Happy Storyteller Saturday! This is your invitation to tell me a little bit of backstory for one of your characters that exists in your head but isn't included in the story that character features in.
oooh, thank you for the ask!!! it's been so long since I've gotten a STS ask!
Hmmmm. This is a hard one. I think I'll go with Val, since their backstory never comes up in the one scene I've written with them, and (unlike Zara, whose backstory was decided by the DM) I did actually come up with their backstory.
Val (full name Kyron Valris) is a tiefling, and they grew up in a town called Xen. In the semi-recent past, Xen had been heavily contaminated by the Hells, corrupting the soil and water, and overall just making it a shitty place to live. So after that was fixed, there was definitely some lingering resentment towards tieflings. Because of that, a lot of them joined up into gangs, in order to both protect themselves and extract some measure of revenge.
Val was a member of one of those gangs (known as the Horned Serpents) for probably about a decade, from the age of about 7 to the age of 17. However, they disagreed with the unnecessary violence that some of the newer gang leaders were starting to show. So they made a deal with the town guards. They betrayed the gang, leading to the capture of several key members.
Some escaped, though, and they hunted Val down. They broke Val's horns, a as sign to others that they were not to be trusted. Then they told Val to get the hell out of Xen and never come back.
Val did leave, and ended up joining the crew of a smuggling ship, as that was the only place they could find work. Eventually, they gained enough money to buy their own small ship (which they named the Devil's Scorn) and begin doing their own smuggling operation.
Despite the illegal nature of their work, Val has strong principles, and refuses to take jobs that they think will result in large amounts of harm to innocent people. In fact, a lot of their smuggling involves smuggling things to people who need them, or even smuggling people themselves.
That was one reason that they were so intrigued when they heard about a crew of adventurers looking to hire a ship to chase down the most feared pirate in the world. When they heard that an innocent man had been kidnapped, they couldn't bring themself to walk away. They had helped Wolf once before, and regretted it ever since. If there was a way to make things right, to save even just one person from her cruelty, then they had to try.
(For context, Val was my temporary character who I played in Rook's campaign after he got kidnapped. They were the only captain insane enough to take on the job. And lucky for the party! The Devil's Scorn was just fast enough to catch up to Wolf's ship before Rook died of sepsis in her hold.)
((As an added bonus, they're a hexblade warlock, and their patron is a young eldritch horror who finds humanoids genuinely fascinating and wants to study them. His name is Kaz (short for Kazithar), and he's basically a kid on the playground with an ant farm. Val is one of his ants/warlocks.))
(((As for the story of how they helped Wolf, basically early in their captaincy they took a job for her and she totally lied about the nature of it, in regards to both what item they were sent to fetch and what was guarding it. A bunch of Val's crew died, and many others were hurt. And to make matters worse, Wolf screwed them over on payment too. Val has felt very guilty about the whole thing, not just because of their crew, but also because they could tell that the item they helped her retrieve was not as inane as she claimed it was. They often wonder how much harm they (unknowingly) helped her to commit by procuring it for her.)))
