PDA

View Full Version : I need help building a Good Backstory (Pathfinder-Campaign-Setting-Specific)



Archpaladin Zousha
2013-03-05, 02:45 PM
I'm trying to come up with a coherent backstory for a character I'm creating for an upcoming Carrion Crown game. There's three distinct elements I know I want:

The character is a squire or even officially dubbed Knight of Ozem (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Knights_of_Ozem), being an inquisitor of Iomedae (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Iomedae) (I don't think I'll need the actual prestige class, as that effectivelly kills the character's spellcasting progression, and having spells like speak with dead and atonement are going to be important to me).

The character is a dhampir (vanilla kind).

The character was born into House Graydon (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/House_Graydon), some of Barstoi's most fiercely loyal knights, before Cilas Graydon broke ties with Count Neska (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Aericnein_Neska) and fled to the Palatinates (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Palatinates).

What I'd like to do is combine these into something that's plausible. The basic skeleton of the idea is that the character's mother was attacked by a vampire while she was pregnant with him. I haven't figured out just what the circumstances of the rest of the birth were, but the catch is that Lord Graydon was desperate to save his firstborn child, and so he followed some advice of a friend of his (preferrably Petros Lorrimor (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Petros_Lorrimor), depending on the timeline) and had an ecumenical group of priests perform a kind of mass-blessing on the child, allowing him to be born with little trouble. This, along with the Graydons' rejection of Count Neska's tyranny and subsequent exile in the Palatinates, seeing an alternative to the bickering of nobles, was what inspired him to eventually travel to Lastwall and petition to join the Knights of Ozem. He feels Ustalav (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ustalav) has forgotten all Iomedae and the Shining Crusade (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Shining_Crusade) did for them, and it's time for a reminder. And once he learns that the Whispering Way is responsible for the death of his friend, Professor Lorrimor, he's going to hunt them down relentlessly.

The big problem here is time. According to the Advanced Race Guide, dhampir mature and age at a rate identical to elves, so it's more than likely the character would have been born even before Professor Lorrimor was, and to have actually lived through events like the War Without Rivals, seeing as how by the time the game starts the character would be at least 120 years old.

Depending on this, Petros may or may not be the person who inspired Lord Graydon to bring in more than just priests of Pharasma, and that it was possible for his son to have a relatively normal life. And it also affect the character's potential relationship with Cilas Graydon in Broken Moon. Is he the character's father? Brother? Great-great-nephew? And if it's before the War Without Rivals (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/War_Without_Rivals), there's the religious element as well, as Barstoi (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Barstoi) enforces mandatory practice of Pharasma (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pharasma), and worshiping Iomedae would probably be viewed as treason, which is punishable by death, if they didn't just execute the kid at birth for being a dhampir.

I feel like these are kind of disparate elements, that would require some serious mental gymnastics to make into a believable backstory. Also, is Ambrose an acceptable name for someone who was born in Ustalav or does it sound too "Western European?"