Last time, I talked in a general way about how we set up the kickoff night for our Naiara-napping event.  But when you pick it apart, a lot of the plot setup had taken place months — and even years — beforehand.  So rather than jumping forward in the planning, I thought we could first take a step back.

In order to have a successful event, you need the player characters to be emotionally invested in the plot.  There can (and probably should) be several different levels of involvement here — does what’s at stake directly affect the PCs?  Does it affect their friends/families?  Maybe it gives someone who’s been on the outskirts of the group a chance to prove their usefulness or loyalty.  As you plan out your event, those are important things to keep in mind, since they’ll become your hooks. But hooks need a line to connect to, something (if you’ll pardon me the butchery of what was probably a perfectly good fishing metaphor before I got my hands on it), for the GMs to cast them out on, and to tug on when the story gets moving.

Where do those lines come from?  Plenty of places.  (“Gee, thanks, falconesse!”)  I’m going to look at two — backstory and NPCs — but feel free to add more in the comments!

Backstory: fodder for the future.

Part the First: Your character’s backstory

Whether your character is newly rolled or has been around since launch, chances are you’ve thought about some of the significant events in his or her past.  Take a look at those stories.  Did you leave some loose ends you might like to tie up?  If you didn’t, is it possible that the character thinks everything’s been said and done, but you as a player can see new opportunities?

Let’s say that when he was a younger man, the character got revenge on the person who had swindled his parents out of their fortune.  He killed the con artist and recouped the money, end of story, right?

Not necessarily!

What if word got out that the character’s parents are still a wee bit gullible?  Maybe a new con artist rolls into town, gets wind of the old scandal, and decides to try her hand at siphoning off the parents’ wealth.

Or maybe the dead con artist had a lover or a sibling or a child who wants revenge and has been biding his/her time to confront the person who killed their loved one.  Now they’re ready.  Remember the end of the fight scene between The Bride and Vernita Green in Kill Bill, vol. I (“When you grow up, if you still feel… raw about it.  I’ll be waitin’”)?  Maybe your character’s been anticipating the confrontation, maybe he hasn’t.*

This might depend on the kind of story you want to run.  If you want a straight-up, ass-kicking adventure, your character might know right away who it is and start sharpening his knives.  But if you want to add a mystery element to the plot and have something for other players to investigate, perhaps the vengeance-seeker sends some threatening letters first, and the players have to figure out who, precisely, is after their friend.

But what if there isn’t much of anything from your character’s pre-WoW past you’d like to delve into?  Here’s something kind of neat to consider:  all those stories you’ve been participating in since you started RPing are also now part of your character’s backstory.  Was there something from a past in-game plotline you didn’t get to resolve?  Did you have to cut out a subplot, but you’ve always had it gnawing at the back of your skull?  Did one of the villains get away?

Old stories beget new.  Just as everything that’s happened to your characters so far informs their decisions and reactions to new situations, everything that’s come before is also an opportunity for a new story somewhere down the line.

So, all right, you’ve got your character’s emotional investment in the plot sorted.  But, well, you guys know my mantra by now: 

RP doesn’t happen to you; it happens with you.

How, then, do you reel others in so the story isn’t just a single-character adventure?  Sometimes it’s going to be as simple as “My character’s friends will help her out in a heartbeat, because that’s just what friends do.”   And that’s totally fine!  However, if you’d like to give them their own subplots, you need to consider…

Part the Second: Participants’ backstories

Sometimes this is still going to be easy, hookwise.  Say you have a player whose character owns a shop in Stormwind.  If your character’s investigating a series of break-ins at businesses near hers, she will most likely have an interest in helping you find the source of the burglaries.  However, remember that your NPC thieves can only break into her shop if her player gives you the go-ahead on it.  Maybe she’d prefer her shop to remain unaffected, or have an attempted burglary thwarted, rather than come home to a trashed and gutted store.

This is where communication is, as always, key.  While you might know everything there is to know about your fellow players’ backstories, you will need to check in with them and get permission to use those elements in your plot.

This also illustrates the collaborative nature of storytelling in an MMO.  Participants might have an NPC they’d like to offer up, or a subplot of their own that might fit in with yours.  Ask first, see where they’d like that part of the story to go, and if they hand over the reins, make sure you ask now and then if it’s working out for them.  If they run with a related story of their own, make sure you’re keeping one another abreast of important developments in both stories.

NPCs:  your supporting cast

All right, so you have the basics of your plot laid out, and know how to hook in your players.  Now, you might find yourself in need of a few more GM characters to make the story work.  NPCs don’t just have to be your villains; they can move the plot along in other ways, as well.  Some of them will have vital information the players need to make their next move.  Others will be your proxy in leading the players to certain realizations (about themselves, about your character, about the villain, etc.)

So who are they?  Make a list of your NPCs — their names, descriptions, the role they’ll play in the story, and any other important information that springs up around/because of them.  Make sure you have it to hand when you need to refer to it during RP.  And always, of course, expect your players to ask at least one question you weren’t prepared for.  Write down your answer to that, too — just because you planned on the NPC serving Purpose A doesn’t mean your players won’t also drag Purpose B out of him.

For example, you create an NPC whose sole reason for existing is to stagger into a character’s arms, a blackmail note for that PC pinned to his back.  With a dagger.  If you planned for the note to be the dramatic introduction to a blackmail story (the note being the important element, not the dead guy), count on your players to also want to know who the dead guy is, who stabbed him, why they stabbed him, and how he was connected to your character.  Maybe he was just someone unfortunate enough to cross the villain’s path that afternoon.  But maybe, as they players decide to go search the dead guy’s apartment for clues, you see the opportunity to sprinkle in a few more clues.  Go for it!  But make sure you remember what you reveal.

Pulling it all together

You’ve got your backstory, your NPCs, your plot threads and your hooks.  Now what do you do with them?  At this point, you’re mostly ready to dive right into the plot.  But what if you take it a little slower?  What if, for a week or two, or over the course of a month (or longer, if you’d like), you sow some seeds?

Have your character allude to some of the odd goings-on. In the string of burglaries example, you could have your character reading an article about one of them in a newspaper and commenting on it.  A day or two later, she might talk about a friend of hers who owns the shop next to the first, and finds out that shop was also broken into.

Start small, throwing the hints out there so they’re on people’s minds when the plot kicks off.

Write up some prologue/introductory fics for your guild or realm forums. Write a newspaper article.  Explore the day in the life of an NPC.  Write a story about your character interacting with an NPC, or a story explaining some of the events leading up to the in-game plot.

Have your character mention the NPCs you’ll be using. It might just be a drunken tale about his best buddy in the army, or it could be a chilling ghost story about a nightmare about to come true.  Again, put the name in players’ minds so they have an idea of who they’re dealing with.  They don’t have to know everything, but something like this can help set the mood for when the NPC is introduced in-game.

If you or someone else is playing the NPC, have them come out to RP. This won’t work for all NPCs, obviously.  If the villain is already kill-on-sight for your character, chances are they’re not going to swing by the Legerdemain Lounge for a drink and a hand of gin rummy with your character’s friends…  though, he might.  Likewise, if seeking out the character’s reclusive mentor is part of the plot, you probably want the first time he’s seen in-game be the night the players find his hut in the middle of Stranglethorn.

However, if it’s someone your players will need to trust eventually, bring ‘em around for a while.  If it’s someone they’re going to distrust, that can be just as fun.  “Wait, Jack’s the one who’s been blackmailing you?  But… I bought him a drink last week!  He seemed like such a nice guy…”

Example time!

How did we incorporate some of these things into the current storyline?  I’m glad you asked!

Maggie Maunt, our villainess, was an NPC from one of the very early Bricu and Threnn stories.  Her son, Thomas, was the ultimate villain of that particular plotline, but his mother certainly did her share of messing with Riders and friends.  She had, as far as anyone knew, been killed by a very angry Ilanna Stormrunner, but… she was also very involved in the Cult of the Damned.  It wasn’t too hard to imagine someone like Magdalena Maunt making plans to come back, even from death.

So, while the body in the Maunt family crypt is Maggie’s, her soul was already finding itself a new home.  She inhabited a younger woman’s body, and got herself a job as Threnn’s mother’s shopgirl.  No one was the wiser for nearly two years.

On occasion, Maggie would come by the Pig to deliver a message from Thenia to Threnn or Annalea.  Bricu, Threnn and Anna mentioned her often when the shop came up in conversation.  Whenever Bricu or I would write scenes that took place in the al’Cair fabric shop, Maggie was there.  While she was always, on the surface, just an NPC related to the al’Cair family, for almost two years Bricu, Yva and myself knew that the shopgirl was far, far more dangerous, and merely biding her time.

Part of the hook for the Naiara-napping was the disappearance of two other NPCs, Thenia al’Cair (Threnn’s mother) and Naiara Bittertongue (Threnn and Bricu’s daughter.)  Both have been well-established in-game and in fics, giving the players who’ve been in their company — or at least in Naiara’s, since Thenia isn’t always the Riders’ favorite person — reason to give chase.

This was also one of those hooks that comes with the “Of course they’ll help; they’re our friends” clause, but since we knew Maggie was getting away at the end of the night, we needed to have another round of hooks ready to go.  Enter phase two.

Now that Maggie’s on the run, Yva’s written a series of hauntings for the players, sent by Maggie to warn them off.  Not only has she tailored them to the players’ fears and personalities if she knew them, in some cases she’s tied them into what she knows of the characters’ pasts.  She’s sent the players drafts for approval.  Once they’re posted, the hauntings are the players’ to control.  The degree of participation and enthusiasm has been amazing.

We still have a few more tricks up our sleeves before endgame, and I’m betting this series will go beyond the three parts I’d originally intended.  I hope you’ll bear with me while I try putting thoughts in some sort of cohesive form.  In the meantime, tell me about some other types of hooks and lines you’ve used to draw in players’ interests!

*This very nearly led me off on another tangent, which is, in a nutshell, Villains Are People, Too.  But I have a feeling that’ll be long enough to be its very own post.

A long, long while back, I was writing a story for Davien and wanted to refer back to how she felt about… something.  I’m not even entirely sure what it was, though looking at the mention on there that Anduin Lothar died when she was six, I’m pretty sure it revolved around that.  So I dug around in the World of Warcraft timeline for a while, and looked on a few other sites that summed up the events of Warcraft I, II and III, and took down my notes.

And discovered that, well, Davien was six when Lothar died.  Chances are, a six-year-old’s not going to think very much about him at all, outside of what her parents told her or what word trickled in from the rest of the world.  Might she have heard tales of his heroism?  Sure — she was a farmgirl from Westfall, and Stormwind isn’t far away.  But most of the knowledge that Davien might have had about Lothar’s life probably came years later.

When you’re creating a new character, often one of the first things you’ll do is determine his or her age.  It helps you figure out where they are in their lives, and to an extent how they’ll interact with others (and how others will interact with them.)  You probably know a few significant things that happened to them in their personal lives:  when he was ten, he was thrown from a horse and spent the summer with a broken arm; when she was sixteen, she went to Ambermill to study magic.

But how do these events line up with the main storyline?  Did something happen in Azeroth or on Kalimdor that might require you to take a second look at the character’s backstory?

When I originally rolled Threnn, and started telling stories for her and Annalea, I had it set in my mind that they were Stormwind born and raised.  But looking at their ages, I had to do some adjusting.  Stormwind was sacked the year before Threnn was born.  It wasn’t reclaimed until she was two.  Which means that, by the time Annalea was born a year later, Stormwind was probably still being rebuilt.

Did it throw a major wrench in my story?  Not entirely — I had to account for where their parents were during the war, but it also gave me an opportunity to look deeper into what their early childhoods must have been like.  Imagine growing up in a city that’s recovering.  They probably slept in tents and temporary shelters for a while.  Food must have been scarce.  Their days were probably filled with the sounds of hammers and saws.  What kind of community would the refugees have built up?  While I filled in a lot for Threnn and Anna, Bricu added to the story of what their parents did during the hard times:  how Padraig helped defend the city, how Thenia cared for other families as much as her own.

Knowing what was happening in the world helped bring another level to all of those characters.  I ended up starting a spreadsheet for Threnn (yes, a spreadsheet.)  The left side is Threnn-specific:  her age and significant events that happened.  On the right side, matching up with Threnn’s age at the time, are the significant events in Warcraft history.  While not all of them are important to Threnn’s story, if someone else is talking about, say, Admiral Proudmoore’s death, I can take a peek at that and see what Threnn was up to at the time.

Playing a dwarf that’s only 100 years old?  Then she didn’t fight in the War of the Three Hammers.  But maybe her parents or grandparents did, and she grew up hearing their stories.

Was your Darkspear troll there when Thrall came and rescued the tribe from the Sea Witch, then brought them to Kalimdor?  What was the journey across the sea like for him?

Did your Tauren join with Cairne Bloodhoof and Thrall’s orcs to drive back the centaur in Mulgore?  How did that affect his feelings about the orcs?

Recent history factors into this as well.  Did your orc ever see Varian Wrynn fighting in the pits under the name “Lo’Gosh?”  And how does your human feel about the return of her king?  Gnomes and trolls will soon be retaking the lands that have been lost to them.  Where were they when Gnomeregan fell or Zalazane drove the trolls from the Echo Isles?  Will they participate in the push to get those lands back?

Your turn — have you discovered any Warcraft-canon events or NPCs that have changed the way you thought about your character’s backstory?

Did they have a mentor?

Now, mentors don’t all have to be like Dumbledore or Gandalf the Grey.  Can your character have been taught by a grizzled old man of indeterminate age, wielding a staff and dispensing cryptic wisdom?  Sure!  But mentors come in all shapes and sizes, and can lend an interesting aspect to your character’s development.

Some things to consider, if you’re giving your character a mentor:

What kind of influence did the mentor have over your character?

The mentor can be a helpful presence, offering wisdom and teaching your character to be stronger, braver, smarter.  Or perhaps the mentor is more of a hindrance, keeping him from going after his goals until he’s been deemed worthy, whether his reasoning is correct or not.  Perhaps the mentor was actively working against your character’s ambitions.

What was the mentor’s standing in his or her society?  Amongst other practitioners of his art?

Is the mentor a well-respected mage of the Kirin Tor, or did he spend the last ten years living in the forest, shunned by his peers?  Do other hopeful students seek her out, or do her heretical beliefs make her someone most others avoid?  Could he pull strings for your character if the need arose?  (And if he could, would he?)

Did your character want a mentor?  Did the mentor want a student?

Are they together by mutual decision?  By necessity?  Because other parties are forcing them to spend time together, and they don’t have the power or leverage to refuse?

Is the mentor older or younger than the character?

How does any age difference affect their relationship?  Does your much-younger character laugh at the curmudgeonly old crone?  Does your middle-aged character scoff at her teenaged mentor?  Does the mentor think the character’s too immature to learn any of his lessons, or too old to change his ways?  How do they surprise one another and challenge assumptions?

Is the mentor still alive?

If so, how involved is he in the character’s day to day life?  Are they still on speaking terms, or did they have a falling-out?  If they’re not getting along, is one bent on making the other’s life hell?

If the mentor’s dead, how did he or she die?  Does your character need or want vengeance/closure/forgiveness?

Did an enemy send an assassin?  Did your character bring about his mentor’s demise by accident?  On purpose?  Did they die so your character could escape to live another day?  Did her mentor leave her with a task that needs completing?  If so, does she plan to complete it?

There are so very many different scenarios you could play with if you choose to give your character a mentor, and I’m sure there are hundreds of other questions we could ask to help you flesh him or her out even more.  If you have a few hours years to get lost in the clicky labyrinth of TV Tropes, here’s where their page on mentors starts.

When you find your way back to us, tell us — does your character have someone they’d consider a mentor?  Fill us in!

These can be anything from minor flaws to major failings.  They might stem from physical characteristics (or the character’s perception thereof) or be a result of something in her backstory. Let’s take a look at a few examples.  I’m grouping them into physical/mental/social, though understand that in a lot of ways, these categories might bleed into one another.

Physical

Something about your character’s body is the source of insecurity.  Is she taller than everyone she knows?  Does he have an awkward gait due to an injury?  Are his clothes shabby and worn?  Is she a Night Elf who thinks her ears are way too short?

Mental

We have two characters in the Riders who can’t read, a fact that made them very uncomfortable when attention was drawn to it, even inadvertently.  Maybe your character’s terrible at math and dreads a shopkeeper figuring that out and taking advantage of them.  Perhaps their memory is missing from a certain period of time, and they don’t want anyone to know.

Social

Is your character afraid her commoner’s accent will make people think less of her?  Is he terrified of having to speak in front of a crowd?  Maybe he never really had any close friends and suddenly has someone confiding in him — how will he react to someone crying on his shoulder?  What if your character failed spectacularly at something in the past, and is afraid she’ll be recognized and ridiculed for it?

Once you have some of ideas for insecurities in mind, it’s worthwhile to explore why they’re there in the first place.  Did the tall girl in the class get teased about her height when she was growing up, or taunted because her dresses always hung awkwardly on her gangly frame?  Did the character’s failure at math mean their brother got cheated out of a deal?  Did he grow up somewhere remote, with only his immediate family for company?

The reasoning doesn’t have to be intricate.  It doesn’t even have to make sense.  A real-life example: I hate showing my teeth when I smile.  Before braces, I had a huge overbite.  The braces have been off for fifteen years and I still have A Thing about it.  Last weekend, Yva asked me to show ‘em, and I literally could not do it. To the point where I spent the next ten minutes covering my mouth with my hand.

Does it make sense?  Not at all.  But there it is.

So how did your character’s insecurities pop up in the first place?  And how do they color his or her actions and reactions in-game?

Does the shabbily dressed character steal finery from nobles’ clotheslines on wash day?  Does the one who stutters speak as rarely as possible?

Do they perhaps try to cover up their insecurities in another way?  The short-eared elf might go out and get a hundred piercings so peoples’ eyes are drawn to the jewelry rather than the size and shape of her ears.  The woman with the commoner’s accent might adopt a noble’s cadence and inflection to hide where she’s truly from.

How does that character react when someone does call attention to their insecurities?  Do they shrink away or flee the scene?  Do they put on some false bravado and talk too loudly?  Do they try deflecting and changing the subject?

Physical flaws are probably among the easiest to create and bring into roleplay, though there’s the danger of coming off as a bit Sue-ish with them.  If your character is constantly lamenting how ugly she is while her RSP description lists all the ways in which she’s a perfect sparkleprincess, it becomes less about insecurity and more about fishing for attention.  This isn’t to say that all of a character’s perceived physical flaws have to be real.  Body dysmorphic disorder is a very real thing (and would be a completely different post), but if a character’s only calling attention to her “too-big nose” so someone will tell her how it’s really quite lovely and dainty and how they just want to kiss it, well… maybe you want to rethink that.

Something else to consider is whether or not you want your character to overcome that insecurity.  It can become a great source for a storyline.  You can go for anything from the comic to the tragic:  the guy who hates public speaking tries out for a play and hijinks ensue.  The person who doesn’t really know how to be close to someone else fails to deliver comfort in a friend’s time of need — not because he doesn’t feel sympathy, but because he doesn’t know how to show it.  Maybe he loses the friend altogether; maybe he has to work to repair the friendship.  Maybe the spurned friend sells him out to the villain.

So, cats ‘n’ kittens, let’s hear it!  What are some of your characters’ insecurities?  How did they start?  What happens when attention is called to them?  Do you think they’ll ever overcome it, either as a part of their story arc, or simply through interactions with others?

Bricu talked about a character’s knowledge of  WoW lore and how to fit that knowledge into RP.  I’d like to explore another aspect of that — how to fit lore into a character’s backstory.

Sure, your characters begin their training in one specific area depending on race, but that doesn’t mean they have to hail from the surrounding towns.  All sorts of things might have happened to them before they ended up on the steps of Northshire Abbey, or found their footsteps carrying them to the Valley of Trials.  It’s unlikely that every Forsaken dragging him or herself out of Deathknell’s crypts was from Tirisfal Glades.

The first step is figuring out what things your character might have witnessed.  How old is he or she?  There are a couple of timelines out there that are immensely useful.  The first is on the official WoW site.  It goes from a generic timeline to more specific details of each period.  I’ve also used this one from Blizzplanet, which breaks down more recent events by year.  (It ends with the start of vanilla WoW, so no BC/Wrath info here.)

WoWwiki is a great source for condensed information on Warcraft history.  It compiles lore from the games, the RPG titles, and official books and sites, and helps you add little bits of flavor to someone’s backstory.

Reading up on the significant events in your character’s area of the world while they were growing up helps you find the things that had a significant impact on who they are now.  Maybe the character was plowing his fields when the first boats of refugees arrived from Stormwind, and remembers seeing hundreds of sails appear on the horizon, or was only a few years old when Thrall broke her family free of the refugee camps and fled to Kalimdor.

In working out the places Threnn had been and things she’d seen (and yes, because I’m a huge nerd), I threw together a spreadsheet that listed significant events in WoW history and filled in what age Threnn was when they occurred, plus another column for things that were milestones in her own life.  I refer back to it now and then, especially when the conversation turns to events that happened long ago — it wouldn’t do for her to start spouting memories about the sacking of Stormwind, since she wasn’t born until the following spring.

Being aware of canon events and minor characters also helps add little bits of flavor as you go along.  One of my characters was recently asked about her feelings on the undead.  She mentioned Meryl Winterstorm, an undead mage who isn’t Forsaken, as someone she respects — didn’t imply that she’d studied under him, or that he’d even know who she was if their paths crossed. It was mostly a way to answer a question she’d been asked by someone else, that hearkened back to a bit of lore.

This certainly doesn’t mean your character needs to be a witness to Azerothian history to fill in backstory — as Bricu also suggested, making up your own lore (that, of course, fits within the established canon) is just as rewarding.  Did a stint on a ship out of Ratchet keep her away from word of Arthas’ attacks on Orgrimmar last year?  Has playing politics in Stormwind kept him from paying attention to (or caring about) the fall of Gnomeregan?

What canon events and NPCs have shaped your characters’ backstories?  Which ones have they remained ignorant of, and why?