Dec07
on December 7, 2017
Dark Background
As a DM it’s important to give your villains realistic and interesting origins. But unless the players know this backstory, they have precious little impact on the campaign. Conveying this information is the tricky part. Very often it’s stored in journals or info dumped by NPCs. At best, journals are a lengthy handout, and at worst they’re an endless bit of read aloud grey boxed text.
Skilled DMs might instead reveal this information via visions. Scrying magics or ritual pools can give a glimpse of the past where the players can ask questions. Interactive flashbacks are even better because they actively involve the players, which is rule one of being a good DM.
First of all, welcome back!
Then, you hit another sensitive spot, as you always do.
Conveying this kind of informations in an original way is hard, and I failed many times as a DM trying to choose the proper medium.
Then I realized three things: first, if you tie precious hints on big bad guy’s weaknesses in his backstory, you’ll have clever players dig for said background instead of just stepping over it. Second, the way should be related to the kind of campaign. I had my last one centered on an order of paladins, which origins dated back 800 years to the first duke, so I put some references in the tales and legends widespread among the population. My next one will be a pirate saga, so the info will be conveyed in the form of rumors running amongst fishermen and buccaneers, and the players will have to discern which ones are reliable. Third… keep it short (er… as I didn’t do with this post. Sorry!).