Secrets

When creating characters for one-shots, I like to give them some sort of personality and background. At the same time, I don't want to lock the players down too tightly into a specific role, nor do I want to spend ages writing a background that nobody will ever use. And so, I have come to write backgrounds out of four distinct elements:

• The anecdote is some short fact about the character's past. This could be more or less anything, but it does need to be something at least somewhat significant. For example, "I used to be a Jedi Knight, the same as your father."
• The quirk is something about the character's present, something that says something about who he is. "He's a card player, a gambler, a scoundrel. You'd like him."
• The goal, obviously enough, says something about the character's future, at least as he wants to see it. "I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father."
• Finally, the secret is either some fact that the character wants to keep hidden from others, or it's something that he wants to find out. "How did my father die?"

I've found that adopting this model allows me to very quickly write up nice, iconic characters with a bit of flavour to them. It all works surprisingly well.

(At one point, I tried to have players provide backgrounds of this form for their characters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this proceeded to be ignored - as far as I know, they didn't even read the section of the document where I asked for them. I've since dropped any 'requirement' for a background; instead, players can provide as much or as little as they want.)

Now, in the first version of this scheme, the 'secret' entry was omitted. Basically, I hadn't thought of it at that time. However, I've found that adding this element makes for somewhat stronger characters, and somewhat stronger games. It's particularly fun when the pre-gen characters have competing secrets - one of them knows something that the other wants to know, but he's not for telling...

However, this also ties into something I read a long time ago about world (or adventure/campaign/whatever) building: Every time you create a significant game element, you should aim to create at least one secret associated with that element. And so, the Council of Ur have become corrupted and are now undead. The local lord has fallen under the sway of the priests of Morr because he's fated to die soon. There's a secret tunnel over the mountains at Minas Morgul. And so forth.

The idea there is that the PCs can just play the game as a series of quests, with their missions being the only thing they care about... or they can spend time digging around in the world that the GM has created, and find that under the surface there actually is more going on than meets the eye.

Of course, not all secrets will be discovered, but that's fine. The key here is to maintain good recycling facilities - any time a good character lies unused, or a secret goes undiscovered, or whatever, you just dust it off and reuse it at some later time. My mysterious crime boss, The Velvet Glove, has actually appeared in three different campaigns now, set in three different settings (FR, a homebrew, and now Eberron), with three different groups.

(Of course, it's entirely likely that nothing in this post surprises anyone. I may well be the last to come to these 'extraordinary' revelations!)