Just started my first session two weeks ago, and I need some inspiration/examples. If you have any of those fancy 10 page long ones, the better. Any advice and help is welcome too.
B A C K S T O R I E S
Parker Price
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Jason Thompson
In my experience, the single most important part of backstory is motivation. Why is your character with the party, and what are they trying to accomplish? What's their endgame? This helps a lot in informing their actions and relations to the other characters. Naturally you should talk to GM and other players to make sure that the motivation works with the story the GM has in mind and doesn't directly conflict with other players.
Beyond that, a basic checklist:
>Motivation
>Place of Origin
>Family
>Pivotal life events
>Training
>Career
Example:
>Motivation: End the abomination that is undead
>Place of origin: Small farming village
>Family: Father was a farmer, mother was a seamstress, three siblings who each went into some form of business. Older brother took over the farm.
>Pivotal events in life: Local necromancer was using town's graveyard for raw materials. Granny was never supposed to walk again. That's pretty terrifying.
>Training: Trained under the town's priest, starting at 15. Moved to a big city to pursue a full education in the divine once the local priest ran out of stuff to teach him. Now an official cleric of their chosen deity.
>Career: Runs around solving undead-related problems.
Juan Perry
Every good back story has to begin well. Here are some examples from mine. I personally think they’re good:
>>Eli considered himself a man of virtue, a man of principles, a good man, a god fearing man, a man who knew his place in the world. Now he feared that place was gone.
>Talathel was the kind of little boy who liked to pull on little girl's pigtails.
>Benjamin Moore was born at an extremely young age.
Lucas Lopez
Those are actually pretty good.
I am shooting for a comedy relief character, more or less. Any examples specific to that?
Also, anything that comes out of my pen always sound overly dramatic going over it. Any advice about that?
Ian Price
>his characters aren't all lawless vagabonds
Why even live?
Benjamin Nelson
That 3rd example was pretty comic relief.
If you are making a comic relief character in that they are conceptually a joke, a rediculous origin cements it. One character in a Marvel game was a sorcerer's fridge being possessed by a cold spirit to save on electricity. If you are going for something more subtle (like a loveable goofball rogue) then it's a different story, of course.
Kayden Jenkins
If your character does bad things for a living like murder who ever if someone pays him then please for the love of god don't put in "But he has a heart of gold"
Fuck that shit man
Jaxson James
Different user. My favorite character played and well-received by the DM/party was a comic relief character.
His backstory was as follows.
>Son of an innkeeper family
>hears stories from traveling bards about heroes of ye olde myths
>dreams of one day being one himself
>grows into a teenager
>still just a boring innkeeper's son
>tired of it all he grabs whatever he has got and runs out the door with a letter
The way I played him was some dumb kid who, albeit had retard strength was in the end just a poser. I'd run around screaming about how I'm on the trail to an amazing quest suitable only for heroes(myself being the greatest of all).
>"I am X! Greatest hero to ever live! What do you mean you've never heard of me?!"
Things of that sort. I would give myself a random title such as "Slayer of the Elder Dragon of the Abyss" or "Kingmaker of the Fae Realm", really outlandish shit. Any time I would introduce myself to any new NPCs I would change my title and if one of the party would bring up the title change, I would look at them as if they were crazy.
The only redeeming quality my character had that made the party keep me around was my insane strength/damage, which made it entirely possible for my character to eventually become a hero.
Wyatt Martin
Enjoy the tale of Mikey McGurkle, one of my shorter lived characters, but hands down my favourite.
>Once upon a time he was a sniper, and a damn good one too.
>Served all over the middle east, both officially and otherwise
>Absolute perfectionist, driven to excel beyond any of his peers
>he only had one true friend, his gun
>left the service in his early 30's to seek greater challenges
>spent a good while as a PMC, pushing himself harder and harder to break past the limits
>until his gun failed him in a firefight rather explosively
>His arms injured, the true injury was his confidence
>can't even hold a toy gun without his hands shaking, he washed up back stateside
>drifted homeless for years, without a purpose beyond the next hit
>until the day he saw a young girl getting dragged into an alleyway, and he felt that implacable will swell up again
>he beat three trained, armed mercenaries to death with his bare hands, coming to the epiphany that you can only rely on your own strength in life
>proceeds to turn whats left of his blood money into black market beyond cutting edge "temperamental" cybernetics
>joins not!shield, REACT as someone with razor sharp focus and specialisation
>that being, the ability to turn problems into not-problems by either glaring at them for beating them with their own entrails until they stop resisting arrest
>he's not in it for the money, the "Good Fight" or any loyalty
>just to show the world that a man only "loses" when he gives up, and this old soldiers just getting started
He was min-maxes towards maximal brutally violent hand to hand combat (albeit unreliable damage output).
His one non-combat ability was to Intimidate
Highlights included punching enemies so hard they turned into a fine mist, intimidating people into being friends, outrunning vehicles, and almost getting eaten by a shogggoth after his cybernetics proved that Drawbacks actually do balance out the points they give.
Landon Cooper
One thing I've found is a good tool for developing a character is this question: What is the lie that they tell themselves?
It could be that they can quit drinking any time they want; that they're a good father; that the people they steal from have it coming and they've 'earned it' by being so disadvantaged. Maybe 'good can always triumph over evil'.
In a friend's campaign I play a stubborn but naive Paladin who truly believes that if he manages to bring down the corrupted god-empress that everything will be okay, and that he can 'unbrainwash' his two childhood friends.
In reality there's going to be lingering metaphysical damage, a power vacuum, an empire full of very upset and anxious people, and at least one of his friends has likely lost his soul forever. If the campaign plays through to its conclusion there's a very good chance that my paladin will inadvertently usher in an age of awful discord punctuated by a bloody civil war.
But he can't and won't acknowledge any of that. It's outside of his worldview and his perception of the world and of himself. And if he does realize any one of these things it'll change him.
Landon Perry
Keep it short, keep it sweet, that's my motto. Comic relief characters still needto work as characters, so don't be funny in the backstory unles it's called for. Below are the entirety of my last two backstories, not a single word omitted, and they've been pretty damn funny in practice:
> HELLO! I AM ARNULF, SON OF BJORK! I TRAVEL THE LANDS TO LEARN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SONGS, SO THAT I MAY SING THEM. NOW I AM GOING TO BREE, TO SEE A WEDDING. I SHALL SING THE COUPLE A SONG OF MY OWN MAKING. WHAT? KEEP MY VOICE DOWN , YOU SAY?
> So, Tanka the hutt thought I had potential. "Stowaway on that cruiser, you'll report everything they do to keep the spice smugglers down, otherwise momma Jawa here will have an untimely end, capisce?", he said. "Okay boss" I said. So then I went up into the galactic empire at large.
> Until they said: "What are you doing here?"
> "Utinni", I said.
> That's when I met Ronon and Mith. Mith had a ship. Ronon wanted to desert his post ."That'll be good enough for Tanka", I said.
Elijah Ross
Real advice, don't make a 10 page long backstory, nobody wants to read all that.
Backstory should cover the following things.
>Character's life before the adventure
>How the character got the skills they have at the start of the adventure
>Their motivation to go on the adventure, or what changed in their life to force them into the adventure.
Even pic-related probably wouldn't be 10 pages if it were typed out fully instead of bulletpoints, but even the bulletpoints tell me enough that I'd allow them in a game almost instantly.
Grayson Jackson
Currently playing a half-elf monk, whose backstory I'd just outlined, and am finally getting around to fully fleshing out. Started questioning myself when I got five paragraphs in and hadn't even arrived at the monastery yet, but it is what it is.
>Half-elf born into elvish community to elvish scribe/bookbinder mother and passing human adventurer who moved on before I was born
>Grow up relatively isolated and bookish because not fully accepted due to mixed heritage, develop insatiable hunger for learning
>In late teen years, having become obnoxiously passionate advocate for tolerance and acceptance, become target of radical elf supremacist movement
>They eventually burn my house down and try to lynch me, fate of my mother unknown
>I manage to escape before my execution and flee aimlessly, eventually guided by some sort of intuition/voice in my head towards a monastery devoted to Oghma, god of knowledge
>Accepted into monastic order, devote myself fully to various studies, both martial and academic
>After some years, leadership of monastery changes hands, I find the order's new direction to be at odds with both my personal beliefs and Oghma's will
>Decide to leave and undergo spiritual journey, spend about a year wandering the land, in time reaching vast desert
>Cue campaign
That's basically the outline, but in full it encompasses my character's motivations and personality traits as well as the more obvious things like class and alignment. In addition, it presents potential future story hooks (mother's unknown fate, elf Nazis, etc.) for the DAM to use. These are all important facets that you can use to really help enrich the setting and narrative of a given campaign.
Anthony Wilson
Currently playing an awakaned, sentient golem (DM's homebrewed race, one of many). He was built to fight, has ridiculously high STR and CON, levels in Fighter class, yada yada, but ultimately he's more concerned about philosophy and issues of "how do I know reality is not an illusion" and such. Mostly researched Descartes since he was a mathematician and that seems to fit a machine's way of thinking.
Oliver Kelly
This. The most relevant part of a character is their behavior during the actual game. Backstory sets a foundation for who they are and gives you a chance to learn who they are before play, it's not an important piece of literature.
Owen Stewart
Lincoln Collins
You should generate a character and backstory with the fllowing 6 questions:
1-When was the character born?
2-Who are the parents?
3-Are they alive and are there more?
4-Why leave your former life at all?
5-What did you leave behind?
6-What does your character want?
John Garcia
All characters have:
-Motivations that pushes them forward. May be less or more buried.
-Goals. That the character belief or feels will satisfy such motivation.
-Method to reach such goals.
-A way to judge or guess how close they are to the goal.
Nathan Sanchez
Past.
Relationships.
Social Obligations.
Motivations.
Sensibilities.
Cooper Jackson
How the fuck is that remotely Old Man Henderson?
Leo Brooks
I need help writing a backstory for John Cena, all I have right now is that he is an elementary school dropout to explain his 4 INT. All he knows is how to sign his own signature.
Aiden Garcia
Backstories are more often than not pointless. The first few sessions are your backstory.
Gavin Clark
Oh, the no backstory guy is back