Background Stories and Knowledge and their Role in Campaigns

I have always been intrigued by the role that myth and legends and storytelling play in building a world.  Maybe it comes from my fascination with Tolkien's Silmarillion or the greek myths I studied as a child, or perhaps it comes from years of pouring over anecdotes of famous historical figures, scientists, and mathematicians.  For me, to know history is really to know the personalities involved and how their unique perspectives on things interacted to make big things happen.

In an RPG setting (Faerun, being my favorite currently), stories, legends, and background stories seem like an important element that gets overlooked too often.  Backgrounds woven together out of people and places and things help ground the maps of endless names and give the deities of character a form and flavor beyond things written on a character sheet.  The greatest asset of Faerun, which to a GM is also a curse, is the abundance of material that has already been written regarding the history, societies, peoples, places, and things.

With my current campaigns, an epic dungeon-delving tale of old on Friday nights and a pirate-themed adventure on Monday nights, I find that simply pointing characters at the existing material is a useless exercise.  There are many websites that capture all sorts of information, canonical and GM-created, but with my own additions (reverting the Time of Troubles and Spellplague) I find the need to focus and revamp the material that exists.  Enter the background stories.

Background stories are little anecdotes (one to several pages) written from various perspectives giving the players focused looks at relevant material that they 1) may want to use in backgrounds of their characters, or 2) explaining key aspects of the common knowledge that may come to play in their current worlds.  Background stories, if used properly, set the stage for characters feeling like they have changed the world.  You can't changes the world if you don't know what it was beforehand.

For example, in my Faerun, I used a time-traveling incident to roll back the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague.  There are several background stories that explain the new order of gods as a result of this.  Other background stories explain how Faerun reacted to these changes.  Other stories just explain interesting tidbits of information, like the Mithral cargo trains that run out of the dwarven cities of the North.

My latest challenge has been to fill in the missing geography of the western seas.  The Cimarine Isles, the Moonshae Isles, the Whalebones -- they all exist in Fearun, shown on maps, referenced in histories, but tying all the information together into making them a place one might want to go takes a lot more.  There must a common understanding of what, who is there.  There must also be a sense of what might be there, what isn't know, what could be.

Another piece I have been filling in lately are the legends concerning dragons.  Written as a multipart series, I am slowly boiling down the dragon lore into relevant summaries for the regions of interest, introducing potential new players in whatever events might eventually emerge.  Faerun serves as a source of two problems -- lengthy diatribes on dragons that far outweigh the word count any of my players would read, and one-line descriptions that give no details, ties, or background.  My challenge is to compress the long stories to short, relevant stories, and expand the one-liners into something colorful and interesting.

Now, background stories, above all, must be accessible to players.  Here are some key points to keep in mind if you write your own:

• Keep them short, relevant, and add pictures (they help build the theater of the mind).
  
• Keep them in a convenient format.  I prefer PDF, since most all platforms can access them, and since they don't allow easy editing.  (Never use word documents -- this an authorship format, not a format for exchange)
  
• Include details sparingly, only where relevant and interesting.
  
• Include multiple cultural perspectives -- for example, does the dragon have a nickname in one language that doesn't exist in others.  Cultural differences in how the world is viewed are important for giving your players that their character will react differently than the other characters.  Differences between characters is the whole point in having characters.
  
• Include hooks for players.  I often send out an email to individual players after I send out a background story suggesting character specific hooks.  For example, here is a city where your character could be from?  Or this is the magic sword you could be searching for?
  
• Be ahead of the game.  Don't send out background information just before it is needed.  Instead give your characters a few weeks to digest the information before they need it.  This also gives you time to evolve things, fix oversights, and even bring up the background in casual conversation.
  
• Leave some things unknown, rumored, or open for future adventures.  (This is where you story can fit in.) 

Players:  feel free to add your comments on the advantages and disadvantages of getting background information!