New Cabal Cast and Character Development

This past Sunday we pulled together the players for my next local campaign, based on the GURPS Cabal background. I won't be running it until early next year, but I wanted to start getting some ideas down for it, and make it a little more fleshed out than my last couple of local campaigns. For the most part, the idea of this meeting was to make sure all of the characters came in at the campaign value of 300 points, and to see if there were any obvious problems in the dynamics between the characters.

All went relatively smoothly, though the levels of preparation varied dramatically from "entirely GURPS ready with a fully conceived backstory" to "I have an idea for a guy with this power and virtually no background". Special assist credit to our host, Mike H, for helping one of the less prepared guys GURPSify his character while I did the fun part of working with everybody else on details of their backgrounds that will bring things to life. We have a fair amount of overlapping detective skills (and surprisingly, no magic, even with Unlimited Mana as an option!), but a certain amount of redundancy in that area isn't necessarily a Bad Thing.

Between this experience and my work on the Paranoia convention scenario, it reminded me of how the most important thing for me in RPGs is to bring a certain life to the characters. Everything else depends on that. I had some social criticism ideas for TPK, but it didn't truly grab my interest and breathe until I worked out who the player characters were going to be and how they related to each other. It's the same thing with these Cabal characters. Now that I have a sense of who they are by themselves and relative to each other, the story we make together starts to write itself. All I have to do is take some notes and light the path a little so we don't miss the most fun parts.