3.3 Group Story Seed

The group story seed is created by all players (except for the GM) for their group of PCs. It is an event that changes the circumstances of the group and keeps them together. It can be a simple mundane thing (our group of elite soldiers was just given a new commanding officer, and we don’t trust him), a mystery (we all woke up with matching crimson tattoos on the back of our necks), a disaster (the organization that protected our identity and allowed us to live a normal life was just wiped out), or anything that the group as a whole needs to address together.

Use this as a tool to make sure the group has a good reason to stick together and find common ground to act upon. Usually this seed is created before the characters, so that you can create the PCs to fit into the seed. But you can also create it afterwards, which requires some tinkering and a willingness of each player to alter their PCs a bit to make it all fit.

The group story seed works as the “crucible” for the PCs. It is the reason they stick together even if they have diverging interests or have personality issues with each other (which makes for good dramatic roleplaying during character scenes). The stronger the seed is, the more the PCs can struggle within it (all in good fun, of course). Examples for strong group story seeds often have one or more of the following ingredients:

• The PCs share a powerful enemy that they each can’t defeat on their own. They are either actively hunting the enemy or vice versa.
• An opportunity for gaining something the PCs desperately want or need has sprung up, and they can only get it together.
• The PCs are together in a situation from which they cannot escape, either because they are physically constrained or because their personalities won’t let them back off.
• A higher authority has called upon the PCs and ordered them to work together. This requires either a very strong sense of duty on the side of the PCs, or an authority that severely punishes insubordination. Great stories can come out of eventually breaking free from the authority together.
• The PCs are tied together through near-unbreakable relationships. Family relations, love, honor, duty, debt, or something along those lines.

When your group story seed comes to a close, such as when the PCs escape their situation or defeat their common enemy, you should all consider together whether you want to make a new one with the existing characters or just start over with a new group of PCs. Sometimes their shared experiences will keep the characters together from hereon out, and they can help each other with their character story seeds. But other times you’ll need something new to keep them together, and that new group story seed needs to be developed by the PC players as before. You can always decide to skip ahead a year or ten before something brings the group back together.

Our group seed is that we’re all part of a caravan across the wasteland when it gets nearly wiped out by demons, and now we need to find and rescue the people from our caravan who got kidnapped by the demons.

This seed kicks us into action. We’ve got a goal right from the start, something to do that involves our PCs directly. All of the PCs that we create need to have a reason for being on the caravan as well as for sticking with the group when we’re setting out to find the survivors. It is each player’s responsibility to make sure their PC fulfills those.