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Message: <blockquote data-quote="reanjr" data-source="post: 2921884" data-attributes="member: 20740">In my current campaign, three of the characters (human cleric, human bard, gnome rogue) started out by living in the same city.  Two of those had backgrounds that meshed together.  The gnome rogue had moved in with the bard's extended family after leaving her home and the two worked together as freedom fighter/assassins.Two additional characters (human druid, human fighter) met up recently (out of game), the fighter fleeing the country after his having relations with his commanding officer's wife and being marked for death, the other having left his family for dead after they persecuted him for joining a nature cult.  They end up traveling down river and ending up in the city the others lived in.The church the cleric is a member of has multiple sects that disagree and act somewhat autonomously.  So I had the assassins (bard and rogue) hired by one sect and followed by the cleric to make sure they did the job and did not notify the authorities.  I had the druid and fighter, as outcasts likely to leave the city soon, hired by another sect to do the same job.This may not work as well for other DMs who plan things out more, but I wanted to do an adventure based around wererats.  Given the characters' backgrounds (two of them assassins) I figured a simple job to kill a wererat would suffice.  Snowballing that in with the cleric was easy, as I just made the cleric's boss hire the assassins.  With the druid's background of nature cultist, and the fighter's vague background of ex-military, I worked with them to flesh their backgrounds out, having them fleeing the militaristic nation to the north.  This is when the druid decided that his family had turned against him, and the fighter decided on the carnal transgression.You just have to take the existing backgrounds and start to permute them in various ways and see how they can fit.  This works out really well for my group, but DMs that allow a Half-Fiend Wereturtle Warlock from Elysium working with a Pseudonatural Hyper-Intelligent Shade of Blue Cerulean Caller are probably going to have a more difficult time of fitting things together.  If this is the case, try patronage or initial conflict of interest (both used in my example, in addition to background meshing) to get them working towards the same goals (even if it's at each other's throats)</blockquote>

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