In XCC, you're a superstar athlete taking your chances in a live-on-pay-per-view death sport. It’s a modern-day world with a fantasy twist, and the game is simple: the Dungeon Judge, or DJ, creates an artificial dungeon under controlled — but lethal — conditions. Can you survive?
I'm just curious what stories/ situations people have come up with to justify their team composition? The game I'm looking at starting I believe has an elven bard, sorceror and favoured soul, with a human fighter and halfling rogue. I know these players well, and occaisionally they come up with brilliant backstories, and other times they just stare at me dumbly and expect me to have things figured out already. Any suggestions would be great.
There are lots of ways. The simplest would be that they met in a pickup tournament, at say the division IV level (where since its nonlethal, is much more open to adhoc teams). They could have joined the adventurers guild individually, and formed a team thereafter. They could have been individually recruited to form a team for a sponsor, such as a mid-sized company's or town's team.
The back story for our team is that most of us had some experience in the Boffer Leagues and were looking to join/form a team. My character was a star player for USC and used an "AAU" type summer tourny to scout for team members. Some of the participants got picked up by better funded teams. The PCs happened to be the ones my character liked and were actually willing to join a brand new team with no backing or coaching staff. Kind of a grass-roots team building approach. We've added 3 new members (new players to the group) to the team and lost one (he went insane after the dire duck encounter. If you have to know just ask ). We justified this by saying we have an open application for team tryouts on our website and Myspace page. So we actually interview for new members often (just in case anyone drops out or has a character die). The GM is awesome at coming up with crack-pot personalities for us to interview.
We won our first crawl so we are some-what popular in the local area.
The answer to all your problems: Murry the Agent/ Promoter. Murry needs a team to fill a spot in XCrawl (whatever) and all of the normal teams are out for what ever reason. Murry has worked with all of the PCs at one point or another in boffers, as body guards, in guild only compatitons, what ever. He makes some despreate phone calls and promises each PC 50gp to work with the others, plus all the treasure they can carry, to keep his rep intact. I've used this one, or a variation, several times with great sucess.
). We justified this by saying we have an open application for team tryouts on our website and Myspace page. So we actually interview for new members often (just in case anyone drops out or has a character die). The GM is awesome at coming up with crack-pot personalities for us to interview.