Backstories are world-building, and should meaningfully inform the story. In particular, they build the world around the character in question; ideally, that world should connect to the worlds of the other player characters and the campaign world itself.

Backstories are a way of connecting values, choices, and temperament to something comprehendible. Done well, backstories use Show, Don’t Tell to weave together a character’s Why, making conflicts more nuanced and interesting.

Building Connections to Others

Characters connected to nothing and no one are tremendously boring. Gratefully, the Orphan Assassin stereotype is mostly dying out, but I still regularly see characters who have no interesting connections to the other PCs.

Most people have gratefully grasped the Know Two PCs rule, which is a brilliant starting point. Making those connections interesting can be tricky. Look at Nicholas Rush from Stargate: Universe. He has connections with everyone, largely based on his central thesis that Nothing Matters But The Mission. This brutal utilitarianism is both how he evaluated others and himself. This led to definite in-show PvP conflicts, and being left for dead on a planet, but dear ye gods at least it wasn’t boring.

More importantly, his backstory informed why Brutal Utilitarianism was his default, and his relationships reflected this. The consistency of the theme made his character interesting, and a delight to watch.

Connected to Values

Any character worth their salt has Values. Motivations for what they do, often connected to a higher goal. Find the reason why, and build that part of the world.

I ran a D&D game for a rogue, who was absolutely motivated by material wealth. Because his dad was the local crime boss in his port city. This doesn’t sound terribly sympathetic, and could be dull. But now read the description of where they came from:

A glittering web of soaring towers, gothic mansions, houseboats, and sunken warehouses has stretched and fattened across the coastline’s mangroves and peat swamps in a seemingly drunken display of wealth and debauchery.

The over-built port has weighed down whatever solid earth could have ever existed. Inhabitants have solved the problem by building second (and third, and fourth) floors on top of their former houses, creating city-block sized rafts to build on top of, or simply pay exorbitant rates to wizards to magically anchor their villas and businesses above the ever-encroaching sea.

Citizens roam the city over a haphazard collection of bridges ranging from elaborate archways to simple planks running between boats, and often give up entirely to use pontoon boats poled along the roads-turned-canals.

The sprawling cityscape includes few walls and fewer soldiers; defenses for the merchant princes’ enormous wealth comes from a patchwork of privateers, sailing under their benefactor’s flags and tenuously united under the seal of the city and the promise of gold from their liege lords.

The difference between layers of society is glaringly obvious: the lower rungs make do in flooded shacks and rotting boats, while the upper echelons of landed nobility and merchant princes soar above in magnificent spires circled fresh sea breezes and bounty from a dozen lands, safely above the rancid smell of the tide, rotting bogs, and worst of all commoners.

Here, the ladder to wealth is as obvious as it is treacherous, each rung cracking under the strain of in-fighting and entropy, forcing a perpetual climb upwards just to keep pace as the tide (and the ambitious) steal away whatever is in sight.

Suddenly, said rogue is infinitely more sympathetic. He wants wealth because he wants Security. He wants his (adopted) father to be proud of him. He wants to be above water, and stay there, and he’s learned the only way to achieve security is to endlessly scheme, plot, and get ahead, because the tide is always coming in. Building the world around him makes his character interesting, and means other characters can interact with the world that made him.

Building Connections to Character Ability

This one drives me nuts when it doesn’t happen.

I need at least “turned the Wheel of Pain” to justify the Conan the Barbarian 18/00 Strength score. I need for your character’s “natural talent” of being able to Fireball everything in sight to have injured a childhood pet in the past. I need for your character’s abilities to have come from somewhere, affected how you got here, and nudge where you’re going.

Let’s go back to Orphan McNinja. Orphan McNinja trained in a monastery. Cool. Do the world building. “Monastery in a Distant, Foreign Land” doesn’t particularly connect with the rest of the world. “The Lost Golden Lotus Temple, reachable only through the ruined Dragon Pass” gets closer, especially if the Big Bad was the destroyer of the temple. Now add aging refugees and novices from the temple into the world, people who deserve support. Send part of your hard-earned money you don’t need (because Orphan McNinja only needs his hands to murder everyone!) back to the little Golden Lotus neighbourhood created by the mass exodus. Suddenly, this is a rich, interesting backstory because the world around it has been built!

Building Connections to the Story

Sure, we’re saving the world. But why. If your backstory doesn’t include a reason why you’re risking everything to follow the campaign, it strains credibility. The story makes less sense because of your character’s existence. Don’t do that, it’s bad writing, and nothing creates Friction quite like bad writing.

Reasons can differ, but usually this relates to either a Value or a Person, and can be as complex as “Despite my grievances with church doctrine, my faith compels me to take up this righteous cause” or as simple as “My little sister is going, so I’m going”. “The bad guy destroyed my village” is a classic for a reason, but be sure to have meaningful descriptions of the Shire before Saruman put it to the torch. That’s where your backstory becomes world building.

Conclusion

Backstories are World-building First. Act like it. Don’t Write A Book, don’t write a fan-fic; write the why to your character sheet’s what and how, and create the setting to connect the why to the rest of the world.

Don’t get hung up on writing well, don’t be perfect, and frankly leave some gaps for the Game Master to fill with plot later. Just the basics of making a backstory that’s consensually connected to others and the world will make a good character, who will naturally become more interesting over the course of the game. You got this. Just be present and connected.