Character Backstory

So this might have been something y'all have already discussed, but I'm just curious about how much mutual backstory our characters have. Will we be starting the game as a "post-war motley" picking up the pieces of a shattered freehold, or are we all independent and just kinda doing our own thing until (if/when)we decide to form one? I guess I just want to know how much character development is meant to happen strictly IC? For example, could I go ahead and do a Glimpse with Ramona of our time together as Summer Courtiers, or is it assumed that we have no significant personal history and barely knew each other in the past? If our chronicle is beginning next week, I just want to be prepared to either meet and greet in our first thread or have some established backstory for our characters.

Entirely personal choice. You can have as much or as little history together as you want. The freehold was actually really big before the war, so it's entirely possible you never spoke much. Afterwards, everyone sorta took stock of who was left.

Whatever you choose, there will be plot aplenty to be had. Part of the reason why I opened up the npc creation. So your glimpses can have a little more flavor if you didn't want or have anyone to involve.

Okay, cool. Do you three want our characters to begin play as a motley, or just start as individuals and see what happens?

I'm of two minds: it might be more convenient if we were already a motley, working from the proposed 'war motley who know each other well enough for basic trust but still have a ways to go' angle, but we also have a group of people and characters that I think could be fun to see work toward a motley in real time.

I'm also happy to drop the war motley idea entirely if it doesn't serve us, it was just a way we thought could be interesting to explain such disparate characters in a motley before we'd settled into writing them.

Either way, I'd love to brainstorm with folks about how much who knows who.

To paraphrase something Saeyer said to me, if we've "grown out of" the idea of the war motley, that's fine. But I'm gonna make a case for keeping it.

I really like the war-motley idea. That our characters threw in with each other half out of desperation, and now, whelp, we're stuck with each other, like it or not. It gives the PCs real incentive to be supportive of each other, even when they have friction. And friction can be interesting! It also saves us from a lot of headaches, I'm sure we're all familiar with situations where you wonder why your character cares about X, or realizing that your PC has no motivation to help another PC. Being a motley beforehand comes with built-in motivation, built-in incentive to help, to care, to give a fuck. Hell, our characters don't even have to be "friends" to be a motley.

Cyl, I would be thrilled for Ramona to feature in a glimpse of Kyle as Summer courtiers together, and would be happy to help with that. As for how much we all knew each other, that depends on which direction we go. If we're a war-motley, we definitely met during the war if not before. If not, we may not have had cause to run into each other except at big freehold gatherings, I suppose it depends on who we each are and which direction each player wants to go with their PC.

One thing that our ST and I have talked about is that, after the war, the Summer court has shrunk so small that everybody knows everybody. So unless Kyle abandoned ship pretty immediately, then he and Ramona know each other at least by face and name. Also, Ramona has Status 1 as a Freehold Ironsmith, so probably everybody's at least passingly familiar with that, even if they never met her.

I do like the idea of a war motely as a concept, however, I am not certain if it fits with the desired "Blitz war" that the war really was only a battle or very very short amount of time. If that immediacy is so important then we should drop it. If the war took place over a month or something, I think war motely is awesome.

For me, i think having some sort of base relationship with the PC's is useful even if it's a simple as. "We met once at this event etc" but having rumors and narrative hooks helps me invest in the game more so I am happy to brain storm some ideas.

It was actually about a month. The Fae slowly brought all the forces together, around near the goblin market. It staged there for a while to give some time for the freehold to gather it's strength. There were some skirmishes and real world raids by loyalists and such. Then there was a slow march at the end which culminated the whole thing in a single battle.

The final battle itself was terrifying but short, getting an actual estimate of it's duration was impossible given the nature of the hedge at the best of times. This wasn't.

I think I am leaning more towards the motley idea. I just think it will make the beginning much easier and give us tons of story line fodder. Perhaps the four of us simply found ourselves stuck in a bad situation during the final battle and pledged a motley oath to just give us an edge in order to survive. There could be some members that want to keep going and renew it, while others are just waiting for the duration to expire.

Kyle pledged himself to a fairly random motley out of sheer necessity during "The Incursion". He didn't really know any of them all that well, but with so many stories of Loyalists and Privateers picking off stray freeholders, he didn't have much of a choice. After all, an oath was the best he could do to prevent a knife in the back, or worse... a chain around his neck.

Those that watched him chase after the summer king probably assumed he was another lost cause until fairly recently. But he found his way back to them and regardless of how it happened, a promise is still a promise. They don't have to be friends after all, but they're probably the closest thing he has to a family right now. At least, for the remainder of a year and a day.

I'm gonna go with the war motley concept for Kyle. Feel free to join him or do your own thing. Regardless, the motley had more than four members, so not all of them are still around. If your character was a part of Kyle's war motley, please just leave a post here with a few general things he would remember about him or her.

His motley mates would know that Kyle is quick and sarcastic. He always had a keen eye but was easily distracted. He was also fairly blunt and sometimes asked dumb questions because his mind was elsewhere. He seems to have worked a lot of different jobs.

I'd like to toss Sylvia into Kyle's war motley. She would've joined a motley for safety, and to make sure people knew she wasn't a Loyalist.

Her motley-mates would know that she had a job at a halfway house for a while before the war, and during the war she ran a safe house out of the establishment. That worked well until it didn't, and a few folks (Lost & mundane alike) were killed. Sylvia is an energetic, sociable person who always wants to be going somewhere or doing something, and loves feeling like the center of attention; she's nice enough in general, but don't drag her down. Bad at waiting, unwilling to talk about herself or her feelings, and currently works at a Spring bar.

So going with the War Motely than. Sylus is well known to use Faerie Magick in the Freehold and is often so ought for it. However is unchecked ambitions, unnerving presence, and occult powers makes him highly....untrust worthy to most.

As an attempt to shake off any accusations that he might be a loyalist to the Faeries, he would have taken the War Motely oath as means to prove himself to the freehold.

Sylus motley members know that he is a schemer and a plotter. While not easy to anger Sylus cool and menacing presence is hard to get past at first. However the short time they have been together as a motley, Sylus has taken his oath to protect them via any means very seriously.

He uses flowery words and speaks about things that sometimes leaves others around wondering what he is whispering about. He is private but always makes time for his motely when called upon. Whether this frustrates him or not is hard to tell

Ramona is definitely in the war motley. I imagine that part of the reason she's there is to balance out the trustworthiness factor. Ramona has roots in the community and status in the Freehold, and a dedicated armorer and soldier of Summer. So if she's sworn to this Motley, it helps to diminish the suspicion and accusations that others in the Motley might otherwise face.

Logistics was most of Ramona's job in the Summer Court. Maintaining weapons and armor, forging new ones, and the mind-numbing drudgery but essential work of pressing custom iron bullets. Ramona's Status 1 is due to her being an Ironsmith of the Freehold, and thus a valuable asset which usually kept her off the front line. She's strong and a decent fighter, but nothing special, and served under arms as part of Summer's reserve forces, which still saw a respectable amount of combat.

The motley knows that Ramona has a generally reserved personality, with hidden depths that most people don't get to see unless you're close to her or spend a lot of time with her. She prefers direct solutions and even more direct communication, there have been times when subtlety or subtext escapes her entirely. She shoulders burdens without complaint, and likes to be prepared for multiple contingencies. Violence always among them. She angers easily, but prides herself on remaining in control of that anger, and not letting it control her.

The ravaging of the Summer Court and their devastating defeat have left Ramona somewhat cast adrift and scrambling. She always feels motivated to Do Something about these problems, to Fix It all somehow, but with no clear idea how exactly to do that effectively, leading to frustration. She's still working as the Freehold's ironsmith, one of the few remaining probably, but with the Summer Hollow demolished few people can guess where her current workshop is located.

Before 'The War', Molly was a ghost, a rumour, one of many entities glimpsed at the edges of territory the Freehold claimed as it's own that never manifested into an emergent threat, and remained too elusive to be a priority for seeking out just in case.

Even now, nobody really knows who she is. You don't have to know what you're looking for to pick her out of a crowd, but she doesn't get out much... and she doesn't talk much...

Everybody knows the stories of what happened to Crawlin' Rawlins though. A notoriously slippery Tunnelgrub; a Loyalist, a thief, a pledgesmith and a spy, he had been opportunistically whisking those who didn't know any better out from under the Freehold's nose for years.

He was found, what was left of him, mounted on a stake at a convergence of a number of local trods, white as a sheet. His jaw wrenched out of joint and mouth split from ear to ear, rammed full of a jumble of bone-white thorns. A mass of spider webs ran from the top of his head almost to the ground, and two glass bottle-bottoms had been hammered into his eyes with such force, they were red-brown with slowly congealing blood.

Molly joined no War Motley, was seen on no battlefield and took no part in the Summer Court's stand, but everyone seems to know-a-guy-who-knew-a-guy who saw something, or heard something while out on patrol... they can't all be true... but then, it's hard to put anything past someone after you suspect they straight up murdered a guy and used his corpse to make a scarecrow in their own image.