Best Character backstories/protrayal in a long-term campaign

[Jd Smith1]

Another thread got me thinking about this. I'm 'meh' about non-Human races because a few sessions into a campaign they're virtually indistinguishable from Human PCs.

What I enjoy seeing, and reward lavishly, are PC backgrounds which are portrayed, and impact, the entirely of a long campaign (say 30+ sessions).

Here are four that have cropped up at my table over the years:

A 6' 3" Human in a War Hammer campaign who, because of a traumatic brain injury (pre-game), believed he was a Dwarf, and continually strove to locate 'his' clan and family, interacting with real Dwarves at every opportunity, no matter how small.

A Windling bard in a fantasy setting (12" high winged fairy) who had what amounted to ADD and an aversion to violence. He was utterly useless at everything, and got into everything.

A Chinese cook in a setting taking place in an alternative history occult setting where the Mexican Revolution got underway in 1889. The party, other than him, were hardened gunmen out to make a buck off the troubles in Mexico.

A noble in a Fading Suns who took looking down on peasants as lower beings to a truly epic degree.

 

[Shiroiken]

The best of mine was a Gold Elf from Evermeet (in the Forgotten Realms) who's family was disgraced. His father was a powerful high mage who helped power the defenses and my mother was a druid who tended to the land. My elder brother and sister, however, sided with a renegade elf to attack Evermeet, distracting my parents to bypass the defenses. The attack was eventually repelled, but my mother was killed and my father became withdrawn. I vowed to redeem my family name, and sailed to the mainland with my friend and bodyguard (another PC).

Over the course of the campaign, we found that my brother had allied with the Fayrie (demon elves, possibly misspelled). They attempted to seduce me as well, and almost succeeded, since they had the rest of the party captured and were torturing them until I agreed. We managed to escape, but I never forgave myself for leading the party into that trap. Eventually when we faced them again, much later in the campaign (they'd allied with the Shadowvar, the other major threat in the campaign), I was forced to face my brother's daughter, deciding if I could kill her. I couldn't, almost dying, but my bodyguard was able to finish her off instead.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Heh- I’ve burned a LOT of great backgrounds on campaigns that cratered in weeks or months. Some that didn’t:

I had a drow MU/TH that believed it was an Android from another dimension, that had been programmed to perform the role of a Drow MU/TH in a competitive LARP game- think of the original Westworld or Dream Park. While the campaign lasted a while, the truth was never revealed.

Alien gladiatrix who won her freedom, found Earth, and turned superhero. She had to eat her normal body mass in food daily in order to power her super abilities. But because of her alien biology, she also sometimes had adverse reactions to terrestrial food.

A superhero in power armor whose main arsenal was designed around taking down other power armor goons, AIs, robots, Androids, cyborgs, etc., with a side dish of crowd control. He was extremely concerned-almost paranoid- that mechanical intelligences should never dominate humanity, He was so paranoid, in fact, that he intentionally built his suit to be difficult to use by anyone unfamiliar with the unique programming language he himself had created for the project.

A Diviner/Ranger/Spellsword based on Indiana Jones, used a whip and Shortsword for TWF. Because the 2 players in the campaign running healers moved out of state, this character was retired @9th level or so, in favor of...

A Cleric/Sorcerer/Geomancer based mainly on DC’s Vertigo-era Swamp Thing. His devotion to slo things green had been rewarded with becoming increasingly plantlike- all of his Geomancer Drift mutations w of the floral variety.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

.

 

[Blue]

Another thread got me thinking about this. I'm 'meh' about non-Human races because a few sessions into a campaign they're virtually indistinguishable from Human PCs.

Dang, what are the players doing? Are they just picking for ability bonuses/features and not giving any thought to how to RP the race they chose so it just defaults to generic personalities?

I've seen some half-elves seem human, but generally race is a large component in the personality and RP of the character.

Sorry, that must have triggered a nerve. I know that race is one of the big touchstones when I do personalities, either as player or DM.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Dang, what are the players doing? Are they just picking for ability bonuses/features and not giving any thought to how to RP the race they chose so it just defaults to generic personalities?

I've seen some half-elves seem human, but generally race is a large component in the personality and RP of the character.

Sorry, that must have triggered a nerve. I know that race is one of the big touchstones when I do personalities, either as player or DM.

LIke I said, I'm sure that the player thinks his or her depiction is amazing, but the reality is its just another bad accent and off-the-cuff wit.

 

[Umbran]

So, for a three year live-action campaign, I was playing a mechanic/engineer from a post-apocalyptic world (it was a sort of shattered-many-worlds game). I had figured out the role I wanted to play in the group, the character's basic personality, skill set and all, but I needed a backstory. This game generally used backstory to drive plot, but I just didn't have a great idea.

So, last day of character submission, I just filed all the serial numbers off King Arthur, changed the names and setting, but kept the basic plotline. And, the actual campaign started effectively after Arthur is sent to Avalon - he heals up and the game is the next phase of his life.

And for two years, just being one of the top engineers and science characters in the game gave me far more than enough to do. None of the writers touched my backstory. And, by that time the game had moved so far away from the origins, that I figured none of that mattered, and that was fine. I was busy.

Then, in the third year, came up a bunch of scenarios I was sent on that I didn't really understand why. I spend a large part of that year of campaign uncovering the Caliber-X, a high-tech weapon encoded to my character's DNA, that we eventually built into the defense systems for the symbolic city the sixty-plus PCs were building to be the cornerstone for the system that would bind the shattered world together.

The whole business raised the possibility that my character was his own ancestor - that a future-me built the weapon and sent it back to myself, but that was a question that never got answered.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So, for a three year live-action campaign, I was playing a mechanic/engineer from a post-apocalyptic world (it was a sort of shattered-many-worlds game). I had figured out the role I wanted to play in the group, the character's basic personality, skill set and all, but I needed a backstory. This game generally used backstory to drive plot, but I just didn't have a great idea.

So, last day of character submission, I just filed all the serial numbers off King Arthur, changed the names and setting, but kept the basic plotline. And, the actual campaign started effectively after Arthur is sent to Avalon - he heals up and the game is the next phase of his life.

And for two years, just being one of the top engineers and science characters in the game gave me far more than enough to do. None of the writers touched my backstory. And, by that time the game had moved so far away from the origins, that I figured none of that mattered, and that was fine. I was busy.

Then, in the third year, came up a bunch of scenarios I was sent on that I didn't really understand why. I spend a large part of that year of campaign uncovering the Caliber-X, a high-tech weapon encoded to my character's DNA, that we eventually built into the defense systems for the symbolic city the sixty-plus PCs were building to be the cornerstone for the system that would bind the shattered world together.

The whole business raised the possibility that my character was his own ancestor - that a future-me built the weapon and sent it back to myself, but that was a question that never got answered.

He is the One! Foretold in myth and song!

 

[Lanefan]

One that came up in my current campaign was an otherwise-typical Thief who had two things going for (against) him.

One was that he was constitutionally incapable of uttering two sentences to anyone without saying something offensive or insulting (this to explain his awful Cha score - 6 I think). This included the parties he ran with, to the point that they'd generally end up ignoring anything he said or suggested even when his point or idea was later found to be completely correct.

The other is that at some point he decided he was going to try to ascend himself to divinity, pretty much by simply declaring it so and hoping for the best. He chose fashion as his domain, wrote his own holy book, and started proselytizing at every opportunity during downtime in whatever town or settlement the party was in. Unfortunately said proselytizing usually consisted of telling people how awful their style was (insulting them in the process, of course) and how it needed improvement that could be best achieved by conversion to his faith.

Amazingly, and very much against the odds, he even managed to acquire one - count 'em! - worshipper. True to form, however, he managed to so abuse this poor worshipper that the worship didn't last...

Wrapped around all this he managed to bang together a decent - and marvelously entertaining! - adventuring career before sailing off into the sunset.

 

[Umbran]

He is the One! Foretold in myth and song!

Yeah. It gets better. As far as is known, the weapon was made by one of the first "technomages" in the setting. Same guy's also credited with having invented the nano-technology that enabled the technomages to reach far greater heights of accomplishment - the shattered universe could not have been stitched back together without them.

It is now some... ten years since that campaign ended. A couple of the original writers are writing a one-shot reunion sort of game. If the character, or one of his descendants, created that technology... and my character as yet has not yet created it or had children... what happens if he dies? Is he effectively incapable of dying, because causality requires things to happen, or does the universe fall apart if he gets killed without fulfilling the future history?

In game terms, I, the player, know (?) the character is not invulnerable, and they won't make the universe fall apart just based on me. That'd be silly. However, the question is whether the character, or anyone else, will think that. I am half-hoping for an in game moment for using a rant on this with an aggressor as a heck of an intimidate/stall for someone else to get into position... "Do you know who I am? If you shoot me, maybe the universe unravels! Maybe history gets rewritten so you never get born! Do you want to take that chance? Do you feel lucky...?"