Simple 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. Staff will be able to inspect a player and pull up this information at any time during play.

Below are the questions you'll encounter. Asterisked headings are submenus that may or may not appear in game, depending on your earlier choices. They're included here to help you prepare for, and better understand, your character ahead of time:

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.

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. 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.

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. 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 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

*Studies

In an age when many children labored more than they learned, simply staying in school was a privilege hard won. Even with new laws and Board Schools rising across Britain, education came at a price: coins for ink and paper, hours lost to wages not earned. For some, school was a gift granted by station. For others, a fight clawed out of poverty. Ragged schools and dame rooms might watch a child for a time, but true study? That cost more than money.

If you remained in school past your early years, ask yourself: Who paid that cost? A parent? A patron? A desperate gamble? Did you hunger for knowledge, or was school simply a way to escape the mills a little longer? Were you gifted, determined, lucky, or simply stubborn?

Whatever the reason, you stayed. And somewhere along the way, something caught your interest.

What studies stuck with you the most from those years?

• Religious Doctrine
• Folklore and Esoteric Texts
• Medical Journals
• Music Theory
• Detective Novels
• Tradition and Etiquette
• Chemistry Textbooks
• Botany Field Guides
• Political Pamphlets
• Market Broadsheets

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.

How did you make a living or get by in the old world?

• Odd jobs here and there
• Honest work in my respective trade [Career*]
• Academic Pursuits*
• Through Violence*: be it military, privateering, private security
• Artistic Pursuits*

*Career

To work a trade was to know your place in the world. At least for a time.

You rose early, kept your hands busy, and earned your bread by skill, strength, or steady habit. Some were taught the craft proper, apprenticed young to a master who took his cut of the credit. Others picked it up as they went, passed down from kin, or learned simply because need left no other choice.

But even among tradesfolk, the freeze changed things. Machines slowed in the cold. Materials grew scarce. Demand for some trades rose while others vanished entirely. What once was stable became uncertain, and every winter demanded more than the last.

What was your trade?

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

*Academic Pursuits

The ability to pursue knowledge in adulthood was a rare one. Some were born into it, sons of gentry given over to books instead of work. Others fought their way in, on scholarship, by favor, or through undeniable talent.

Academia became the stage where young thinkers debated the purpose of Empire, the burden of industry, and whether the longer winters were a passing anomaly or the new normal. In quieter corners of universities and private salons, the talk turned to radical questions, about labor, imperialism, and what role science might play in the preservation or downfall of civilization.

A few women, emboldened by change across the Channel, slipped through the doors of learning. They were rare, and rarely welcomed, but as the warning signs of ecological collapse mounted, prejudice gave way to urgency. The race for answers had become an all hands on deck affair.

Not all scholars sought truth. Some pursued recognition. Others wrote reports for quiet men in government offices, or for private patrons with quieter intentions still.

Whatever called you to study, a hunger for understanding, a place in the machinery of knowledge, or perhaps just a need to make sense of the growing chill, something kept you at it.

What field was your primary focus of study?

• Botany
• Chemistry
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Music Theory
• Writing and Literature
• Political Science
• Criminal Justice
• Religious Training
• Military Tactics

*Violence

In an empire built on conquest, violence was never far from reach. Some learned it in the Queen’s army, shipped off to guard foreign holdings or put down colonial unrest. Others served on ships as privateers or sailors turned mercenary, blades drawn in cramped quarters for crown or coin. Some wore uniforms and walked the fog-choked streets in the name of law, while others took to those same streets under no banner but their own.

Whether you were trained by drill sergeants or hardened by gang wars, hired as a man-at-arms or born into brutality, you learned to fight, and you favored a method.

What was your weapon of choice

• My Fist
• I improvised
• Bludgeoning Weapons
• Ranged Weapons
• Slashing Weapons
• Piercing Weapons

*Artistic Expression

For the upper class, art was cultivated behind velvet drapes, taught by private tutors, praised when properly restrained.

Elsewhere, it lived in the margins. Some artists found patrons. A few were born into wealth and could afford to create without concern. Most scraped by, busking in alleyways, painting signage, writing by candlelight, selling verses by the line.

What was your artistic focus?

• Sculpture
• Painting
• Writing
• Music Composition
• String Instruments (Bow)
• String Instruments (Plucking)
• Percussion Instruments
• Brass Instruments
• Woodwind Instruments
• Stage Performance

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.

When the war began, how did you respond?

• Fought for Queen and Country
• Took advantage of the chaos to enrich yourself.
• Worked in the factories to support the British Front.
• Worked in the hospitals, caring for the wounded.
• Fled to the countryside, avoiding the Prussian bombing campaigns.

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.

What did you do to survive?

• Doing unspeakable things that you will take to your grave.
• Banding with other survivors to stay safe.
• Taking what you needed from others.
• You remained at wartime post until the very end.
• Used your connections or wealth to obtain relative safety.

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.

You have survived, but in doing so, what hurt most to lose?

• Your Loved Ones
• Your Life's Work
• Your Faith
• Yourself
• Nothing

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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