There’s a pretty specific process I follow when I start a new campaign. That’s what I claim anyway. Because the truth is that I almost never do anything the way I say do it here on this site. And I almost never use my own hacks either. Does that make me a hypocrite? No. Just a liar. And at least I’m honest about that.

And by the way, the advice of liars and hypocrites is no less useful than the advice of others. Neither are their game designs.

The reason why I don’t follow my own advice or use my own systems is simple. It’s that I don’t f$%&ing have to. Mechanics and systems and rules and procedures? That s$&%’s for computers. Or for people who need them. When you’re just learning how to do something, a process or rule is super helpful. But once you get good enough at doing the thing and the rules and processes become second nature, you don’t need them anymore. Moreover, you can start modifying them. Even breaking them. And you can invent your own. I’ve been at this GMing thing for a long f$&%ing time. Long enough that I can handle it without having to follow specific rules and specific procedures. Most of the advice I give and most of the rules and systems I invent, that’s just me codifying the s$&% I already do for the benefit of others. I don’t need to codify the s$&% I already know how to do for myself.

Remember that Whatever Stat thing? Do you think I actually assign specific numerical stats to things and then come up with specific rules for when to increase and decrease those stats? F$&% no. I just scribble down a word or a number and watch what happens in the game and adjust it as I have to. Or I just keep the word or number in my head. And when the number or word seems like it’s changed enough, I just do whatever I do in response. All that bulls$&% about Patience Scores and Whatever Stats? That was for you, not for me.

Remember when I told you how to have a good Session Zero and how to start a campaign? Same thing. I was just trying to describe the things I muddle my way through to start a campaign in some kind of systematic way so someone else could imitate me until they’d done it enough times that they could muddle through it on their own.

Today, I’m writing about how I came up with the pitch for my new campaign. And once I start the real article, I’m going to make all sorts of claims about my process. And the necessary deviations I made from that said process. It’ll all sound very rote and systematic. But those of you who’ve read this Long, Rambling Introduction™ will know that it’s all bulls$%&. You’ll know I just muddled my way through like I always do to get where I wanted to get.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll take a lesson from that and stop e-mailing me to clarify and expound on every damned thing I write like it’s a legal f$&%ing precedent. E-mail Crawford if you want that s$&%. I want you to think for your own f$&%ing self.

Ringing in the New Game

Guess what? I’m starting a new campaign this month. Technically, I started starting it last month. But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, I know y’all just love yourselves examples and object lessons. And I know y’all love getting glimpses of what I’m doing at my table. So I thought I’d tell you how I came up with the pitch for my upcoming Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 campaign entitled New Horizons. Or Year of the Comet. I still haven’t finalized the name. Maybe I’ll use the standard video game colon-and-subtitle approach and call it Dungeons & Dragons: 3.5: New Horizons: Year of the Comet. But who gives a f$&% what it’s called.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you know how I start a campaign. First, I send my players a pitch that describes, in broad strokes, what the game’s going to be about. If the players agree that the pitch sounds like it’ll make for a fun game, I expand the pitch enough so the players can start making characters and so that I can start making the first adventure. Then, they make the characters and I make the adventure and we get started.

If you’ve been with me a while, you also know that I like to hold this Session Zero thing before I come up with the pitch. A Session Zero’s where I get all the players together and trick them into telling me what sort of game they want to play by having a totally normal conversation with them. Which is something normal humans do when they want to learn about other humans. And I do that even if I know the players pretty well. Or think I do. And it works a hell of a lot better than asking the players what they want in a game.

Remember, you can trust people to tell you when they like something. You can’t trust them to explain why. And you should never, ever ask people to predict what they’ll like. Because they suck at it. If you want to find out whether people will like something, shove it in front of them and ask them if they do like it.

This whole process is very goal-oriented. And the goal is a simple one. It’s not to plan out a campaign. It’s not to set expectations. It’s not to get player buy-in. It’s not for collaborative world-building purposes. It’s there to get a game started with the least amount of work possible. To start a campaign, you only need two things. You need a bunch of player-characters and you need a first adventure. The characters and the adventure have to fit together though. So you have to tell the players how to make the right kinds of characters. And the players have to be willing to make those characters and play that adventure. Which means they have to be happy with the game. Even excited about it. Which is why you show them a pitch. And if the players reject your pitch, it’s back to the drawing board. So it’s best to write a pitch you’re pretty sure the players will approve.

And, at the very least, if the players rebel later, you can point out that they signed off on the pitch before you tell them to either shut up and play or find a new table so you can go play video games instead.

Anyway, when I start a game, all I want to do is start the game. I want characters coming together for an adventure and I want an adventure. The less work I have to do to get there, the better off I am. Usually. I mean, I also don’t want a crap game. Otherwise, I’d save myself even more work and just run published adventures in published settings.

This article’s about how I came up with the pitch for my campaign. And how I had to change s$&% up because I couldn’t have a Session Zero this time around. At least, I didn’t. “Couldn’t” might be too strong a word. And despite not having a Session Zero, the players still approved my pitch and thus my perfect batting average on pitches remains intact.

Because, when I pitch, I bat a thousand.

Not Starting at Zero…

I bog my articles down enough with rambling bulls$&% as it is. I’m not going to bog this one down with superfluous detail too. Suffice to say I couldn’t have a Session Zero this time around. Which isn’t usually a problem. I’ve gone without Session Zeroes before. They aren’t necessary. They just increase the odds the players will give my first pitch the thumbs-up.

But I didn’t want to totally skip the pre-pitch session this time because my table was laden with some… baggage. First, while I’d been running on-and-off games for three of the players involved for a while, we had a new player. Someone who’s playstyle I didn’t know too much about. And second, the players had some trust issues. With me. See, what with one thing and another, I’ve proven to be pretty unreliable as a GM over the last eighteen months. We’d started several games and each one had died prematurely. And, in the end, we’d stopped gaming for a long time because I burned out. Actually, I rather spectacularly crashed and burned.

So, my pitch had to satisfy a completely new player I’d never run a game for and it had to reassure my three existing players that we’d actually see the game through. And, frankly, a Session Zero would have helped a lot. But you don’t waste time crying over resources you don’t have. You just do the best with what you gots.

But before I gave any thought to what the chucklehead players might want from my game, I had to figure out what I wanted from my game. And what I could actually rely on myself to pull off. I mean, at this point, I had trust issues in myself. I tend to plan really big, but I’ve botched too many executions. I had to set my sights a little lower.

First, I put a time limit on the game. I told myself — and promised my players — that I’d only plan a three-month campaign. Three months of regular weekly play. Thirteen sessions. That’s all I’d have to work with. Now, that didn’t mean the game actually had to end at the thirteen-session mark. Just that we had to be able to walk away after thirteen sessions and feel like the whole game had been tied up with a nice, neat bow on top. I could petition the players to renew the game for another season, as it were, and keep going with new story lines and new adventures, but I’d have to win that renewal from them. And if they didn’t want to keep going, the game had to be over.

Second, I couldn’t let the game turn into work. I explained what happened back in my New Year’s Resolution article, but I’ll forgive you if you skipped that rambling piece of crap. Basically, the last campaign I’d run for this group — or any group — before I crashed and burned was a D&D 5E campaign. And I spent all of my time developing new rules and systems and fixing D&D 5E and testing ideas for future articles. Now, that worked out well for all of you. You got companions out of it and you’ll get downtime rules and a bunch of other s$&% over the coming weeks. But it didn’t work out so great for me. Because it killed my for-fun game and cost me my players’ trust. You’re f$&%ing welcome.

All right, all right. That was totally my fault. I’m a tinkerer. But sometimes, you just have to relax and have fun. And that’s what I wanted to do with this game. Just relax and have fun. That meant I couldn’t run D&D 5E. That’s what I write about. What I make content for. What I’m trying to fix. So D&D 5E isn’t fun for me. And I didn’t want to learn a whole new system either. That’d be too much work for a for-fun game. And whatever system I did run, I’d have to run it by-the-book. No new systems. No hacks. No rewrites. No house rules documents. Nothing apart from the normal rulings and tweaks that happen during the normal course of play. Maybe a variant rule or two.

Resolved to just run a by-the-book game for fun, I had to figure out how to get some Session Zero information out of my players without actually having a Session Zero.

First, I threw a bunch of genres out there and asked the players to prioritize them. That way, we’d all feel like medieval fantasy was a choice and not a default. See, I’d been through the genre thing with three of these four players before. And I knew how it’d shake out. It’s not that fantasy is everyone’s favorite, but it’s the only thing we all have in common among our top-three favorite genres. And I knew the new guy wasn’t going to change anything. And I was right. He had a completely different top three from everyone else’s. Fantasy is the only favorite we all share. So fantasy it was.

Next, I posed the following question to each player and asked them to send me their answer in private:

Using only single words or short phrases, not sentences or prose, list ten qualities that describe a great fantasy campaign.

I know what you’re going to say. I broke my own rule. I asked my players to predict what they would like. But I did it in a very clever, specific way. I gave them a highly constrained blank page to work with. When you ask someone to generate a list like that, they usually dash off the first few items without thinking too hard. And after they get off their few knee-jerk, automatic answers, they stare at the list and struggle until they finally just fill it with whatever weird thoughts pop into their heads. Which means you’re short-circuiting their conscious brain. Sometimes, their conscious brain will sneak in an answer or two about a third of the way down the list, but all the rest of the answers are either automatic or random thoughts. It’s not a perfect system, but it works well enough in a pinch.

Sculpting a Clay Tapestry

So, what did I get back from the players? I can’t show you the actual lists, but I’ll show you the patterns. Here’s the things that appeared on all or most of the players’ lists:

• Exploration
• Wonder/fantasy
• Growth through gameplay
• Progression
• Low fantasy/low magic
• Player empowerment and player skill
• Humble beginnings/rags-to-riches
• Living, detailed world
• Relationships between the characters and with the NPCs of the world

Now, if there’s one thing that’s obvious from that list, it’s that I had the right group of players for my tastes.

We did have to settle one weird issue by having an actual discussion. And that was reconciling the call for wonder and fantasy with the idea of a low magic and low fantasy world. Honestly, I was 90% sure I knew what the hell my players were driving at. I just wanted to confirm it. And I did.

Basically, they wanted low magic, low fantasy civilizations — and player characters, by extension — in a magical and fantastic world. It’s that underworld and overworld thing I’ve harped on about a few times now. Basically, they wanted a J.R.R. Tolkien or G.R.R. Martin approach. There’s magic in the world. And even people who can wield that magic. But they’re rare. There aren’t wizard academies and bard colleges. Priests can’t heal everything. Non-humans are rare and special and mostly stay out of the human world. Except for the adventurers.

That cleared up, it was time for me to take those disparate pieces of clay and sculpt them into an elegant tapestry.

Picking a System

First thing’s first. I had to pick a game system. And that was a really easy choice. We’d chosen a genre already — fantasy — and I didn’t want to learn a new system. Now, I’ve run a lot of different fantasy systems over the years, but, come on, if you want to not learn a new system and you want to run fantasy, you’re going to use some edition of D&D. Or maybe Pathfinder. I’d recently remembered what I actually thought of 13th Age and I sure as hell wouldn’t touch anything powered by the Apocalypse for long-term play. Even short-term long-term play. So it was going to be D&D or Pathfinder.

Initially, I toyed with heading back to the halcyon days of my youth and running AD&D 2E or BECMI Dungeons & Dragons, but neither of those systems has aged well. In the year 2000, design elegance came to RPGs and I don’t ever want to game without it again. Sorry.

In the end, it was down to D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder. And once it was down to just those two, there really wasn’t any choice. It had to be D&D 3.5. Pathfinder didn’t fit the bill at all. And I’m just going to leave that statement there as if it’s self-evident and leave all y’all to wonder why I wouldn’t run “D&D 3.5, but fixed and better.” Keep sending those e-mails kids. My delete key hasn’t worn out yet.

And since you asked, yes, I would absolutely love to hear why I picked the wrong system and why your favorite system is so much better. Post a comment. I’m sure it’ll survive an encounter with my +5 battleaxe of irrational moderation.

Settling on a Setting

Next, setting. That was another easy choice. If I’m going to run a game, I’m going to run it in a homebrew setting. And I already have a homebrew fantasy setting that works perfectly for games like this. I call it the Angryverse. Actually, I don’t call it that. But if I called it anything else, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

And if you somehow don’t know what I’m talking about anyway, let me explain. The Angryverse is my default fantasy setting. For almost a decade, I’ve been running most of my homebrew fantasy games there. That said, it’s not really a setting. It’s just a pile of setting elements that I can mix and match and remix and rematch however I want. There’s a loose, historical timeline, a few different eras of play, a dozen or so different regional cultures, a bunch of nations, a handful of major religions, and so on. Sure, the s$&% changes a bit from game to game, but the song remains mostly the same. And since I originally built it for a D&D game, that means all the standard races and classes have a place in it. Except f$&%ing gnomes.

The Angryverse is low-fantasy by its nature. Especially in its Age of Darkness. That’s the standard fantasy world dark age that follows the collapse of the great empires of the past. Civilization’s fractured, travel’s dangerous, trade has broken down, and the civilized non-human races have very limited contact with the rest of the world. The old orders and organizations and hierarchies of the past have fractured too with the loss of imperial infrastructure and secure trade and travel. So, local churches are mostly doing their own thing and the old arcane colleges and knightly orders that flourished during the Age of Empires have fractured and crumbled too. Those traditions survive only in isolated chapter houses or passed along from lone master to student through the ages.

Of course, I’d want to move the temporal dial a little further into the future. The world has started to recover. Travel’s picking up, trade’s resuming, the non-humans are emerging from their hidey-holes, and the world is ripe for exploration and discovery. Or re-exploration and re-discovery. Maybe I need to name a new age. But what would you call a global, cultural rebirth following a dark age? The Age of Rediscovery?

Anyway…

Playing with Playstyle

So, the two easy choices were easily made. Now I had to contend with something more difficult. Playstyle. See, playstyle’s a hard thing to define. It’s so broad and loose. And it defies terminology because any terms you apply to it are descriptive rather than prescriptive. It’s another one of those things that are best described with loose, vague prose. Or with lists of words and phrases that are hard to define but nonetheless, everyone knows what they mean.

Normally, when I run D&D campaigns, I have an overarching story to tie the game together. Usually something epic. Not quite “save the world” in scope and scale, but close to that. Something urgent. Something that drives the action forward. But whatever epic plot I come up with, I have to wrap it up in thirteen sessions. And I’m pretty sure I can’t f$&%ing do that. So the best way to ensure my dangling plot won’t be hanging out, unresolved, for all the world to see in three months is just not to have a dangling plot at all.

Normally, when I run a D&D campaign, I like to limit the setting to an area of adventure around a home base. You know, a city the players come back to after their adventures. That way, I can keep adding details to the setting as the players build stronger relationships with the NPCs. It helps me bring the world to life. But my players, bless their f$&%ing hearts, want to explore the world and trot the globe. So f$&% that, I guess.

On top of that, my players made these noises about empowerment and growth and progression. And that tells me they want to set the pace of the game. A little bit, anyway. See, I have to be really careful when I say “player-paced game” because some GMs take that s$&% to a ludicrous extreme that most players can’t handle and don’t want.

Speaking of bad GMing advice and the noises people make, I know some of you are probably making noises that sound like “hex crawl” and “West F%&$ing Marches” right now. And those are terrible noises to make. You didn’t read anything I said my players said, did you? Hex crawls are, to an extent, about exploration. But it’s a very down-and-dirty, gritty sort of exploration. Tromping through the wilderness, one hex at a time, clearing monster lairs and plundering ruins, that’s a kind of exploration, sure. But that’s not globe-trotting. Or wonderful. Or fantastic. It’s mostly just very violent cartography and note-taking. And it doesn’t leave a lot of room for experiencing a living, breathing world and forming relationships either.

My players want to visit new lands and meet new people. They don’t want to write their own adventures one hex at a time, they just want their adventures to carry them to interesting new places. They want action and wonder and fantasy. They don’t want to crawl, mile by mile, through one patch of terrain after another. That s$&% can fall into the background.

What I’m looking at here is an adventure-of-the-week style campaign with lots of traveling. The PCs follow their fortunes from city to city, town to town, and land to land. Each offers some exciting opportunities for exploration and adventure. They stay there for a while, adventuring, and then follow the wild winds of fortune to their next port of call. And the sense of progression comes from traveling farther and farther afield. First, hopping by foot or by horseback from one kingdom to the next, then sailing as passengers from port to port, then maybe buying a ship of their own and sailing wherever they want, and then maybe piloting their own airship. If I decide airships are a thing. Which I won’t. Because airships are steampunk, spellpunk, high-fantasy bulls$&%. Unless there’s only one airship in the world and it was hidden by the ancients who built it under some desert somewhere.

That said, thirteen sessions probably won’t be enough to recover the only airship in the world. But that idea alone might ensure my campaign is renewed at least through season three.

Characterizing Character Creation

I had one last thing to figure out before I could smash everything together into something resembling a pitch. And that was how we’d make characters. Mechanically, there wasn’t much to say of course. I’m running a by-the-book game of D&D 3.5 with minimal modifications. Standard character creation would work just fine. As for options? Well, I’m smart enough to know you start with the core options only, maybe add a supplement — two at most — that your campaign absolutely needs, and then you rip out any of the s$&% that you don’t absolutely need. And since my campaign is standard, fantasy fare, it doesn’t need any sourcebooks or supplements. So I’m starting with core-only, vanilla D&D 3.5 and the only things I have to rip out are gnomes and monks. Everything else is cool.

And yes, I know you’d never consent to play in such a limited game. You can skip the comment. I didn’t invite you anyway. And that’s your loss.

But there’s more to character creation than mechanics. Unfortunately. You know how players are with things like backstories and goals these days. They can’t just start playing a character and, you know, discover it through play. Nonetheless, I’d need to establish some rules. I like to tell my players what they should come up with, character-wise, and what they shouldn’t bother with. And thus, if they bother with it anyway, it’s my God-given right to ignore it.

First, individual character goals weren’t going to work. That is to say, I couldn’t have the players bringing me a bunch of characters with specific goals in mind. No avenging dead parents. No reclaiming lost kingdoms. No establishing their own churches. None of that crap. If I wasn’t sure I could wrap up one story I had complete control over in thirteen weeks, I sure as hell wasn’t going to promise to wrap up four other peoples’ stories in that same time.

But the characters needed something to drive them forward. Unmotivated characters aren’t characters. They’re just game constructs. And this is where the difference between motivations and goals is extremely important. A goal is a specific endpoint. It’s a plan. Something you can finish. A motivation is a drive or desire that’s never finished. “Fight evil” is a motivation. “Kill Satan” is a goal. “Wealth” is a motivation. “Pay off the mortgage on my family’s estate” is a goal. See the difference?

So, every player would need to give me a motivation, not a goal. Something that’d drive their character to adventure. Moreover, each character would also need a motivation that would take them from home. Or else, they’d need two motivations. “Travel the world,” for example, “and fight evil.” Or “earn glory and fame throughout the world.” Or “amass wealth and leave this pathetic backwater far behind me.”

As for personal histories and backstories and that kind of s$&%? Well, they wouldn’t really have much use in this game, would they? The players wanted a game about growth through gameplay. And about exploration. And about building organic relationships. And they’d be leaving their homelands very quickly besides. And my players also told me they wanted to play through a “from humble origins,” “rags-to-riches” story. So, what the hell kind of backstories would the characters need? “I was born on a farm and hated it. Then the mad old wizard on the edge of town took me in as an apprentice. But after I learned the basics from him, it became clear that he was either holding out on his secrets or else he just wasn’t that powerful. So, I decided to head out into the wider world to build up my power and knowledge.” Anything more than that would be a waste.

But…

A few of the players mentioned they’d like to have some established relationships between the party members. It’s nice to have some bonds of kinship holding the party together. And I’d totally agree if that weren’t a completely terrible idea in general and if it didn’t totally wreck the whole growth-through-play underpinning of the game itself.

Thing is, I’m a big old softie at heart and I’ve never been one to tell my players “no” just because they have a terrible id… nope. I couldn’t finish typing that sentence without retching.

I wanted to have my cake and to eat it too. Which is a stupid phrase because the only reason to have a cake is to eat it. Anyone who just wants to own cake is a moron.

What I needed was a way to let the characters have preexisting relationships that could get totally shoved aside by the organic relationships the players built by actually playing their f$&%ing characters. So, I stole an idea from the oldest days of the Fate RPG.

First, I’d assume the players all grew up in or around the same hometown.

Then, I’d ask each player to come up with an event from their character’s formative, childhood years. Something that’d be important to the character’s development, but not big enough to shake their hometown. The death of a parent, an accident, a bout of illness, a conflict with a rival, a prestigious apprenticeship, something like that. They’d write a one- or two-sentence description of the event. No more. And then I’d take those events and shuffle them up and give each to another player. The recipient would then add one or two sentences about how their character got involved in the event. Maybe they provided comfort to the character through the event. Or maybe they sought out the rival and made them back down. Or maybe they resented being passed over for the prestigious apprenticeship that went to the character. I’d then take the events and shuffle them up one more time and pass them to one more player each. They’d add one or two sentences more, and then I’d return the full story to the original player. And existing relationships would thus be established.

Of course, I’d carefully review and curate everything. I’m not an idiot.

Now, these would all be childhood events. At some point after the events in question, but several years before the start of the campaign, the characters would have gone their separate ways. They’d have spent the next few years training or studying or doing whatever they had to do to, you know, gain a level in a class. And then, years later, at the start of the campaign, they’re reunited for the first time. Thus, each player can make of those childhood events whatever they wish. Some characters may have let them go and moved on, trying to start fresh relationships. Others might still be holding on to those established ties. That way, each character has a starting point for the relationship, but they still get to basically meet each other character for the first time too.

There’s the Windup, Now the Pitch

The actual pitch I came up with was really simple. As befits a casual, for-fun, core only, adventure-of-the-week D&D 3.5 campaign. It really comprises just two main elements.

First, the characters all hail from the same hometown. It’s in a small, out-of-the-way kingdom in an isolated corner of the Angryverse during the Age of Darkness. Most of the strife that came along with the fall of Zethinia, the holy wars in Alqaad, and the fracturing of Zhou actually passed the kingdom by. Once it was an occupied Zethinian province, but when it’s silver mines were tapped out, it was forgotten and left to fend for itself. The people are hardy and self-sufficient and got on fairly well, apart from the usual troubles that befall frontier kingdoms in fantasy worlds. The whole kingdom itself embodies the “from humble beginnings” trope. It’s a forgotten backwater. There’s roads through the mountains into the wild Western Kingdoms and south to the Principalities of the Jagged Coast and, now that civilization is recovering, ships sail for central Zethinia and points beyond from the kingdom’s small port town.

I didn’t come up with too many details about the kingdom though. I wanted to leave myself room to fill the kingdom with whatever I’d need to make the characters work. If someone wanted to play a barbarian, I could add tribes of hill people. If I had a paladin, I could add a citadel that’s keeping the old knightly traditions alive. A wizard would need a mad old magician who lives on the edge of town. That kind of thing.

The second element is the Festival of the Harbinger. See, the characters grew up in the same hometown, right? Or near it. Or at least visited it frequently in their youth. But then, they went their separate ways and earned a level in a character class for a decade or whatever. Having completed their training, whatever that means, they’ve decided it’s time to head out into the wider world to seek their fortunes. But before that, they’ve returned to their hometown for a visit. Because it’s the Year of the Harbinger.

Every ten years, I decided, or maybe it’s fifty years, this comet appears in the sky, right? Right at the turning of the year. And it always appears in a different constellation. Tradition holds that its appearance foretells the events of the coming decade. Or half-century. Whatever. So, it’s a big to-do. And a great chance for the characters to say goodbye to their hometowns. Or just get stuck for a few days on their way somewhere else if they have no sentimental attachment to their hometown.

Thematically, the appearance of the future-predicting comet establishes something of the magic of the world. It’s a mystical, celestial event beyond the control of humans. And it’d be impossible in the real world. Comets can’t appear just anywhere in the sky. Certainly, they can’t appear in radically different places during their otherwise regular-as-clockwork orbit of the sun. And they can’t predict the future. But in the Angryverse, they can. And the people of the world watch the event with hope — and possibly dread — because they know they’re beholden to the forces of fate and destiny. So it’s also humbling.

Incidentally, I love doing s$&% like the impossible comet just to f$&% with the brains of scientifically-minded players. I once utterly f$%&ing broke a player by explaining the Angryverse has no time zones. It’s always the same time, wherever you are, and the sun reaches its zenith at the same time everywhere in the world. “That’s impossible,” he moaned. “How can that possibly work?” I told him that it works very well. It’s much easier than having to keep track of time zones and no deity with any sense would do it any other way.

Symbolically, the comet marks the beginning of a new chapter in the world’s story. Thus, it also marks the start of the first chapter in the characters’ stories. Which is why they don’t need complex backstories.

And no GM with any sense would create a game that wanted for complex backstories.