The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide Read online

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  Contents

  Introduction

  What Can We Accomplish?

  FOR PLAYER CHARATERS

  LEVELS 1-7

  Humble Beginnings

  Idioms

  Save the Cat

  Holidays

  What Gets Left Behind

  Beanstalk

  Five Lessons

  Ventur

  My Associates

  Across a Crowded Tavern

  Orphan Details

  What Can You Do for Me?

  A Matter of Status

  What Drives You Forward?

  Where I’m From

  Finders Keepers

  Well Worn

  Five Things You Packed but Shouldn’t Have

  Of the Cloth

  Five Fears

  What Does It Mean to Be . . . ?

  Private Mysteries

  Prophecy Half-Remembered

  On the Line

  Red Flags

  Damn Merlinials

  Rival

  The Taming of the Wolverine

  My Grimoire

  Familiar, but Not Too Familiar

  A Touch of Home

  Vision of the Future

  Mentor

  Magic Mirrors

  Visualizing Intellect

  FOR PLAYER CHARATERS

  LEVELS 8-14

  Veteran Heroes

  Five Scars

  Wed, Bed, or Behead

  The One That Got Away

  Never Have I Ever . . .

  Last Will

  My Friends

  I Know You from Somewhere

  Five Things You Can’t Throw Away

  These Things Rarely Work Out

  A Traveler’s Taste

  I’ve Heard Stories about These

  Cursed

  We Clean Up Well

  Song of Folly

  Old Haunts

  Atonement

  Wanted

  It’s More Than Personal

  Movements of a Master

  Campfire

  Hero’s Best Friend

  Unheard Confession

  A Taste of Death

  Conquered Fear

  Getting to Know You

  A Show of Force

  Five Times Your Name Was Cursed

  Mountains and Molehills

  Life Goes On

  In the Eye of My Enemy

  Irrational Taste

  Fish Story

  You Have No Idea

  The Gauntlet

  Honey Pot

  Trusty Steed

  FOR PLAYER CHARATERS

  LEVELS 15-20

  Myths and Legends

  Towers of Terror

  Monuments

  Classifying Villains

  Home Heraldry

  “It Is My Distinct Pleasure to Announce . . . ”

  God, No

  Five Commandments

  Pocket Dimension

  For the Myth That Has Everything

  Inventory

  Art of Facts

  Terror of Wisdom

  A Cutlass Carol

  Private Secrets

  It Sounds Good on Paper

  I Knew Them Well

  Alive Only in Memory

  Collecting Dust

  Sign of a Legend

  Hobby

  Five Lives

  You Made It Weird

  In the Eyes of Mortals

  Hangover

  Apprentice

  Five Enemies

  Impossible Trial

  Not Looking to Get Merlined

  Crisis of Faith

  Your Kind of King

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Sitting around a table with your friends, rolling dice and cross-checking charts, slaying monsters and looting treasure hoards, you know the fun, the creative joy, of playing role-playing games. You may have slain your first goblin while playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), but these days there are dozens of RPGs in a variety of settings.

  Whether your player character (PC) is prowling around a moldy dungeon in search of gold or battling a crowd of orcs on a bridge that spans a bottomless abyss, a lot of the fun of RPGs comes from how your character reacts to any given challenge. This book will help you explore this dimension of gaming.

  How your PC handles a problem depends on what shaped the character into who she or he is. In these pages you’ll find exercises that will challenge you to create a richer past for the hero you’ve brought to life.

  You can complete most of these exercises on your own. Others might be more fun to do with your gaming buddies. Some exercises are crafted with specific character types in mind. (For example, Orphan Details is geared toward characters who are orphans.) There is no particular order to these activities, and you should feel free to hop around the book to find the activities best suited to your character. To make hunting a little easier, this book is divided into three sections for low-, middle-, and high-level characters.

  Choose your answer from the options listed

  Roll a six-sided die (d6), a ten-sided die (d10), or a twenty-sided die (d20) for an auto-generated answer

  Write your answer out

  Many of the exercises in this book will address your character as “you” the way a game master might. Whenever the book is asking about physical qualities or background details, we’re talking about characters and not you, the reader. So get started! You’ve got a character to create and worlds to explore!

  What Can We Accomplish?

  With all the possibilities a fantasy world contains, you may find it difficult to determine what challenges you should take on. All too often heroes shy from challenges beneath their capability or charge headlong into situations they are not prepared for. Following is a guide that provides a rough idea of what you should be able to accomplish. It is possible for powerful characters to be unlucky and make mistakes or for weaker characters to be prudent and fortunate, but generally, this list will provide you with a starting point for your level.

  LEVELS 1–5

  • Survive a relatively unlucky day

  • Survive an encounter with a fairly dangerous animal

  • Win a bar fight

  • Hunt a large nonmagical beast

  • Fend off a coordinated bandit attack

  LEVELS 6–10

  • Compete in a gladiatorial arena

  • Hold off a squad of trained soldiers

  • Defeat a giant monster terrorizing a community

  • Unseat a corrupt governor

  • Recover an ancient and powerful secret

  • Match wits with a deviously intelligent monster

  LEVELS 11–15

  • Become a champion in a massive competition

  • Have your actions declared miraculous

  • Avert a natural disaster

  • Unseat a powerful tyrant

  LEVELS 16–19

  • Seal an ancient evil

  • Battle an army with a small party

  • Settle a cosmic dispute

  • Destroy an interplanar threat

  LEVEL 20

  • Defy a god

  FOR P
LAYER CHARACTERS

  LEVELS 1–7

  Humble Beginnings

  1 Idioms

  This is a fantasy idiom generator.

  2 Save the Cat

  This will help you determine your character’s alignment based on the level of personal risk he or she is willing to take to save a cat.

  3 Holidays

  In the place you grew up, there was an annual celebration that stuck with you. No matter where you are, you try to introduce this custom to the people you are with. This uses random tables and fill-in-the-blanks to create a wild holiday and determine how people react to it.

  4 What Gets Left Behind

  In setting out to adventure, your character abandoned things. These bittersweet prompts will create objects that your character put down, never to touch again.

  5 Beanstalk

  Through foolishness, carelessness, weakness, or some combination of the three, your character has lost your party’s fortune to a swindler. This will help readers form a picture of how their characters react to an unavoidable social crisis.

  6 Five Lessons

  Your character learned five lessons he or she carries on the road and into dungeons. Some have saved his or her life; others have put him or her in danger; all of them make your character a hero. This provides a framework for ideology and behavior.

  7 Ventur

  Picture an app that helps adventuring parties find one another. This is a list of hero profiles. Whom do you swipe right?

  8 My Associates

  An inventory of surface-level thoughts about the group your character travels with. Questions that will guide readers to think about the other characters at their table.

  9 Across a Crowded Tavern

  Inns tend to have at least one cloaked figure seated in a dark corner looking to offer a job to the right heroes. What would one of these people notice about your character?

  10 Orphan Details

  Many heroes are motivated by tragedy, but without compelling details, those stories tend to run together. This exercise helps readers add evocative detail to clichéd tragic backstories.

  11 What Can You Do for Me?

  A guide to defining what your character wants from his or her companions.

  12 A Matter of Status

  Learn the concept of status within a scene and how you can move it about. Create modifiers to help people abstract your character’s social status.

  13 What Drives You Forward?

  An exercise to help develop the ways in which your core motivations spur your decisions.

  14 Where I’m From

  Create a snapshot of where you came from and your life there.

  15 Finders Keepers

  Your character happens upon the body of a fallen adventurer. How do you handle the situation? A flowchart game that asks players to make tough moral decisions and decide what they owe a stranger.

  16 Well Worn

  The objects carried by heroes are tools as well as a form of self-expression. This exercise helps you further define your look by adding a wealth of small details to your equipment.

  17 Five Things You Packed but Shouldn’t Have

  What five things does an inexperienced adventurer take with him or her?

  18 Of the Cloth

  Charts to help players visualize different ways to play a character whose religion is a major theme.

  19 Five Fears

  At this point in your career you are vulnerable and know little of the world. What fears has that led you to carry?

  20 What Does It Mean to Be . . . ?

  This exercise will help you construct an identity based on your character’s race. You can play into it or against it.

  21 Private Mysteries

  This exercise invites you to focus on a detail about your game world and learn more about it over the course of play.

  22 Prophecy Half-Remembered

  An exercise to help you generate a prophecy known by or about your character.

  23 On the Line

  This exercise guides you through a memory of the first time your character risked her or his life for something.

  24 Red Flags

  At what point does your character decide a job is too much trouble?

  25 Damn Merlinials

  What complaints do older generations of adventurers make about heroes your age?

  26 Rival

  Create a foil for your character, someone to clash or compete with.

  27 The Taming of the Wolverine

  How should you play a rebellious antisocial character in a game that calls for collaboration?

  28 My Grimoire

  An exercise to add personal detail to your spell book.

  29 Familiar, but Not Too Familiar

  Familiars and animal companions all too often get left out of the game. This exercise will add quirks and personality to your animal friends to give them a shot at longevity.

  30 A Touch of Home

  Staying at inns can feel exhausting. What do you do to make strange rooms feel like yours?

  31 Vision of the Future

  You are visited by a version of yourself from the future. Prompts for humorous self-reflection.

  32 Mentor

  Create a mentor for your character: reputation, relationship, resources, skills, accessibility. Assign priorities.

  33 Magic Mirrors

  One of the most insidious magical devices is the magic mirror. It whispers lies and truths that beguile heroes and lead them astray. What will it try to tell you?

  34 Visualizing Intellect

  There is more than one flavor of smart character. Creating a visual guide to your approach to intelligence can help you diversify your playstyle and keep characters feeling fresh even when they have the same stats.

  1 Idioms

  A great way to make a world feel lived in is to find a unique way for your character to speak. Idioms are a perfect new way to communicate without totally reinventing language. Roll a d6 for details and pick appropriate connecting words to create commonsense phrases that exist in a world unlike our own. Then work the phrases into your character’s everyday conversation.

  Choose one of the following words or roll on the profession or monster table to start your idiom:

  YOU/MAGIC/GOLD/BLOOD

  1 can’t find . . .

  2 shouldn’t count . . .

  3 spent . . .

  4 might lose . . .

  5 won’t . . .

  6 can’t make . . .

  A RAGING . . ./PLEASE A . . ./ON A . . ./A FOOLISH . . ./A . . ./ . . .

  Professions

  1 Wizard

  2 King

  3 Princess

  4 Jester

  5 Thief

  6 Peasant

  Monsters

  1 Dragon

  2 Vampire

  3 Owlbear

  4 Observer

  5 Mind Tyrant

  6 Mimic

  Riches

  1 Gold

  2 Blood

  3 Faith

  4 Happiness

  5 Love

  6 Health

  . . ./WITHOUT . . ./FOR . . ./ENDS WITH . . ./IN . . .

  Conditions

  1 with a dwarf

  2 over a barrel

  3 with one arm

  4 dancing alone

  5 trusting a stranger

  6 between the sheets

  Actions

  1 digging a grave

  2 swinging a sword

  3 holding your nose

  4 tilling a field

  5 lugging a pack

  6 climbing a mountain

  Results

  1 getting you killed

  2 getting you paid

  3 suffering a god

  4 going broke

  5 losing your way

  6 finding a dragon’s horde

  Places

  1 a river to drink

  2 the deepest mine
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  3 the darkest dungeon

  4 an aging castle

  5 under the stars

  6 hell’s black gates

  2 Save the Cat

  Alignment can be tricky. Saying a character is good, evil, or neutral leaves so much undefined. This chart will help you navigate those shades of gray based on what your character would be willing to do for a cat stuck in a tree.

  Choose where your character might fall based on what he or she would or would not do:

  Evil Actions

  Set the tree on fire.

  Throw a rock at the cat.

  Save the cat and use the story to get elected to a political office that will allow you to close the city’s animal shelters, forcing thousands of feral cats to take residence in trees.

  Bind the cat’s spirit to the tree, making it a vengeful guardian of the very tree that imprisoned it.

  Build a series of deadly traps around the tree to kill any potential rescuers.

  Use magic to conceal the tree so the cat never gets rescued.

  Convince a child to save the cat, injuring both in the process.

  Grumpily wonder if anyone would rescue you if you got stuck in a tree.

  Neutral Actions

  Feel guilty that you don’t have time to help the cat.

  Wonder aloud, “Hey, whose cat?”

  Say, “Hey, cat! Get down here!” Shrug. Walk away.

  Defensively justify to the cat why you can’t save it right now as it watches you with anxious disinterest.

  Sit watching the cat until it gets down safely on its own. Feel relieved that everything worked out okay.

  Good Actions

  Find a ladder to rescue the cat.

  Rescue the cat.

  Rescue the cat. Form a deep emotional bond with it as you nurse it back to health. Adopt it.

  Battle the horde of undead terrors who chased the cat into the tree.

  Evade the wild dogs that chased the cat into the tree. Rescue the cat.

  Evade the wild dogs that chased the cat into the tree. Rescue the cat. Train the wild dogs to be emotional support animals.

  Free-climb forty feet into a thorny tree to rescue the cat.

  3 Holidays

  Where you come from, people celebrate a holiday not observed in other parts of the world. The coming of that day reminds you of home, but it is also something of an obligation. This exercise will help you create the structure of an unusual holiday you celebrate.