My Two Standard Fantasy Backstories

 

A lot of folks like to come up with elaborate backstories for their fantasy rpg characters, but you inevitably run into two problems:

 First, your first level character is a bit shit, so the fact that they’re the best and wisest wizard ever whose spent decades researching the most powerful magic ever is... less than credible.

Second, your best adventures should be the ones you have as part of the game, not the ones you had before your career began.

 As a result, I have come up with two basic standard fantasy backstories. You may notice a common motif running through them...

 

Parte the Firste: The Farmer’s Tale

"You were born a farmer. Your parents are farmers. So were their parents. Every morning, you get up in the dark and do farming all day. You plant stuff. You feed stuff. You plough stuff. You milk stuff. You milk a fuck of a lot of stuff. Sometimes the things you're milking kick you in the face. Sometimes, they'll kick over a bucket so you have to milk them again. You fucking hate milking things.
"After you've finished, you sit down long enough to eat a turnip and then go to sleep, sore and tired, just in time to get up again, sore and tired, in the dark, so you can go and milk shit again.
"One day, for a change, they have a harvest fair and there's a guy who's dressed in colours that aren't shit brown and dirt brown. He sings a song about heroes who travel to weird new places and have adventures, woo beautiful nobles and encounter shadowy strangers. At no point are they required to milk anything.
"Inspired, you grab the meagre handful of coins you've managed to scrounge together. It's enough for a threadbare leather jerkin and a dented tin hat and your dad's second-best wood cutting axe that you managed to abscond with.
"The world is strange and weird and dangerous. You don't know anyone and the ground you sleep on is hard and cold and lumpy. You don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you'll get rich and famous and people will sing songs about you. More likely, the first time you meet a monster, you'll probably shit your pants and it'll eat you whole, tin hat and leather coat and all.

 "But at least you won't have to milk the fucking thing."

 

Parte the Seconde: The Soldier’s Tale

The second one’s pretty much the same thing except instead of a harvest fair, a bloke on a horse rides up and says that you have a lord and that he needs able-bodied young people. So you jump at the chance, and they give you a nicer tin hat and a colour-coded tunic and a long stick with a blade on it and teach you to use it for a couple of days before standing you and another bloke next to a bridge.
Before he leaves he goes, “If anyone who’s wearing a different coloured tunic tries to cross the bridge, stab ‘em with the stick”, then he rides off.

So you do that for a bit, and eventually another bloke rides up and tells you the whole lot’s over and he hands you a bag with some coins in it. Eventually, you make your way home and someone’s burned it down and nicked everything. You have no idea what colour tunic they were wearing.

 The only other thing you know how to do is hit people with your stick with a blade on it, and your mate from the bridge tells you there’s money in that, so you shrug and go, “Sure.”

 At least it probably won’t involve milking anything.

 

(Art is Soria Moria by Theodor Kittelson (1881))