Your world can sometimes be your baby. You made it, after all, and you may have already poured hours of work into developing it. You know how it works, and more importantly how it doesn’t. This can be a good or a bad thing. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be looking at ways to prepare your world for contact with the party (which is most certainly NOT the enemy).
Today the focus is the backstory. For your world, there is either a long or short series of events that led your party to the current predicament or enemy they are facing. To some extent, this is written in the history of your world. However, as we’ve said before, you aren’t the only one at the table. You’re making a world for your players to play in and enjoy. If your world isn’t flexible enough to hold the stories your players will create, then you should write a book and buy an adventure to run.
Now, this doesn’t mean that what you have to say isn’t important, the players are coming to you to do a lot of heavy lifting story-wise, but you have to roll with the punches when it comes to their thoughts and storytelling. Next week, we’ll take a shot at what to do when flexibility is demanded at the table, today we’re looking at how you can incorporate the stories of your players into your world before they even roll a die.
James is playing a gnome. He really wants to be an artificer-y type of character but he also wants to be one of the first ones in this world (pre-Eberron rulebook). He wants to come from a group of gnomes who are living under an evil dictator but have a prophecy, “one day the Iron Gnome will come and set us free!”
Cassie wants to play a tiefling. She wants to have been scorned by her family and left on the doorstep of a religious organization. She is a follower of an ancient faith in a world that might see her as touched by evil. She wants to prove them all wrong and show how a person makes her own destiny.
Don is playing a human barbarian who was pressed into becoming a sailor. He really wants to buy his own vessel and sail the seas looking for the pirate who sunk his first ship and killed his first captain.
These aren’t long backstories (trust me) but they give us some amazing story points. Every single one of these characters has a motivation for why they are adventuring in the wild world, and they all have goals they want to accomplish. Sometimes we can get bogged down in the sheets and the math and forget that our characters are here living lives with their own hopes and dreams. Encourage your players to ask themselves what their characters goals are. What would cause them to be happy or content enough to stop adventuring? What have they lost and what are they running from.
So, once we have the backstories, let’s find ways to incorporate them. Our lobster cult from a few weeks ago is the most pressing issue to our characters at the moment. But how can we engage our characters through their backstories? Don has sailing skills to help the party access the surrounding coastline and Cassie can use her title as a priest to reach out to the local religious orders. These are small steps, using only the features that come from the background section of the character sheet, but you’re already expanding these characters in the story; making them more than just their swords or their spells.
In the grand scheme of things, James needs to encounter (or become) the Iron Gnome of his legend. Cassie should have a storyline that focuses on her parentage and perhaps has her making some great advancement for her deity. And please, please, please give Don a boat! These bits and pieces of story lead to great memories at the table. They’ll forget all about the damage they rolled and the number of monsters they slew, but Don will always remember how he and his crew hunted down that yellow-bellied pirate and cast him into the locker!
Like I said, we’ll be exploring even more ways to engage your players and let them write their own stories in your world over the next few weeks. Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or question here or on our Facebook page! We’d love to engage with you and talk more about this great hobby!
Until next time, keep on rolling!
-Dalton
