Back to backgrounds again! I was chatting with Ryven about a project he’s working on, and in discussing that I came up with yet another way to deal with backgrounds.
First, let’s think about temporary backgrounds. If a “real” background represents training, skills and experience that can’t easily be taken from a character, a temporary background represents a specific, recent condition or experience affecting your character now. We can’t get out of control representing these ephemeral moments, though. We should only use temporary backgrounds to represent things that our story cares about. We don’t have to document every hurt feeling or bruised bone.
But…say we are involved in a mystery. A strange being is attacking folks around the village. No one has been killed yet, but the attacks are becoming increasingly violent. We have to find the being and what it wants, and put its attacks to a stop. In addition to the skills and experiences we bring with us (our normal backgrounds), our current story makes clues a relevant part of our experience. After interrogating a barkeep, I gained Clue: It Strikes at Dawn +2 for a temporary background which, since I like terminology as much as anyone I will call ephemera. I can use my clue where it is relevant in the story. Ephemera bonuses usually stack on top of a normal background (and therefore are usually smaller bonuses), but of course require more specificity. I can’t just use my clue for any old thing. It has to pertain to this mystery somehow when I use it.
But why do we need to have a type (“clue”) for our ephemera? What does that give us? The driving concept here is that each type of ephemera has some set of rules that govern it. Let’s say that clues can combined to make an insight roll. The roll determines what additional clues and information the GM reveals to you. If you roll high enough, you get the “final” reveal, in this case “what is this creature stalking the town?” If you have enough clues, you can combine and consume them to avoid the roll and just get straight insight into the case.
Another type of ephemera could be a memory. Let’s call a memory a vivid experience that is important to your character. A memory always stacks with a background when making a skill check. When you use a memory, you must “link” it to the current moment. How is now similar and relevant to this vivid experience? A memory is consumed immediately when you use it.
These are just concepts right now; still hammering out details and implementation thoughts right now. The goal isn’t to make a million different types of backgrounds that you have to tack at once, but rather to introduce subtle mechanical changes that you use for different parts of your story.
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