Salvagers of the Savage Seas!

Brainstorming as a group with the GM can lead to an unexpected campaign full of promise.  That’s what our RPG group discovered at our weekly session last Friday.

Going in to the session we had all decided to end an OD&D campaign that had been running for about five months.  The question was, what next?  The GM offered us a choice of six different campaigns to choose from via e-mail.  The majority wanted to play Rolemaster but everyone was ho-hum about Forgotten Realms which was the setting the GM wanted to use with the Rolemaster system.

After busting our brains searching for a setting everyone would like, someone at the table suggested that we approach the problem from a different angle.  We should all in turn talk about what sort of character we wanted to play and any backstory ideas that we had.

We went around the table and the GM used the chalkboard to list our character concepts.  What followed was a rapid-fire session between us and the GM where he would take our concepts and throw back at us genres, story ideas, or even TV shows and movies that our characters as a group seemed to fit into.  We would in turn adjust our characters to better fit story ideas, and the GM would adjust the story ideas, and so forth.

We went through many variations:  Blackmailed thieves, Ocean’s Eleven (with both the George Clooney and Frank Sinatra versions–one girl at the table giggled at the mention of Sinatra), the A-Team, Firefly, pirates, and finally a group of salvagers.

So here is what we came up with:

We are a salvage team, not pirates. We salvage ships, hunt for treasure, and even hire out for the odd job–and maybe even take on passengers or cargo at times. Our jobs and treasure hunting invariably put us in the paths of pirates who we have to fend off, and sometimes pits us against unscrupulous rivals who would do violence against us given the chance. Sometimes–if neccessary and we decide to–we have to skirt around the law to achieve our aims.