Tragic Backstory
You know, I would be more than willing to write up a nice family history if the GMs of the world would stop killing everyone off. It’s like every character’s family tree is the guest list for the Red Wedding. Fighter is just a little ahead of the curve.
People are lazy though, and that’s the real reason for the “man with no past” PC. Players are too lazy to put in the work, and GMs certainly don’t want to squeeze 4-6 PCs worth of distant relations into a story. I mean sure, it could lead to a vibrant narrative with fully developed characters, but then we might have to spend a few freaking minutes not killing things.
“But Colin,” I hear you say. “My favorite ever PC was an orphan, and she was a fully developed character!” Well bully for you. I’m sure Harriet Pöttér was a great wizard or whatever. But my family is dead, and I’m bitter about it.
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I just did a weird double take at this one because my name is colin. And also all my current PCs have their backstories woven into not only the world (We just finished visiting the bard dwarf’s home and curing a curse) but also some into the plot!
Never overlook a nice dangly plot hook that a player just unknowingly handed you.
Okay in retrospect, calling myself (THE REAL ONE) is probably bound to cause confusion.
Thankfully you’ve already indicated what to do in cases of doppelgangers.
Welcome to the comic, fellow Colin!
With the combinations of dwarf + bard + curse, I’m guessing it was a self-playing bagpipe that wouldn’t shut up.
I will put in relations, but rather than being the orphan, or giving the DM’s much fodder I usually have the parents die of old age, and the relations being an aunt, uncle, sibling, or something who has a completely safe job three countries over that just acts as a pen pal so that when I write an in-character journal (complete with putting my IRL calligraphy lessons to use) I have a justification.
Ha! You’d get so much bonus XP at my table for proper calligraphy. Any chance of a photo link to one of these letters?
In Pendragon you get a huge liftup if you’re the “son of sir whatsamicallit”. Depending on what your father stature (and corresponding glory) in life is/was, you get more starting glory the higher he is (you start with 10% of his glory, in addition to the glory that you already have for other stuff).
Although the extra 1000 glory for his “Died heroically in battle” is a nice addition to the whole sum…
And all your living (male) relatives are part of you Levy, which you can raise in times of need. So the more the better.
And this is my great uncle, Sir Bonus Stats.
Named for your shared Great-Grandfather, one presumes.
My most recent character flipped things a little. He had a large, extended family, and he was the one that died.
Vampire game?
If I’m in a long term campaign, I like to have roots. Thus, halfling Kiri had sibling Miri and Piri, as well as parents at sea (we visited their ship). In Kingmaker, the great noble sending us on our quest, Roustoff Medvyed, was my Uncle Rusty, and the character who became queen my possible bastard cousin.
Are you sure that ship hasn’t been lost at sea? I’m just saying, those parents now exist to be taken away from you in a tragic act of piracy, thus earning your undying enmity for the Pirate Queen or whatever. 😛
That kid looks a little like link from wind waker and now I think I know what happened to his parents.
You have to figure Link is a parricidal sociopath. Who else abuses chickens like that?
One of my fellow players is no longer an orphan. We were on a quest of retrieve a lost sacred weapon that was once wielded by Fighter’s dad 20000 years ago to fight back ‘The Darkness.’ We found the weapon. We also found Fighter’s dad. Fighter is now Fighter Jr.
Fighter’s Dad seems like a long-lived fellow.
Also, I’d have expected that a weapon designed to fight back “the darkness” would be a wand of magic missiles:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-dead-alewives-dungeons-and-dragons
Very long lived. Fighter Sr also has a lack of impulse control, as indicated when we woke him up from his stasis sleep and he attacked us. It took a while for us to get him calm enough that he could recognize his own son. Didn’t help that he doesn’t understand anything we say.
lol
Hilariously my very first PC had a complex and developed family as a noble Scion from a powerful City State from the Scavenger Lands Hundred Kingdom’s reason.
Whole reason my PC went out adventuring was one of his parents was secretly evil and stole/sold off a bunch of the royal family’s ancestral artifacts while planning a coup. It took us three years-out-of-game to return and find the other parent dying of poison, but the Good parent didn’t actually die, fortunately (and my City-State got to become our Circle Headquarters). Still, since then it’s become a habit with my PCs to totally have living parents… who are evil and my (heroic) PC has vowed to hunt down and kill them for their crimes.
…Except that one Half-Blue Dragon Half-Drow PC. Parents were still evil, but they were quite a happy family since the PC was evil too and mostly the parents spent a lot of time plotting conquests and Evil Uprisings while really wishing my PC would settle down from the Marauding Mercenary Lord life and take up as their Dread General and Herald in the family court… Maybe get together with that evil Priestess who broker’s deals with Arch-Devils for them…
Wait a minute… You means to say that you can have your parents and kill them too? You’re like some kind of backstory prodigy!
I generally go with either estrangement, or general communication difficulties meaning that you can’t easily send a letter to “that small town three miles away from the stream that has two bends close to each other”.
My favorite plot-relevant backstory was actually originally a 13th Age character. He was a Draconic Sorcerer from a line of minor nobles, who flunked out of wizard school, and returned to the family estates to find his great-great grandmother had decided to take up residence there. Turns out she was a giant blue dragon, and basically told him that his family was kicked out until they brought her enough for her hoard or kicked her out.
One of my most recent NPCs that I’ve created is a tiefling warlock whose patron is her own mother. She’s essentially a famous adventurer that got grounded and now has to beg her mom for another 1D10 cantrip. Her father is a lich, and “Deadbeat” puns ensue.
It’s all about family with patrons: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/family-ties
Reminds me of the old definition for chutzpah: Begging for mercy from the judge on account of being an orphan . . . due to killing ones own parents.
From the Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah):
That does seem to fit li’l Fighter nicely.
Wait a second. Fighter’s mother (in this comic) looks very similar to someone who is called Fighter’s sister in a different strip about the different “child” ages of the races. I certainly hope they’re not the one and the same, otherwise….oh my…
Ah yes, this one really gets me. I strongly dislike the “tragically orphaned” backstory, so I avoid it in all my characters, and try to discourage it in my players. But there is the downside that some DMs take the existence of a family as a cue to threaten said family, to motivate or distract my character. It doesn’t matter that my characters have simply left home on amicable terms with parents, or have adult children who have gone their own way.
It can backfire on the DM though. Once a character of mine, who was an interplanar traveller (it fit the setting) was told that his teenage daughter was for some reason wandering around in the crapsack world he was trying to save, not the happy idyllic place she was supposed to be. The DM didn’t even put her anywhere on our path to just bump into – I think she intended to have me try to drag the party away from the course they were taking, or otherwise create tension by dividing my concerns. I simply had my character quit the party, and go off on his own, because – why drag a bunch of adventuring companions into my domestic trouble? Might as well come up with a new character!
Now, most of my characters aren’t of an age to have children, and they have family backstories like “left home for a new job, he writes to his parents occasionally” or “surrendered to a temple as an oblate because her parents were too poor to feed another squalling brat, she neither remembers nor cares about them”.
Of course, another problem I have is with all the players who want to be the child of someone important, and who thus can’t understand why I don’t bring their glorious pater or mater into the campaign…
If that’s a case of “I want favors from my daddy the king,” then that does indeed seem like some power gaming shenanigans.
If this is a legit plot hook though, I don’t see the harm in writing in a family backstory. If everyone is trying for that shtick, then it can bog down the game in harry, absolutely. But otherwise I think that a backstory is a backstory. I tend to read them as suggestions from the player: Here’s a hook that might be fun to explore. A player demanding that you take up that hook is obnoxious. But if you can fit in the odd letter from home, that’s “yes, and-ing” the player at a fairly low cost, and not a bad way to do between-sessions RP.
Obligations go both ways. If Player wants to ask favors of Famous Parent, just be sure that FP has a list of chores for the Player to get done before bedtime. It goes without saying that the bigger the favor, the more (or harder) the trips to the Job Jar. Or you could just go full GURPS and make the player buy his powerful relative as a Patron advantage.
In fact, i could see translating something from old Paranoia into a campaign: all the players have patrons, some better or worse, some allied or opposed to each other; they all take an interest in whatever adventures the players go on, but may have wildly different ulterior motives.
the very first time I made a BG with family – character was a farmer that lost his wife, so during a decade with pretty bad winters, he resorted to highway robbery to feed his son. Once his son grew of age, the father left for a life of saving others to compensate for his past crimes, and would periodically return home to see how his son was doing – the very first time I went to see the character’s family the GM said the kid was dead. just like that.
Worse yet: the previous session another PC betrayed the party and I Crited him into oblivion (we were just 2nd level, but I dropped him all the way from full life to -10hp in a single Total Attack action), and this was the GM’s “brilliant” introduction for his new vampire-slaying cleric: had my character’s son turned into a vampire spaw and this cleric passes by knowing how to un-turn the kid. Yeah, the player of the vampire-slaying cleric that lost his previous character to me never mentioned anything about un-turning the kid and just killed the boy before he attacked anyone else.
the following two times I dared make a family for my character the GMs portrayed them as completely retarded morons that would fuck up their own lives just for the sake of making plot hooks.
Now they wonder why I only make effectively-orphans (either because the family died or because the character cut any ties with his family prior to adventuring).