Integrating Player Character Backstories

I started running Vaesen with one of my RPG groups recently and, while overall the support for GMs in the core book is not bad, there was one area where it seemed very poor. Each Player Character has a Dark Secret that complicates their life. There are some prompts to help players come up with their Dark Secret, but after that the book basically tells them not to worry about it, and the GM will work it into the game. In this 200 page book there is a short paragraph on 'Dark Secrets in Play', giving some very general advice that doesn't get far past the concept of "yeah, you should have the Dark Secrets come up during play". Not terribly helpful.

D&D 5E has this same problem. Players are encouraged to come up with a Backstory and to "work with the DM" so that it can be worked into the game. But there's not much support for the DM as to how they're actually supposed to do that. I've always found it tricky. Sometimes there are obvious ways to make it work, but as soon as you're having to introduce new elements (characters, places, things or events) it can start to clutter up the game, slowing progress and killing momentum.

But the promise of a PC's backstory coming up has so much potential - when it works it really works. Players are so much more engaged and it truly takes the game farther in the direction of collaborative storytelling. So how can we as GMs fix this?

The way that Myths work in Mythic Bastionland is that each Myth has 6 Omens. These take the place of Wilderness Encounters: Whenever something would happen, you don't roll for a Random Encounter, you encounter the next Omen of the nearest Myth. It allows the Myths to play out organically, but still in a satisfying arc because you're encountering them in order. It's a really flexible system, and in play feels a bit like the NPC questlines in a Souls game. I think this would be a great engine to drive PC backstory arcs.

I'm going to use the Backgrounds from the 2014 Player's Handbook to quickly pull together a backstory for an random example Character: A sorceror named Reena, who is a Forest Gnome with the Hermit background.

She lived in seclusion as the caretaker of an ancient ruin or relic. Her Ideal is Free Thinking (believing that inquiry and curiosity are the pillars of enlightenment). Her Bond is that she entered seclusion to escape from the ones who might still be hunting her, whom she must someday confront. Her Flaw is that now she has returned to the world, she enjoys its delights a little too much.

The 2024 backgrounds are great but wow, I really miss these background tables from the 2014 PHB!

We've got a Character on the run from a group she must someday confront. If this were a real Player Character, I'd be inviting the player to tell me a little about who that could be but for this example I'm going to generate a Cult from Sly Flourish's Lazy DM's Companion. So Reena is on the run from The Paper Masks : A wasp-worshipping cult who serve The Yellow Queen. So maybe Reena's sorcerous origin is linked to this cult. Whatever the reason, it sounds like a confrontation with them would be the climax of this arc. So the Omens might be something like this:

1. A faint buzzing can be heard, only by Reena. It sounds close, but there's nothing there. 
2. A traveller, dead at the side of the road. Huge welts cover their skin, they were stung to death by giant wasps.
3. A village fayre, in lively celebration of The Yellow Queen, who has provided a great feast in exchange for their subservience.
4. A faint buzzing, heard by all, getting louder as a group of giant wasps attack.
5. A ruin conceals a terrified pair of scriveners, who have escaped The Yellow Queen's palace.
6. Paper Mask assassins now hunt the party. They try to remain hidden until an opportune moment to strike. Their target is Reena.

Knowing the end point and working backwards was helpful. I looked back to the backstory for inspiration, and tried to have each Omen do at least of the following:

• Challenge an Ideal
• Test a Bond
• Provoke a Flaw

I think there's some potential here for a procedure for integrating character backstories naturally into the game!

That's it for now, till next time!

Tabletop Scotland 2026

Our third year at Tabletop Scotland! In previous years we've attended all three days, this year we went for the Saturday only and wow: There's a lot to see when you only have a day to get round everything! Plus I was actually running a game this year so, really, we only had about half a day to find our favourite new games. So it was a very different vibe to previous years where we've taken our time to try and see everything, not been too fussed about a long wait for food or a queue for the toilets, etc. But we still managed to find some cool stuff!

Lo! Thy Dread Empire, by Tanya Floaker is a narrative wargame and tactical RPG with a killer tagline: "The Skeleton War against The Death Cult of Capitalism". The grimdark artwork by Julia Nevalainen is incredible and the text of the game is uncompromising, angry, and funny. When I picked up the book Tanya briefly explained to me that the game contains a ruleset that allows you to run large-scale pitched battle combats in your RPGs. It does contain this. It does a great job of this. But that's burying the lead. For me the juice of this book is the second half, detailing the Factions of the game's assumed setting in which Capitalism has progressed to its natural conclusion and literally destroyed every living thing, leaving only the dead to fight back. These are just excellent, and I love this book!

I also picked up the extremely cursed book Spine by Backwards Tabletop, which I've not delved into yet but really looking forward to. I honestly can't remember where I first heard about this game, it could have been the Yes Indie'd podcast, maybe Dice Exploder, maybe Bastionland, who knows? Maybe I've always known about it...

Natalie and I went in together on Elements of Power by Heartborn Studios. We bought Escape from Tibbles Tower from them last year, which was great fun, and had since picked up their Flippin' Dinosaurs game. Elements of Power is a skirmish game where each side takes control of 3 or 4 unique 'hero' type minis and battle it out. You can use any minis for it, but the starter box comes with its own, so I'm looking forward to painting them up and playing this with Natalie.

Also: I ran a game! This was my first time running a convention game, so I was a bit nervous in the couple of hours before. But I'd done plenty of prep, including subjecting my regular gaming group to a practice game (thank you so much again if any of you are reading this!), and I was really excited for the chance to run Mythic Bastionland again. 

About the game itself, there's some great advice on the Bastionland blog for running Mythic Bastionland one-shots but the myth I was most keen to run for this game was The Tournament: Which sees a Tinkerer turning up to challenge the Knights of the Realm against a company of clockwork Knights of his own creation. As written, the myth would see the knights being called back from their questing every so often to compete in the next round of The Tournament, which would work great in a longer game with several sessions, less so for the one-shot. So I decided to compress it down into a three-day event, add some more activities inspired by Old Man Lucy's Tournaments for Mythic Bastionland, add a bit of intrigue between the other competitors, and set the whole thing within the Tournament festival grounds. I was a little bit concerned that my players might be disappointed at being denied the full hex-crawling experience, and I would've argued that drama within Holdings is just as big a part of the game as wandering round the wilderness bumping into myths, but I didn't have to. They had a blast squaring off against the Clockwork Knights, sabotaging their shifty creator, and digging into the courtly drama. My players were great as well (thanks to any of you that might be reading!), none of them had played before so they were all excited to get into the role of their knights, and they engaged with the material generously. 

So overall the game went well and I was glad I gave running a convention game a go! I'd say something I'd encountered before when running Mythic Bastionland that I ran into again for this game is that I definitely struggle with the arithmetic of dealing damage between Guard and Vigour and subtracting Armour. It sounds simple but at the table I find it fiddly. I think my brain just prefers adding things than subtracting them, haha!

That's all for now, till next time!