Step 1B: Determine Background

Coming up with your character’s background is the important first step in inventing and building your character. However, it’s also the step with the fewest rules. We figured this is actually appropriate. After all, this is a roleplaying game, so inventing your character’s history should be more of an exercise in narrative storytelling than an exercise in game mechanics.

Nevertheless, we expect that your character’s background will inform how you build your character. For example, if your character is a hard-working miner from a frontier planet in a distant galaxy, you’ll probably want to build the character to be tough and strong, and to have abilities appropriate for someone living on a frontier world. Likewise, if your character is a scholarly sort from a prestigious university, you’ll probably invest in making them smart and cultured.

The other thing about backgrounds is that they’re going to be really dependent on the game setting. If you’re playing in a medieval fantasy, your character can’t be from an alien world. Conversely, if you’re playing a game set in the distant future, your character probably doesn’t come from a family of blacksmiths.

Now, keep in mind that your character’s game statistics don’t all need to reflect their background. Instead, the background is meant to provide depth to the character, offering insights on personality and mindset that are not evident in skills, talents, and other abilities. Knowing a character’s origin can often provide a useful framework for determining what goals your PC might have as well as the paths they might pursue to achieve those goals.

With that in mind, we’ve prepared a short list of questions. You don’t have to answer them (from a rules perspective, your character doesn’t need to have any background at all), or you can pick and choose the ones you like. However, answering some or all of them may help you as you invent your character’s background.

Background Questions

Where does your character come from? This can be specific to the setting (Planet Ebulon in the Delta Cluster) or generic (a small farming town in the hills). But in either case, where are your character’s roots, and what does your character think about the place they grew up in?

Who is your character’s family? Did your character grow up with a lot of siblings, or were they an only child? Did they have parents? If so, who were they? If not, who raised your character? Is your character still on good terms with their family, or not?

What is your character’s social standing? Is your character a respected member of their community and culture? Or are they simply one of the unremarkable masses? Or maybe they’re an outcast, shunned by the members of “decent” society? What did your character do before they became an adventurer?

How old is your character? Are they young and brash, or old and wise? (Or maybe old and brash, or young and wise.) If they’re middle-aged or older, how have they changed as they’ve aged?

What does your character think about the world? Your answer could be very general (a cynical attitude toward everyone they meet), or specific to the setting (they hate the unjust rule of the Federation of Sol). You could even ask and answer this question multiple times, picking a different aspect of the setting each time.

Why did your character leave home? Likely, your character is now an adventurer and has left part or all of their old life behind them. Why? What happened?