The loss of something or someone, or the threat, is a powerful motivator for a character. The loss of a loved one, be it a friend or a family member has been a central theme for stories going back to the earliest days, complaints about “fridging” not withstanding. Hell, a puppy is worth 74 Russian gangsters’ lives according to John Wick — the audience never said “That might be a touch much…”

I’ve always liked to have a set of regular NPCs for the players to interact with when I’ve run games, but that took a sharp set up after I did a five year run of Battlestar Galactica. I loved the Moore version of the show, and thought it captured the desperation and the lack of time to heal that led to some bad decisions by some of the characters, but there was always something missing that I though would have elevated the show (and padded it out better than the “gangsters on this ship” episode of Season 3.) What is it they lost?

Yeah, your civilization is gone and billions died…but what did you lose? When I started the campaign, I realized that would be a central way to motivate and help the players define their characters. First was the idea that everyone would have a military character, and a civilian one. Our first “season” took place before the Cylon attacks. Normal life for the civilians — who were their families and friends? Where did they live? Where did they go to eat out? Normal duties for the military — boring shipping lane patrols, training exercises, law enforcement interdictions. And then, right in the middle of one of the adventures, when they were focused on that particular storyline — tracking some escaped fugitives that put them outside the blast radius of an attack; a missing ship leads to a Cylon fleet stealthing in toward the shipyards at Scorpion; the middle of a breakup with your wife at your favorite cafe — the Cylons strike.

It surprised the players as much as their characters. Suddenly places, things, people that were in their lives are gone, imperiled, or rescued. As the campaign upfolded, we had periodic “flashback episodes” to link to something happening in the rag-tag fleet that might inform a character’s decision-making while still trying to recover from the shock, loss, fear, boredom. Having them run out coffee, cigarettes, alcohol; clothing that was getting frayed and work to the point that uniforms might have a knee blown out on the pants. Not matter how much they made headway to finding Earth, they were losing bits and pieces of their old worlds. 

It was, easily, the best campaign I ever ran. Normally, I like to rotate through games on a semi-regular basis. Once we got into Galactica, it displaced all other games for nearly four years. When finally we wrapped it, I found myself missing the characters and the storyline. It’s been about ten years since that game; it’s still one I frequently think about, and the idea of creating real backstories and NPCs to fill them so that people have things to lose has informed many of the campaigns since. Characters in our Star Trek and Dune games have large NPCs networks of family, friends, contacts.

Creating well fleshed out NPCs for them to interact with also creates a sense of loss when they are either imperiled, die, get reassigned. After three seasons, the loss of a well-liked NPC, our bubbly “I’m French, not Vulcan” science officer (raised on Earth as her father was part of the Vulcan diplomatic mission there) actually did influence the characters and players. They missed her, especially after the relatively gruesome way she was lost. The opportunity to possibly save her two seasons later, felt like a real win, but things were never really the same afterward.

Loss — it’s a good frame for character motivation and development.