This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction
The first exercise I use is called That Was Me! I learned this technique from a friend as we started a Curse of Strahd campaign. For That Was Me!, each player (including the GM), writes down 2 or 3 summaries of something that a player character in the group did during the group’s shared past. I find it helps that you, as the GM, create one to two examples per player character and share those with the group before you ask the other players to each write one to two more That Was Me! summaries. (In future posts, I’ll provide examples from a D&D, a Night’s Black Agents, and a The One Ring campaigns I’ve run as well as discuss how they shaped our campaign).
Once you have all the That Was Me! contributions, you read them out loud and have players claim them by saying “That was me!” Once a player has claimed a That Was Me!, they sit out the rest of that round, and you continue reading them until everyone has claimed one. If you need to, start reading unclaimed That Was Me! summaries from the beginning and work through the batch again. Once everyone has claimed one, you continue reading so that everyone can claim a second That Was Me!.
I explain to players that while it’s most common to choose a That Was Me! that speaks to them and their early conception of their character, it’s also useful and interesting to choose a That Was Me! that seems completely out of character. It could be a latent aspect of that character which will emerge over time. Or it could be uncharacteristic one-off, which in itself makes for a great story as well as defining who that character isn’t.
Before you write any That Was Me! summaries and ask your other players to do the same, you should decide on a context: How do the player characters know each other? Have they been working for an individual or organization, or all belong to an organization? Did they all grow up together? Have they been pursuing the same goal and have teamed up? Have they never met each other but have all been participants in the same shared dreams?1 (If you go with the dreams, give them context for those dreams such as they were all traveling to a pilgrimage site, or soldiers in an army on the march, or guardians of an artifact. Something concrete and tangible even if the shared dreams involve absurd dream logic.)
Deciding on the context of that shared past helps everyone imagine that past.
In the first D&D campaign I used That Was Me! with, we’d established that the PCs had all signed up to work for an Adventurer’s Guild — the ruler of their kingdom had been an adventurer herself, and she decided that such a guild could harness the adventurous to the kingdom’s benefit. The player characters had all been with the guild doing jobs for six months to a year. They’d worked together in smaller groups, and over time they became an effective team, so they got assigned bigger jobs as a group.
For the past 3 months from the in-game day our campaign started, they’d been assigned to assessors taking population censuses and identifying needs of communities. I told them their last assignment was traveling through a mountain range that marked the northern border of their realm, and that the first adventure would begin on their return trip. (At that point, they would be free to keep taking jobs through the Adventurer’s Guild or strike off on their own.) Creating this shared past with a context, also gave us the opportunity to kick off our first play session with a threat the PCs needed to respond to.
In the next Forget the Tavern post, I’ll share the some of the That Was Me! scenarios I provided the other players in that D&D campaign and discuss how some of them became ongoing touchstones throughout the campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 2
- I’m thinking of using this shared dream version if I ever run The Fortune’s Wheel Planescape 5e D&D campaign. In it, the PCs wake up with amnesia in Sigil’s mortuary. The logic of the narrative as written is that the PCs will band together because they 1) woke up together, and 2) will want to find out who they are together, although there are plenty of options for them to split up before someone promises to help them figure out who they are. Sure, the social contract of playing in a published campaign means the PCs will likely stick together.
However, waking up in a room with a bunch of other people not knowing who you or anyone else in the room is but you know you’ve had multiple dreams — clearly dreams rather than memories — involving these people provides a far better reason for the PCs to remain banded together once they escape the mortuary. ↩︎