Team Backstories Options

[Lynxer]

I'm starting a new 4E game soon, and am wondering how others have done to explain how their runners are running together.

I'm looking for some ideas on how to bring my runners together.

[Dwight]

I submit that in posting here you are asking the question of the wrong people.

P.S. This is the exact sort of thing that gets handled quite nicely having players get together to hammer out character concepts prior to actual chargen.

[Blastula]

3 runners walk into a bar. The 4th one ducks...

[ThirtyWiredMonke...]

I recently started a 4e campaign that involved 4 players.
We played it out so they all new each other as contacts and when a fixer would contact one of them he would then "hire" the rest.

[Acme]

I'll be starting a story soon that kinda grew out of backstory, the first guy's character is basically following after his father's exploits. As we sorta figured things out, the father basically turned into this playboy, and we figured that four of the five characters will end up being half-siblings because of the first guy's father and that part of the getting together will be figuring this out. I'm almost trying to convince the fifth guy too but that might be pulling teeth..

[Kruger]

It really depends on the kind of campaign you're running. Shadowrun doesn't really always turn into an overarching plot, so you don't need a whole lot of background unless the characters are an odd grouping. In my current game (Twilight 2013), I ran a series of "prequel" scenarios that featured all the principle characters individually or two at a time, and everyone else ran pre-generated characters. Eventually, all the prequels tied into the main plot line where it picked up with the characters as a team. And this way, everybody knew where they came from and how the group came to be. Was also really good for everyone to get used to the mechanics since they all got to play an "expendable" character at some point. This may or may not work or even be necessary for Shadowrun since it doesn't need a "narrative" as much as other games often do (Why exactly are my thief and his cavalier friends again?). The characters can simply be past colleagues who have figured out that they work well together. or, it is almost as easy to say that whoever has the fixer contact was set up with these others on a recommendation.

[CanRay]

I started my most recent group with a bunch of 'Runners that were in a bar in the Barrens, on the run from the cops, and were forced to do a beer run when the bartender called in their tabs.

And said it was a few thousand (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) and had the Mafioso that was also on the lamb back up that claim. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Then the group all got caught by the cops... *Sigh*

[Traul]

They don't have to know each other beforehand if they have common contacts. The easiest case is the same fixer for everybody. A Johnson asks him for a team and he builds a team whoever is available. Whoever being the players.

[Trevalier]

I like the idea of a Noodle Incident origin--give a name to an unspecified event in the past that brought the team together, then let them flesh it out via references whenever it seems sufficiently weird and amusing.

Example: The team was brought together by something they refer to as "the McGrath run".

1) The team is hunting (and being hunted by) a failed attempt at genetically engineering a unicorn. The result is armored, carnivorous, sentient, and pissed off (like the not-unicorns in P. C. Hodgell's Kencyrath novels). "Hey, this reminds me of the day we met!"

2) An improbable plan is suggested for the current run, and the troll street sam says, "Look, I told you after the McGrath run that I was never wearing a tutu again."

3) The team is stumped. One ventures cautiously, "We could ask McGrath." Everyone else threatens to shoot him.

4) Something goes wrong--anything from a cyberzombie attack to the soykaf tasting a little off--and someone says, "Damn you, McGrath, this is all your fault."

If you want, after a while you could piece together the references and try to figure out what the incident actually was--maybe even do a flashback run with the team's starting builds--or you could just leave it a mystery and keep elaborating on it.

(McGrath, by the way, is my current character's fixer. Yes, it's all his fault.)

I'll be starting a story soon that kinda grew out of backstory, the first guy's character is basically following after his father's exploits. As we sorta figured things out, the father basically turned into this playboy, and we figured that four of the five characters will end up being half-siblings because of the first guy's father and that part of the getting together will be figuring this out. I'm almost trying to convince the fifth guy too but that might be pulling teeth..

Something very like this happened by accident in the Pathfinder campaign I'm playing in. We didn't coordinate character creation beyond telling each other what classes we were going to play, and one of the available campaign traits (pieces of pre-written character backstory that come with perks) was "Finding Haleen", which set the character up to be searching for his missing sister, Haleen.

You guessed it. All but one player picked Finding Haleen...which meant that she had a human brother, a half-elf brother, and a half-djinn brother. Later, one player dropped and was replaced...by a guy who also independently picked the same trait. So Haleen acquired a half-orc brother as well. We're thinking of getting the party chartered as "The Brothers of Haleen", and suspect that their father is a minor fertility god of some kind.

[Mayhem_2006]

I'm starting a new 4E game soon, and am wondering how others have done to explain how their runners are running together.

I'm looking for some ideas on how to bring my runners together.

This is the sort of thing I almost always ask the players to come up with themselves.

I try to avoid the "You are all strangers" start up, since all it takes is for two people to have strong RP reasons to not join the other and immediately you have to start working on solving *that* problem instead of running the game you planned.

"I'm an Orc, and I have a rabid, unreasoning hatred of elves and could never work with one." "I'm an elf, and I hate Orcs just as much as you hate elves." "I'm a card carrying member of the Humanis Policlub, and I hate you both." "I'm a ghoul and I have a major addiction to biting sleeping people in order to infect them. Just can't help myself."

Yes, such conflict can be a lot of fun, but unless you have specifically planned for a "people who normally wouldn't are forced to work with each other" its more hassle than fun, especially for a novice GM.

Or, for a slightly less extreme example, if you have planned out a reasonably balanced run thats going to require a mixture of talents, and everybody creates a partially lobotomised troll street-sam killing machine, your game is going to stall as soon as the opportunities for killing things run out.

Getting the players to create the party together as an established group with their own reasons for working together immediately forstalls the "I would never work with him" issue and gives them the chace to create at least a partially rounded party.

[Cheops]

In the game I am running now we just finished the Prologue the point of which was to have all the characters meet and set up what's going to happen in the first run.

It started with the data courier running a package for a Johnson that was coming under fire. Then the B&E/Security specialist burgled a passkey from an apartment. Finally the Face, Melee Adept, and Technomancer were hired by a talent scout for a trial run against an advertising blimp maintenance facility. These all went smoothly but naturally there was a left turn from there. A nasty Street Sam showed up trying to take the head of the data courier to get any juicy, juicy data or sense memory from him. A couple of military-like gentlemen hired the B&E guy for a security test (he's got a legit SINner business that does this and is also a retired Ranger captain) which was a set up to try and capture him. The group of three got nicely forwarned by being at the end of the info chain so they were able to find out a lot of info beforehand. Basically everything was built up towards a run that another team is about to pull and the target corporation is trying to hunt down the threads to figure out the who/what/when/where/why/how.

Led to some really funny moments where the data courier first hired the Face to track down and capture the street sam and then when he also hired the TM to run a trace when he meets the Johnson who hired the Sam. Funny enough when the TM met with the courier to discuss the upcoming meet she gave him a full data dump of what the rest of the group had been able to find out. It was a hilarious moment as the courier's eyes went big as plates and sputtered "But...What...Huh?"

[CanRay]

Just remembered my first group. I got around the "Don't trust each other" issue because one of the PCs was a Street Doc most of the time, and was their "GP" (Or the closest that a Shadowrunner has to one), and vouched for everyone.

After all, if you can't trust your doctor, who you just found out dresses like a monkey and does Shadowruns, who can you trust?

[flowswithdrek]

I normally do one of four things.

The characters are put in a situation as strangers and have to work together to escape, evade, overcome the situation, what ever it may be. That opening situation or encounter creates the characters shared history and how they know each there and then.


I get the player characters to write out a pretty large background and then look for common ground and work out a shared background from there. Quite often this involves some of them sharing the same contacts such as a fixer, though often knowing him by a different name. This is not always easy to do as there may be little common ground or theme in a players background.


I write the player’s character backgrounds for them and insert any shared history for them I deem necessary for them to work together and to take the plot forward. This depends on who the players are. I find this is much easier to do this for first time players. Veteran players like more freedom in creating their character background.

As already suggested, get the players together to hammer out a shared history.


However I once had fun by getting my players to create up to three characters with short backgrounds they would like to play and then used one of the players as the recruiter trying to put a team together. He was allowed to interview all the characters and chose one from each player (without being able to look at the characters sheet). The rest became NPCs for the gamemaster to use on down the line.