As a GM, I’ve always been a big fan of when character backstory works its way into the campaign. I enjoy when players see fit to reveal secrets about their characters. I love when backstory is revealed in key moments to underline the drama of a roleplaying scene — or sometimes even a combat encounter.
Character backstory working its way into the campaign spontaneously often comes in response to specific beats of narrative pressure. Something happens in the campaign and a player sees the opportunity to have their character react in a way that reveals something about who they are. Other times, fate or the actions of villains push the heroes into a corner that inspires the revelation of a secret a character had hoped to take with them to the grave — but which their player has been dying for a chance to let slip.
Sometimes, though, the opportunities for characters to reveal backstory don’t come as often as we’d like, or certain players might not have as much emotional investment in backstory as others. So if you’re looking for an excuse to bring a bunch of backstory into your game in a fun way, the following adventure setup can help you make that happen.
What Dreams May Come?
This adventure setup is taken from a dungeon site called the Dream Tombs, which I set up for one of my weekly CORE20 campaigns. What follows is entirely generic, though, and suitable for pretty much any fantasy game.
To set up what I wanted to do, I sent the players the following email before our session:
Unlike many of the adventuring escapades we share together, the one we’ll be starting today comes with a bit of homework. I’d like you all to come up with three bits of backstory for your character that you’re comfortable sharing with the group. This can include story elements in the three secrets you all provided at the start of the campaign, but doesn’t have to.
What I’m looking for are specific meaningful events from your character’s life involving action, other characters, and so forth. So perhaps a pivotal interaction with family or comrades, a dangerous situation that had to be overcome, a moment during an important job that went really well or really badly, et al. Something momentous on a personal level that would make a good scene in a movie.
The “three secrets” mentioned in the email refer to the pre-session-zero character-building conversations I like to have with the players leading into a new campaign. It’s totally not necessary to make the Dream Tombs scenario work, and I find that even without that kind of preliminary framework, many players have a sense of a secret or two their characters are keeping to themselves.
Records of the Past
The Dream Tombs in my campaign were a complex of ancient crypts protected by powerful magic and holding secrets the characters were looking for. But the choice of location for this scenario is totally up to you. In addition to a tomb or crypt, the theme of secrets and backstory being brought forward into the campaign might be apropos for a magical library, a warded laboratory or guildhall, a ruined wizard’s tower, or any other location where suitable magic can come into play.
As the characters explore the site, alongside whatever other location features you prep, work in one physical detail — small pieces of parchment that are scattered across or hidden within the site. Some of the parchment fragments are old. Others are relatively new. All feature notes in different languages and different handwriting, with each parchment a record of some incident or event, anonymous and unsigned.
Describe the notes as seemingly written by someone wanting to record a thing they’d done, a conversation they had, or something that happened to them. As the characters have a chance to find more of the notes, describe them further as carrying a sense of yearning for the past — or in a many cases, a sense of regret or fear for that past.
Living the Memory
At any appropriate points during the session, the magic of the site triggers. This could be a thing that happens at regular intervals while the characters explore or linger, or in response to characters touching certain things, fighting certain guardians, and so forth.
Choose a character randomly and have their player choose one of the memories they came up with. Then have that player narrate that backstory memory. Describe the scenario as the character slipping into a kind of fugue state and going through the motions of the memory event, even as illusion magic unfolds around them to share that memory with the other characters. Work with the player to build up the description of the memory vision and make it real, asking questions to expand certain moments, suggesting additional details, and so forth.
Then, when the vision is done, tell the players that even as the illusion magic fades away and the character comes back to their senses, that character sees a piece of parchment manifest in front of them to fall to the ground. On that parchment, they see a written record of the vision just shared, magically scribed in their own handwriting.
Cost or Reward
Depending on the nature of the site where these dreams manifest, the revelation of backstory and secrets might be enough of a narrative reward to carry your memory scenes. But you might also attach benefits or drawbacks to each memory, so that the characters are rewarded or punished by the magic tapping into their psyches. For example, if the characters are making an incursion into an enemy site set to end in a boss battle, the magic might provide them with one-off benefits as their memories let them recall moments of past inspiration or draw new resolve from memories of failure.
Alternatively, if the characters are exploring a site that calls out for putting pressure on them as they explore, each memory might impose penalties or conditions on the character experiencing it — or even on all the characters as they share that memory. (When I used this scenario, the Dream Tombs were that kind of site. The characters were searching for a specific tomb and the treasure it contained, and the longer they took, the more debilitating memory-visions they would have to face.)
Inspiration for Story
In addition to the fun of bringing specific backstory elements and secrets into your campaign within a solid narrative framework, this adventure setup can have the added bonus of inspiring players to think more about their backstories — especially players who are more about playing in the moment, and who might have given little thought to their character’s life before the campaign began. One of the best bits of feedback I got from a player after we finished our Dream Tombs scenario was their lament that they hadn’t gotten a chance to share all three of the memories they’d written up. Especially if the players in your campaign aren’t naturally big into backstory — and this can often be true of new players — bringing memories to life this way in the course of an adventure can be a great start.