4.8 Character Story Seed

The character story seed is created by each player for his or her own character. It is an event, mission or personality issue that pushes the character into action. It could be a personal loss, falling in love, discovering a mystical item, swearing vengeance, being exiled, dealing with the character’s self-loathing, and so on.

You shouldn’t plan out a whole story arc—you don’t even have to know who or what caused the event. As long as there’s something going on that gives your character a goal to pursue or a mystery to explore, or something that complicates her life and makes for good dramatic character scenes, you’re good to go.

Depending on your playstyle, your character story seed may or may not conflict with your group story seed. For most players, I would suggest that they should be intertwined in a way that they support each other or are completely independent. For example, if your group seed is that all of the PCs are stuck together in unknown territory after an airship crash, your character story seed could be proving your newfound love to one of the other PCs, overcoming your fear of the unknown, delivering that urgent message despite your crash, etc.

Advanced players can have character story seeds that conflict with the group story seed. This is great fodder for dramatic choices: the GM can put the PC in a position where she has to choose between one and the other and figure out what’s more important to her. But it can also tear the PC group apart if you’re not careful, which is why I only suggest it if you’re up for that kind of tension.

Our group seed ensures that we’re sticking together for a while, and I know my fellow players well enough to know that we like to play some tension between our characters. I talk to a fellow player, and we decide that my character story seed is that his character Rasheem is wearing a necklace that I know belongs to my old nemesis Locust. In fact, I know that because I gave it to him when we were still partners and I had a crush on him. It’s made from something unique I found in the wasteland ruins.

How did Rasheem get the necklace? Is he on Locust’s side? Is my nemesis involved in the attack on the caravan? Those questions will be answered during our game. Notice that this is only a seed: I’ll find out the answers soon enough, but it will hopefully lead to a whole story arc that involves one or more confrontations with my nemesis. By making this my seed, I’m telling the GM and other players that this is one of the things I’d like the game to focus on.

At this point, I also fill out my final trait: “Distrustful of Rasheem.” It turns out that Rasheem’s player picks “Grudgingly attracted to Zadie.” That should be fun to play out.