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?

Every race has its religion, and certain classes might lend more easily to a character being devout (or not!)  As new content has been released, we find our PCs exposed to demons and demigods.  There’s also plenty of room for embellishment — looking back at the lore, worship of the Light seems to be relatively new for humans.  What came before that?  A few of our Northerner-players have filled in the blanks with some very cool ideas.

Along the same lines, troll lore is hard to chase down — part of it is probably the sheer numbers of tribes, each having their own patron gods, or variations on one another’s gods.  We got to see a bit more of it with Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, but there is still much that is left to your imagination.

There are dragons and titans and spirits of all kinds.  So much excellent fodder for RP.

Davien’s an atheist at heart.  She doesn’t believe in gods, really, though she acknowledges that there are beings with powers that far surpass her own.  She simply counts them as other races, their power worthy of respect (and, obviously, study), but not something to worship.  The closest she comes to religion stems from her study of the arcane — she believes it connects everything, and holds things together, but it’s not sentient; it’s a power to be tapped into and harnessed.  Malygos’ insanity and death have given her new things to ponder about magic and its nature.

Annalea felt that the Church of the Holy Light was far too stuffy for her tastes.  She grew up mostly going through the motions at services, but not much liking what she heard.  Then came the Kal’dorei and their moon goddess, and she headed off to the Temple of Elune to offer her services as an acolyte.  It’s a much more comfortable fit for her, but she’s far from devout.

Threnn has the strongest faith of the three.  She holds firm to the Light and its teachings, but unless someone else asks first, she keeps it to herself.  Faith and prayer are very private and personal for her.  When the Draenei came, and the Naaru with them, she suffered a minor crisis of faith.  Here was the very thing she worshiped, spinning around and making windchime noises in the middle of Shattrath.  She’s since decided that they’re creatures made from the Light, but they aren’t the Light itself.  After A’dal appeared at the end of the Bridenbrad quest chain in Icecrown, she lost a huge chunk of respect for them, and any lingering doubts as to whether or not she should worship the Naaru the way she does the Light went away.

What do your characters believe?  How has the lore that’s been revealed with new content affected or challenged those beliefs?

Annalea was one of those.  Let’s be honest, she was originally just an NPC — Threnn’s little sister, a sometime bard and confidant for my paladin.  The only reason I ever actually rolled the character was because I had a very strong image of a blonde girl in a white dress in my mind.  Woe to me when I learned you needed to be level 17 before you could equip the White Woolen Dress.  So, a-levelling we went, with Anna occasionally offering commentary in our IC channel as she melted faces.

And then she started to grow on me.  I knew very, very little about her, really.  She was generally happy-go-lucky.  She got along with her mother far better than Threnn did.  She was good at singing.  She took up being a shadow priestess so she’d be able to defend herself when she went out into the world, not out of any desire to be a true priestess.  Anytime I tried to sit down and think of her story beyond that, though, she eluded me.

Revelations about Anna have come slowly over the years, sometimes sneaking up on me and clubbing me over the head, sometimes slipped surreptitiously into the stack of ideas for other things where I’d find them, like someone snuck over to my desk and left a note when I’d stepped away.

Her very first one was the former kind: I was working on a conversation between Anna and Threnn, wherein Threnn was fretting about having children.  I’d established (in my head, at least) that their mother and maternal grandmother and so on back through their family had trouble carrying babies to term.  Anna was explaining most of them away, trying to reassure Threnn — this woman was always sickly, that one was probably preventing her pregnancies on purpose — when Threnn looked at her and said, “Anna, what about you?”

I sat back from the keyboard and frowned at what I’d typed.  That hadn’t been in the plan.  But as I explored the possibility of this bright, sunny character having such a terrible thing happen to her, and having come through it, it felt more and more right.

I left the details fairly vague.  At that point, they didn’t matter to the story, and whenever I tried to tease out the specifics, nothing came.  Nearly a year passed before I figured them out, and even that story came slowly, growing from random RP that was meant to just fill in a lull in our IC channels.

Smaller things came to light about her between that first revelation and its eventual fleshing out:  my girl had a temper.  She was in some ways stronger than Threnn believed her to be, but in others, far more fragile (Threnn, I created to be nearly unbreakable; Anna, I’ve realized, has the potential to shatter).  She got freckles when she went out in the sun without a hat, and thought she could bleach them away with lemons.

Most recently, she revealed yet another to me.  She and Tarquin were sitting in the Pig, being miserable gits together (as he phrased it), and he pulled out a cigarette.  After a moment’s pause, he offered one to Anna.

And, after a moment’s pause, she accepted it.

It’s a small thing, just a little bit of flavor added to the character.  Her smoking is only an occasional thing, not the constant chain-smoking of her brother-in-law, not even something she does regularly when drinking.  She coughed at those first couple of drags as her lungs remembered the feel of it.  A small thing, but something so very Annalea that it became instant canon.

So, how about it?  What surprises have some of your characters sprung upon you?