Advanced Background
During [Character Creation], you'll choose between two backstory paths: Simple or Advanced. Both are valid ways to establish your character's history and influence future storytelling.
Please Note: Your backstory is canonical, and staff will be able to inspect a player and pull up this information at any time during play.
Origins
By the mid 1800s, Britain stood at the head of 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.
Describe your character's birth and heritage. Where where they born, and who were their parents, and how did these origins shape their identity?
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. And 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.
How was your character raised? How did they spend their time, and what lasting impact did their early years leave upon them?
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. And the aristocracy, obsolete.
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.
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 one 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 defined your character's teenage years? Note significant experiences or events that marked this period and influenced their worldview.
Adulthood
By the 1880s, summers no longer came as they once had. The sun still rose, but it did not bring warmth. In the north, temperatures climbed a little less each year, and 1891 would prove the last time they rose above 60°F at all.
Ships arrived late, when they arrived at all. Coffee, sugar, and spices from the colonies became scarce. Seasonal vegetables grew rarer. Markets leaned more heavily on root crops, what had once filled winter cellars now stretched to feed the whole year through.
Fishing turned erratic. Sailors spoke of vanishing shoals and whales drifting off course. The sea no longer gave as it once had. Catches dwindled, and prices rose. The cost of bread climbed quietly at first, then sharply. No one called it a crisis, not yet. But each season asked a little more of people, and gave a little less in return.
In August of 1892, with anxiety mounting, the British government turned at last to the Royal Science Society. Their charge: to determine what was happening. Was this merely a passing cold snap, or the beginning of something irreversible? They had an empire to feed, and if this chill persisted, it could unravel everything.
The rich, of course, fared well enough. Wealth bought warning as surely as it bought coal, and those with access to newspapers, to learned journals, to the whispered word of men in high office, had seen the cold coming long before it reached their door. They stocked their cellars, moved their fortunes, and settled in to wait out what they assumed would pass, wrapped in furs, waiting for salvation to arrive from on high. The rest simply made do. A living had to be made, one way or another. Firewood. Food. Work. Getting by.
Times were harder than they had once been, but the world still pressed on. Many hoped the cold years were just a passing trial.
Briefly detail your character’s adult life prior to the great collapse. What profession did they have, what social class did they belong to, and how did they otherwise get by?
The Last War
By 1893, governments had accepted what many already feared, the winter was inevitable.
We call the fallout the Last War. Prussia struck first, sending airships to bomb supply lines, ports, and cities across Britain's colonies. The war spread quickly, and Great Britain answered where it could.
The government drafted widely, but many volunteered before their names were called, hoping for food, shelter, or money for their families. Others fled. Trains and wagons rolled south toward the equator, chasing rumors of better climates. But the chaos followed.
Some saw opportunity, raiding supply routes, looting abandoned homes. Others escaped to the countryside, far from the cities and the sound of zeppelins overhead, foraging what they could to survive.
Global conflicts arose over dwindling resources. What did you do to get by, and how did this period of violence and collapse impact your character personally?
The End of the World
By 1894, the median global temperature had fallen below freezing.
The war didn’t end with a treaty. It ended because there was no one left to fight it. Nations crumbled, borders vanished, and the great powers of the world fell quiet. One by one.
The cold had won.
By 1895, civilization had unraveled completely into a frozen wasteland. What steps did your character take to survive?
Sacrifice
The year is 1896, and the world has frozen over.
The British Empire-once the mightiest force on Earth-lies buried beneath snow. Its halls of power, its fleets, its monuments to industry, all reduced to ruin.
The world as you knew it is gone. What was the deepest loss your character endured, and how does this profound loss continue to shape them?
Purpose
Rumors speak of an English settlement built on the bones of an imperial geothermal experiment, a secret kept close during the war years, lest word spread and trigger a mass exodus, or worse, draw Prussian zeppelins.
Now, with the Empire fallen, the secret has slipped its bonds. It is spoken of more openly these days, not as a hiding place, but as a chance, if you can reach it, to help rebuild.
But the world you knew is gone, and rebuilding asks everything of you.
What is it that keeps you going, when so much has already been lost?
- Hope
- Defiance
- Opportunity
- Community
- Posterity
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