Simple Background

The Simple Background option is a multiple-choice, choose-your-own-adventure-style backstory builder.

Origins

By the mid 1800s, the British Empire was the vast empire on which the sun never set. Its navy ruled the seas, its factories belched smoke into darkening skies, and its reach extended to every corner of the globe. The Great Exhibition of 1851 proudly displayed the marvels of industry-steam engines, telegraphs, iron bridges-heralding an age of progress. But for all its triumphs, the spoils of empire were not shared equally. The wealthy few dined in gilded halls, while the poor toiled in soot-choked cities, their children pressed into labor, their lives traded for coal and coin. This is the world that raised you. The Old World.

This was the world of your parents. They were...

• You never knew them
• Criminals
• Laborers
• Merchants
• Aristocracy

Childhood

The first stirrings of unrest came in 1866, when Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck was assassinated. You may have seen the headline in the broadsheets, perhaps, or heard it discussed in loud opinion, or quieter worry. By 1868, Prussia was marching south, uniting the German states under a single banner and tilting the balance of Europe. But for most in Britain, these were distant affairs, and life carried on.

For a child, the world was much smaller still. It was chimney pots and cobbled streets, or else hedgerows and country fog. It was the scrape of the workhouse spoon, the sting of the cane, the clatter of boots on factory floors-or the rarer luxury of ink-stained fingers and well-worn books.

However you came through it, childhood left its mark. How did you spend yours?

• An Orphanage
• School of Hard Knocks
• Worked as a child laborer
• Enrolled in School, or private tutelage
• Playing in the woods in the countryside

Adolescence

In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War erupted. Prussia annihilated the French army, annexing eastern France, the Low Countries, and most of France's colonial holdings. Amid the collapse, revolution gripped Paris.

The People's Commune seized power, abolishing the monarchy and casting down centuries of rule. What followed became known as La Semaine Sanglante, Bloody Week, as Communards rounded up nobles, clergy, and loyalists. Executions stained the streets. Mansions burned. Thousands were put to death in the name of revolution.

But it was not the violence that frightened Europe most. It was the ideas that came with it. The Commune called for women's suffrage, the end of child labor, the dismantling of inherited wealth, and the transfer of factories into the hands of those who worked them. Education, they declared, should be free. Labor, dignified. The aristocracy, obselete.

Across the Channel, Britain watched with a mixture of horror and fascination. The broadsheets dripped with warnings of chaos and moral decay. In parlors and pulpits alike, voices fretted over what might follow should such ideas take root in proper English soil.

Among the youth, the stirrings of revolution landed differently. From the factory girls to the chimney sweeps, from the breaker boys to the help downstairs, the Commune's victory had a nice ring to it. It promised that a body's station was not fixed by birth, that one might rise by one's own hand rather than wait upon another's leavings. But to the sons and daughters of the well-born, it felt instead like a sentence handed down before the trial had begun. What, after all, was fair in condemning a child for the house he happened to be born in? They had not built the world they stood to inherit, had not chosen the name they carried nor the wealth that came attached to it, and yet revolution seemed to judge them guilty all the same. Many among them sympathized, in truth, with the call for fairness and reform. But it struck them as a curious sort of fairness, one that forgave a boy his poverty while damning another for his birth, and they recoiled from the fire, the bloodshed, and the chaos that seemed forever its companion.

What best describes you in your youth:

• A Loner: you kept to yourself, avoided attention
• A Menace: you ran with gangs, maybe fought in the streets
• A Laborer: you worked to survive, day in and day out
• An Apprentice*: you learned a trade, your future tied to another's craft
• A Student*: you spent your days with books and lessons

Apprenticeship*

In normal times, there was a master to teach, a youth to learn, and a craft passed down whole. But by your day, that world had frayed. Industry moved faster than tradition, and time spent teaching was time lost earning. Journeymen took up the work of training, but with wages tied to output, they taught only what served the hour. A boy might hammer the same nail for years, never once shown the shape of the house. A girl might rise through service, stitching, scouring, baking, learning her trade not in a workshop, but in the quiet corners of another's home.

Perhaps your master was a good one, patient with your mistakes, or perhaps they were not, and the lesson came harder for it. Regardless, the work shaped you all the same.

Under who did you apprentice?

• Blacksmith
• Carpenter
• Tailor
• Butcher
• Fisherman
• Cook
• Farmer
• Gunsmith
• Glassblower
• Pressman