. There’s a lot of pressure to get all the gears to align, and it’s easy to psyche yourself out.
As is so often the case, a well-designed session zero can come to the rescue here. Taking the time to bring all stakeholders into the planning phase of the campaign gives players and GMs alike a sense of ownership, and is an easy way to build enthusiasm coming into session one. Take my group’s Dead Suns game. It may be an AP, but that didn’t stop my players from comparing notes and creating a unique take.
“So,” I said. “Did any of you guys know each other before the adventure?”
“Sure!” they chorused. “We all did!”
“Well then how did you meet?”
“We’re journalists! We work for the National Enquirer!”
“What? I mean, there isn’t a National Enquirer per se…”
“There is now! We’re gossip journalists! We’re joining the Starfinder Society to scoop the competition! We’re desperately poor because of all the libel lawsuits!”
There was laughter, back-and-forth brainstorming, and a crazy amount of creative energy in the room. It helped that we were planning this during the 2017 solar eclipse and were all in the mood for a sci-fi game, but I think that the group-sourced concept made all the difference. Getting everyone to buy into a unique premise transformed a standard-issue adventure into our adventure. It’s the same if you decide that you’re mystery-solving teens, part owners in a traveling carnival, or press-ganged students at Miss Spine Eater’s School for Unruly Young Ladies. Collaboration is key in TRPGs, and it’s a wise group that fosters that sense of teamwork from the start.
So how about it, guys? Have you ever created the premise for your campaign as a group? What crazy concepts did you come up with? Let’s hear about your wackiest opening premises down in the comments!
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…what sort of a deity is Inquisitor serving exactly? Wait a moment.
FR: Drow worship Lolth
Golarion: Drow worship Demon Lords
I think I no longer wish to know.
In my head the school faculty had all turned into zombies, thus necessitating arson. If there was a bit of religiously motivated pyromania as well, I’m sure that’s Inquisitor’s business.
So she’s Sarenrae, but True Neutral rather than Neutral Good, and REALLY focused on the Fire aspect. It may seem weird for a drow to worship the sun goddess, but, then again, Inquisitor doesn’t seem to have much of an issue with sunlight, wide-brimmed hat aside. Also, what better way to stick it to her jerk mom?
Inquisitor’s Mom: “Oh, you could have been a great demon Cleric like your sister, or even an Antipaladin like your father, but nooooo, you had to live on the surface and be a bounty hunter, hanging around with Paladins and sullying our family name.”
Inquisitor: “Get out of my life, mom! If you cared about me, you wouldn’t have tried to feed me to a spider when I was 6!”
Inquistitor’s Mom: “Silly girl! It wasn’t trying to eat you. It was trying to-”
Judgement activates
The real question is… if Inquisitor was in high school with a Half-Orc and a Catfolk, how old IS she?
(Also, I really like school!Magus’s hair.)
Asking a lady’s age? Judgement activates
Laurel’s character designs are on point. She’s been going to town on a new graphic novel project, and it’s been fun to see some of that reflected back in Handbook.
You can gauge a Drow’s alignment by how sexily they dress. Nun = Good. Spider-themed S&M gear = evil. This is because Drow are made out of the sexual hangups of baby-boomer fantasy writers.
Inquisitor dresses moderately sexy (When she isn’t stuck wearing a school uniform) and therefore is neutral.
Dude.
Exalted lets you use past lives and destiny to pull your team together.
Standard D&D play is almost perfect for a mercenary group.
Ars Magica makes you decide not only how you know each other, but has mechanics to describe your shared base.
The one that will always stick with me, though, is my first game of Scion. I was the main Storyteller, but we started knowing that the job would rotate around. Hence, we decided on a lot of things as party members, rather than the ST just dictating them.
And, if you didn’t know, a group of Scions is called a Band. So, obviously, we decided that our Band was also an internationally famous rock (et al.) band. High profiles, easy international travel, and lots of Legend to work with (and Fatebinding to be paranoid about).
My son of Hel was the bassist, the son of Damballa was the drummer, the daughter of Veles was the violinist, the main vocalist was a daughter of Hermes, a daughter of Artemis was the guitarist, a son of Anubis was our agent, and a son of Uncle Sam was our lawyer.
What was your party theme song? Do you have a playlist or a comparable band from the real world?
Funny, we kind of had a similar thing going into Dead Suns.
We were in the early stages of planning. While most of us were still deciding, I knew that one player had a solid character. He was basically going to recreate his Starfinder Character, who is pretty much a space faring version of E.T.C. from Heroes of the Storm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xueABAjPmc0
It’s pretty out there, and I know that player can get excited and be pretty bombastic when he is. So I pitched the idea of the entire group being a metal band to make sure the Doom Cow would complement the group instead of clashing with the mood.
Turns out the group was down! So the GM (who’s a huge fan of Bards, btw) rolled with it and integrated our tours and stage shows into the story. And thus begun the legend of We Ate Golarion.
That is the best possible band name.
Not really a campaign I was in, but in two of the campaigns I have DM’d, we have ended up with interesting group backstories.
The first one was about the party shipwrecked on a haunted island. I figured I would let the PC backstories decide what the ship was actually doing before it crashed, and so, when we got a Goliath Druid with a dinosaur Animal Companion and a Wild Shape specialty in dinosaurs, and then the Witch decided to have a dinosaur familiar, it became official – the party were dinosaur smugglers. I’m sorry, “quasi-legal dinosaur shippers through international waters.” The Ninja became a sailor (thus making her a pirate-ninja) the disease Oracle became the ship’s doctor/veterinarian, and the Alchemist became the ship’s cook. While dinosaur smuggling doesn’t exactly match the tone of the rest of the campaign, it’s led to enough good inside jokes that it was worth it.
That other one was an intentional organizing on my part. The party is effectively the Suicide Squad, coerced by the government into trying to take down an otherwise untouchable crime lord. As a result, we ended up with a party consisting of a LE, a NE, a CE, a N, and a poor NG trying to keep these guys pointed in the right direction.
Suicide Squad is a solid premise. Anything that gives evil characters an excuse to work together is a good idea in my book.
Personally, I have found that starting each session with a ‘flesh-out’ questionnaire really helps build a foundation for each characters’ investment to the party. Players who choose to participate in the session questionnaire answer three preestablished questions about the character, and are awarded a hero point (if Pathfinder) or an inspiration point (if D&D 5e).
During this last campaign, the questions used so far are:
– Pick 2 other party members, describe two situations whereby each of the chosen people were the pivotal person to the success of the encounter or quest.
– What is the greatest fear your character has, when did he first realize this fear, and describe the last instance when the party needed to rescue you because of your fear.
– Describe your characters’ favorite childhood toy and how he acquired it and/or lost it.
– Describe your characters’ favorite childhood hideout and why it was special to them.
– Describe your characters’ favorite food/beverage.
– Describe your character’s childhood friend, and how that friendship grew or diminished over time.
– Describe your characters’ favorite piece of equipment and how you acquired it.
– Describe the greatest journey your character has experienced (literal or metaphorical).
– What did your character want to be when he grew up?
– Describe your character’s family unit growing up.
– Describe your character’s worst memory.
– Describe why your character chooses to travel with the party.
– (Meta) What would absolutely break the resolve and/or spirit of your character should they learn it.
– (Meta) What is one thing that your character does not know.
– What is the one thing your character “needs”?
– What is the one thing your character could NEVER forgive?
– What does your character believe to be a “good” death?
Participating players would take turns reading aloud the answers to the questions (usually in the accent of the character). Overall, it has helped players become invested in the party as a whole, and not just their own character. It also helps to slowly build and establish a working and plausible backstory for the party, if there wasn’t one already.
I’d cut the number of questions a bit, but that’s a matter of personal taste. What I really love about this is this bit:
That goes a long way to solving something I call the “rich inner life problem.” That’s where you’ve got this fascinating character in your head, but no one else gets to experience it because you don’t have the chance to show it off. Really good idea to do the read-aloud!
The embroider’d knuckleduster school logo is everything.
One of the great pleasures of collaboration with an illustrator is finding these little details. I’d looked at the comic three or four times before I noticed. 🙂
Wackiest party origin I can remember?
It was homebrew aquatic setting, with most of civilization being underwater. There were custom races and stuff to accommodate this. The GM had an adventure path in mind, we just had to decide how we know each other and stuff.
It started when we realized that we all kinda coincidentally made young female characters. There were ideas thrown about being Magical Girls, but magic was lame in that campaign because of homebrew rules. We then realized that we have 2 Bards and me, of a race and background related to music and performance.
So we decided to be a girl band. Our barbarian would play the drums, the bards would play the flute and do the main vocals, and my mystic would play her invention, which was basically a psychic-powered theremin.
Sadly that game didn’t last long, so we never got to do anything with our super cool band.
What this thread is teaching me is that I’m not the only gamer with a “let’s roll bards and start a band” campaign rattling around in my head.
So did the wolves who raised ranger send her to Miss SpineEater’s?
Are you kiddding me? Public schools in the forest are terrible. You’d send your pups to private school too.
Now I’m wondering how the [nasty-word] they pay for tuition!
Yeah, private school can be expensive. Ranger is a legacy though, so her family gets a pretty good discount.
Note to self: stop drinking tea while checking for replies to your comment!
My homebrew started with an incredibly ill-advised premise. Two of the players were vigilantes protecting a large town, and the third was a bandit leader, complete with her own gang of comically inept NPC bandits. They all had secret identities and were friends in their civilian guises, never suspecting the truth.
The first combat in the game was PvP – the vigilantes vs the bandits as they fought over a rich treasure hunter who was passing through town. Of course, three rounds in a BBEG and his minions showed up and forced the two sides to work together to survive. Still, it was a risky opening that I’m not sure I would have the courage to try again.
Then came the trials of running a game for a Rogue, a Vigilante and a Ninja. That is, three different flavours of Rogue. That was fun. Stealth was rolled, heists performed, the mystery solved and the day saved.
Well hey, grats on sticking the high difficulty maneuver. Did they come close to killing each other before you made the big reveal?
Once in a Exalted game we played as a group of the Realm nobles who were in an island of the west when they were captured by fair folk pirates. Our characters were just a group of friends who were on a beach celebrating something and then they were escaping the rakshasha and helping the island’s natives to fight back and all that with the madness of the fair folk all around. It was a funny group of characters 🙂
A dynasty beach resort sounds like a pretty posh place. I’m imagining something like that Dead Island video game, but with fair folk instead of zombies.
It was more like Far Cry 3 actually, funny thing none of us knew of that game after much more latter 😛
On a side note. Who is this Miss SpineEater? She sounds like a really good choice to leave your daughter; and i use “is” instead of “was” in the question because i suppose she survived and is plotting revenge. That sounds like something someone called Miss SpineEater would do 🙂
I believe the Miss Spine Eater name is adapted from one of Laurel’s old Exalted games. Not a very nice person if memory serves.
Well, i really hope the Team Bounty Hunter prequel shows more the character, she needs more screen-time, or even her own spin-off 🙂
Wait, on a second through just made spin-off for every character in the Handbook of Heroes, even the two halfling commoners of “A Few Points Short”, their love story must be told 🙂
I’ve toyed with the idea of making a longer comic or writing some HoH fiction, but I’m not sure there would be much of an audience for the heroic tales of the original character (do not steal) of the fighter named Fighter. I’m afraid it would stop being ironically generic and become actually generic outside of the joke-a-day format.
Well, to be fair, what did they expect to happen, when the school’s uniforms have pictures of Brass Knuckles on them? Seems a bad way to set a good example for “unruly young ladies”. Unless, of course, the school is supposed to teach them how to be unruly young ladies? In which case, I guess they passed.
I’m not going to lie. I’d be all over a fantasy girls school version of Bully.
You would not believe how many times the school’s signage has been vandalized to say ‘with’ instead of ‘for’!
Well, yeah. Do you think the Bronx School of Science teaches people how not to be scientists?
Today’s session is going mark the sixth time people have switched out chars in this campaign and the….15th player that has come into my game. I think a players gonna drop but I’m not sure.
I’ve transcended the concept of session 0, in the past week i’ve had 2 players switch out their chars.
Nobody has died because everyone’s switching out chars, original party whats a original party 4/5 of the players have switched on and out and today marks the third time for a player. Why worry about dying when the gm has to worry about a cohesive plot line?
Someone save me from this hell, and here I am hoping that one day I can commission a group sketch when everybody knows that when I do someones gonna switch out their char.
;_;
Yeesh… How long has that campaign gone on? Is it maybe time to wrap things up?
Hmmm, let’s see if I can recall a few.
“Child adventurers in Ravenloft!” is definitely my all time favorite idea.
There’s been a traveling group of performers, each of a different type. (Obviously a musician, but also there was an acrobat, and I believe there was a chef and illusionist and maybe a few other things.)
There was a merchant expedition to a new island, each member having different personal agendas.
And I’ve always wanted to play a group of explorers and mapmakers.
Child adventurers in Ravenloft, eh? Laurel bought this book a million years ago…
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/55727/World-of-Darkness-Innocents
…and we’ve never had a chance to play. I always thought that kids vs. evil would be a great campaign.
For me a good part of the great fun of this idea is three things aside from the main thrust.
A) The kids actually wearing adventuring gear and having class abilities and being at least somewhat able to actually fight monsters in the conventional sense. Which goes against the norms for this kind of thing.
I think I like the idea because it would let you play more with the fact that just because they’re physically capable of monster fighting it doesn’t mean they’re emotionally well equipped to handle the situation.
B) Ravenloft in particular is a no-win scenario most of the time. Even if you’re leaving the possibility open that they might escape, everyone playing is making a character knowing they have to be prepared that their character may be in for some changes. And that gasp!, the kids might not be all right in the end.
C) If you do go the “no escape” route, you have the amusing possibility of children becoming the new Lords of Ravenloft and the kind of messed up that place is winds up going through a very radical shift that is probably an even worse (but also more amusing) result than having adults running things. Just imagine the crazy result that is evil Neverland/Lord of the Flies/the twisted dreams and nightmares of children brought to life….. with adults (and the old brands of monsters) having to try and somehow live there. What beautiful madness!
I think Spielberg produced on that film:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone:_The_Movie#%22It's_a_Good_Life%22
As a note, I must point out that the Dresden RPG and likely by extension the Fate RPG have this as a core mechanic. In Dresden, you get your last two Aspects from how your backstory crosses over with two other PCs. You sit at the table and literally pass the paper with your backstory to the person to your left, you cowrite little vignettes where the characters cross over, and distill that experience down to a pithy phrase you can spend points on to call on the shared experience and proficiency.
We did an Exalted game where the party had all been recruited into a Martial Arts Dojo by a master who was, of course, a Gold faction Sidereal. It was only more amusing that my story was basically he thought I was going to exalt as a Solar, but things shifted at the last moment and I ended up with Luna’s kiss instead. That was a fun game, despite the party of dysfunctional weirdos we were.
And as our most outspoken WoD junkie, I have to say that Innocents is a very particular experience. Find a really good GM and you can have a ball just trying to figure out why that one girl keeps disappearing through doors or what old man Jenkins is really up to in the creepy house up the hill.
Wanna know something weird? I actually used the Fate system for that Starfinder game. It failed for me because the players had already done all that work spontaneously and independently. It wound up feeling redundant and a little anticlimactic.
I’d still like to give it another try in a home brew game rather than an AP, but I was surprised that such a cool system didn’t pan out for my group.
That’s not a failing on the part of the Fate system, that’s a success on the part of your players. ^.^ You know how much I would give multiple left shoes to get backstories and concepts before Session 1 (our group dislikes the idea of Session Zero, cause they are kinda impatient.). Instead, I have fun things like showing up with a quest and realizing “This guy has the exact build to steamroll this” and this other character “is crippled due to his unforeseen fear of unusually long furred hamsters”. And they wondered recently why Session Two tends to be very different from Session one. x.x’
I’ve been slowly introducing them to the concept of Session Zero by simply being really active in emails and text messages on the week before beginning a new game, but it doesn’t help sometimes with my more reactive players. (I could roll a thief or a cleric based on what player b rolls. Player b’s choice is dependent on what player c rolls. Player c is going back and forth between Wizard and Frenzied Berserker, and Player D is a Bard who specializes in knitting. There’s always one. )
I tried to start a Firefly TTG campaign once. I had this idea that it’d take place during the second push to find and colonize planets, so that they could be there when the core worlds were still blooming and be the ones to discover some of their favorite rim-worlds from the show, or at least help colonize them and get them started. It was great! The guys were all on board, and I asked them what it was they wanted to be doing.
“Terraforming!” was the almost unanimous answer. They wanted to fly out past the core worlds, land on barren rocks, set up equipment and be the ones to shape planets!
…We got about two sessions in, with one plot hook involving some unexpected orphan stow-aways and another involving an offer to team up with the newly blossoming browncoats (they turned this down) before it fell apart. I was a pretty green GM at the time, and couldn’t come up with much that worked as a story when they were literally going out for months at a time to barren rocks. Two or three of my players made a wonder-combo that basically threw ‘engine/parts trouble’ out the window right out of the gate, and I for some reason didn’t think to turn the mission into fighting off the new rebel group (really was expecting them to join…).
So it petered out with ‘You fly out to place, you set up equipment, you return, uh… good job.’ Needed more XP under my belt before I could pull that one off, it seems!
Tough luck on the “ran out of ideas” count. I had a buddy who set up a great premise in Exalted once upon a time. We were a bunch of alchemical exaltes (robot people) who’d come through from our own dimension to stake a claim in Creation. Our living city plopped itself down in the middle of some kingdom or other, and we set about feeding it to grow our base.
Great concept, right?
“Sorry guys. I can’t think of anything.”
The game lasted exactly one session.
It happens sometimes. No matter how cool the premise, you wind up running low on ideas. Never mind all the cool brown coat fights, reavers, claims jumpers, smugglers on the run, nefarious traveling space salesman, and natural disasters you come up with once you’ve had a few years to think about it. In that moment, as you’re wracking your brain trying to figure out what happens in the next session, it’s blood hard to pull it together.
RIGHT?!
Easy to check out, readable…heck I needed to leave
a commment!
Huzzah!
Wow. I had no idea it was possible to make Inquisitor look cute