(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
For my Dark Sun campaign, I told my players I didn't want "reluctant heroes" or "shopkeepers who want to adventure" and along those lines. However, they picked many of the themes, their starting goals, and so forth. This was decided by email list before the first game.
They ended up being a band of 30 escaped slaves, which turned out to be really handy because one player keeps switching out characters but there's still plenty of ex-slaves left. (Also, they rescued a tribe of first generation dray, which are statted as dragonborn, several sessions ago. Until then, I'd banned dragonborn for flavor reasons.)
In the first session, they stole an understaffed and illicit iron caravan from Tyr (the city's sorcerer-king hadn't yet fallen, but they'd cut off the iron trade; of course, this raised the price so corrupt merchants would bribe templars to get caravans out). They ended up with a huge quantity of valuable iron, but ... selling it was actually more trouble than it was worth. The term "white elephant" came up a lot
. They turned the iron into something of a line of credit with the dwarf town of Ledopulos and found a super-convenient oasis, which they often have to defend. And that was the first three sessions.They settled on keeping this outpost of ex-slaves alive in an otherwise hostile desert, occasionally going forth to seek information, power, or whatever hooks the group might be interested in. They're currently carrying an avangion's cocoon. Naturally, it's utterly useless at the moment, but they're expecting big favors, if they survive.
