Game Wish 54: Background Hooks

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 54: Background Hooks

This week's question concerns character backgrounds.

Do you like to have bits and pieces from your characters' backgrounds appear in the game? Do you write hooks into your character background for the GM to use in the campaign for your character? Do you like it when the GM gives you a background hook into an adventure or scenario with a previously unknown hook, such as creating an old friend of your character's who is somehow involved? What are some examples of cases where hooks have worked or not worked for you?

In one word, yes. If a GM isn't going to use a character's background in the game, there's little point creating much of a background in the first place! Two of my favourite characters, Neil Jones from a GURPS Cyberpunk game, and Karl Tolhurst (who I've mentioned before, and will probably mention again), originally from a modern-day Call of Cthulhu game, both had extensive character back-stories. In both cases the GMs wove these backgrounds into the plotline of the game, in Karl's case some figures from his background became significant NPCs.

Neil was a former railway mechanic, who's backstory had him jailed for manslaughter after being wrongly blamed for causing a fatal train crash in the middle of the channel tunnel by negligent maintenance. The GM turned into an act of deliberate sabotage, and it turned out that seven of the casualties (A party of nuclear scientists) weren't actually dead but working on a evil secret project, and the crash was a cover to explain their disappearance. Several NPCs turned up at various stages as well.

Karl Tolhurst was the guitarist from a defunct goth-metal band who's singer had disappeared after allegedly murdering the keyboard player (who was also Karl's lover). The GM took this and ran with it in big way; this singer had been incorporating forbidden dark rituals into song lyrics and getting audiences to chant them, and this had been a major cause of the irruption of tentacled Things Man Was Not Meant To Know into our reality. Various other band members and their relatives turned up as NPCs, including the singer himself, as a hidious undead creature.

When GMing, I like players to come up with detailed backgrounds too. Not only does it prove they've actually read and understood my gameworld, but it also gives me plot hooks to work with. In some cases elements from these backgrounds have worked their way into the gameworld, and turned up in other unrelated games using the same setting. A prime example being the terrorist^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hrevolutionary group "The Right Hand of Vandrak", originally from the character background of the revolutionary and rabble-rouser Hollis, one of the PCs in my Kalyr PBMB game on Dreamlyrics, who I've used as the villains in a convention-style FtF scenario. I got a lot of plotline mileage out of the story of betrayal and treachery in the background of Kolath the legionnaire in the same game.