Re: Cool Backstory Syndrome
 

http://flatblack.wikidot.com/long-history

I still have a copy of the first words I wrote for that setting, on a Mac Plus, back in 1989. The disks are unreadable, but the printout is just fine.

I know that for all that 22 pages of history is too much in a primer, there are still players who are going to want to know:

• What was the name of the flinger that the Interplanetary Society built to transport the first colonists to Tau Ceti?
  
  A: Bifrost
  
• What was the name of the first colony ship to arrive at Tau Ceti?
  
  A: Red Earth. Golden Barque arrived six days later.
  
• Who was the first person to set foot on a habitable extrasolar planet?
  
  A: Gwen Missahan. She was hand-in-hand with Wim van Zaanen and they had been supposed to do so simultaneously, but careful examination of the recording shows that Missahan's boot hit the ground about 0.04–0.08 seconds before van Zaanen's.
  
• Who was the first person born on a habitable extrasolar planet?
  
  A: Adam Missahan-Bertucci
  
• Why did people set up 840 colonies before the first one was full?
  
  A: Partly because lots of them were cultural or religious separatists, or religious or secular utopists and they wanted a planet to themselves. Also partly because teh flingers were big delicate objects in orbits beyond Mars and had a narrow field of fire almost directly away from thei Sun. That means that a flinger built to serve one destination only got a few shots at it in a brief window every two years or so. Between times it offered occasional shots at other places in the plane of its orbit at very low opportunity cost. i.e. getting to the establish planets was expensive, getting to new ones was cheap.
  
• Why does everyone speak English?
  
  A: It isn't exactly the English we speak, but I can't be bothered with a conlang. They [almost] all speak Standard because Earth became a global village before emigration started. Even though other major regional languages had not died out by 2120, International Standard English was the common language of most pioneering teams. And by the 24th century other languages had died out, so when the really thick streams of migrants started they all spoke standard, brought cultural materials and technical literature in Standard, etc.
  
• Wouldn't it be (a) more realistic and (b) better if the setting was amazingly polyglot, with at least one different language on each planet?
  

  A: (a) Not really. (b) Definitely not.

• Why is nobody religious?
  
  A: That's partly an illusion. Some people are explicitly religious. As for the others:
  
  Progress in neurology and AI discredited the concept of an immaterial soul, and that undermined the concept of gods. The global village effect exposed people to the variety of religious experience, which discredited "the religious way of knowing". So explicitly religious belief became uncommon (that's what the religious separatist emigrants were fleeing from, but of course they brought it with them). But lots of people have beliefs, follow practices, and identify with groups that fulfil the role of religion while being ostensibly secular.
  
• What was Anchises Inangulo up to?
  
  A: Trying to perpetuate his posterity.
  
• I don't believe that raiding low-tech planets and extorting valuables from high-tech ones could possibly be lucrative enough that piracy would pay for ultra-tech pirates. And I don't think that intercepting and seizing ships in transit is feasible.
  
  Well, pirates did a lot of other stuff, such as dealing arms and narcotics, setting up fortified trading posts and defying local governments, transporting settlers who invaded low-tech colonies, transported blokes with guns who wanted to make like Cortés and Pizarro, transported (religious, political, cultural, and economic) missionaries with toxic memes, and transported pathogens that caused plagues and crop failures, besides devastating ecosystems. They're called pirates because they pirated Eichberger's IP, not because they wore eyepatches and parrots.
  
  Think of the heyday of piracy in terms of conquistadors in Mexico; Portuguese, French, and British trading posts in India; British settlement in Australia; religious and anti-communist wars in Africa; the Heart of Darkness in the Congo; and smallpox in North America.
  
• Why didn't the pirates' homeworld governments control them?
  
  A: Well, do you see governments doing much about the overseas behaviour of their big companies now? How long did it take for them to get started? The pirates' governments tended to support their commerce and their missionaries as heroes, disclaim responsibility for the acts of passengers, protect their emigrants, and disbelieve or affect to disbelieve reports of what was going on. While treating the deaths of hundreds of millions from neglect of quarantine as a sad accident, nobody's fault.
  
• How exactly did the Formation Wars end in an exhausted draw? The [Foundation | Belligerent Colonies] should have won outright!
  
  Well....

Have to have answers for them somewhere!

Re: Cool Backstory Syndrome
 

Okay good! I'm glad you didn't just get rid of all that information, because as you point out, someone is going to want it!! :)

Re: Cool Backstory Syndrome
 

This.

In an RPG, it also helps for there to be depth below the surface when the players start to dig.

Additionally, making it often amuses the GM.

Finally, it can be a lot of fun, as a player, to figure out something about a setting and see the clues/foreshadowing in previous events going all the way to the beginning of the campaign, rather than only having episodic events.

The real problem with most "cool backstories" is they ae used to bludgeon the players with either "listen to my cool story, regardless of if you are interested in it," or "I've got a secret nananananana."

Re: Cool Backstory Syndrome
 

I agree that both of those are bad approaches. The proper attitude to backstory is to sit on it and smile to yourself, either because you're waiting for your players to get the joke or because you know they aren't going to. Either of which is fun.

I had a tremendous amount of fun running my "hidden supers" campaign Gods and Monsters, set in 1925, with cameos by nearly every important figure from popular culture, from Lord Blakeney (on a visit from the African jungle where he had been raised by apes) to Tommy Walker (whom the PCs saved from psychogenic blindness and deafness). I think the players got around half the references.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Cool Backstory Syndrome
 

I have on occasion hidden Easter eggs in setting designs which the players did not get until their third or fourth campaign played in the setting. Or ever.

Re: Cool Backstory Syndrome
 

This "problem" reminded me an old italian comic with this weird story: when everything was about to fail, suddently a third party appeared and saved the day leaving the main characters puzzling their identities and motivations. This move was important for the ending of the series but, at the time, the main characters couldn't know this. The whole idea behind that issue was a meta-story showing how to build clever plots without "fooling" the reader.

I think in RPG the same rule apply: while is important to build a clever and working world around the PCs, they remain the "focus" of the whole story, burdening the world too much could steal importance and slow the pace of narration.

I think it's a matter of layers: spending too much on background informations it's wasted time, better to add another "layer" when the campaign grows. Like in the old 4° ed. D&D manuals:
First come the PCs and the opponents (Basic set)
Then the city and the surroundings (Expert set)
Then the whole World is revealed (Campaing set)
Then the mechanics behind the World are explained (Master set and beyond).

On the other side I'm fine about "cool (and burdening) character backstories", a player could bring the most long and boring story he wants; I put only a condition: he must explain me the "driving conflict" that pushes forward his character. Exploit it and everyone is happy.