Character Connections and Backstory for Mothership RPG
My ongoing campaign Mothership sandbox campaign took a brief hiatus this last week when one player couldn’t make it. However, we made game night happen and of the players, Matt, offered to run me and the other player through character creation and a short adventure with Beyond the Wall. In short, it was awesome. The process of creating characters with interconnected backgrounds, NPCs and setting details was fantastic and really got me thinking. What’s an easy way to pull this into a Mothership game?
Mothership already has a mechanism to provide hooks for a character background in the form of patches and trinkets. These are a lot of fun if players choose to engage with them beyond “this patch must mean I like booze.” So I think a little more structure, akin the playbooks in Beyond the Wall, can help promote this engagement and draw it out.
There is another resource in the Mothership core books that I really love, the “Lore” table on page 56 of the Warden’s Operation Manual. I had all my players roll on this to add something to the setting when we started play, we talked it out a bit and in most cases it resulted in a new location on the big sector map. However, it kind of fell to me as GM/Warden to really flesh it out. Again, a little structure might go a long way to making this more collaborative around the table.
Here is my, as of yet, unplaytested proposal: During character creation when rolling for patches and trinkets each player will pick another player with which this item forms a connection. It doesn’t have to be a direct connection, perhaps you both visited the same bar on planet whatever, but years apart - or you know of the same NPC but in different contexts.
To give this a little juice, after picking the player you roll a d10 to determine the nature of the connection and then collaborate with the other player to figure it out.
1-3: Location
4-6: Event
7-9: NPC
0: You choose (location, event, or NPC), but it’s a secret between you and the Warden…
Once everyone has done that you can do the same with the “Lore” table in the WOM.
I’m going to ask my players to do this the next time we meet to play Mothership. I hope it will add some depth to the current set of characters and might be really interesting given what we’ve already discovered about them in play. I hope it brings something fun to your table too!