Professor Rosen's Backstories
184 new backstories for your pawns!
A list of the backstories and their descriptions can be found here, which was generated by a very simple python script.
[url=https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fabrosen%2FRosen-Backstories%2Fblob%2Fmain%2FSummary.md]https://github.com/abrosen/Rosen-Backstories/blob/main/Summary.md[/url]
Rosen-Backstories
Part serious mod, part attempt to learn to mod RimWorld. My initial goal was to add more variety to the "Researcher" category of backstories, since "The Anomaly" scenario's backstories felt unvaried. As such things happen, this mod has expanded in scope to add some book and media references, add additional generic childhood backstories, and add some knights, and some classic old scifi. Then I kept writing. And then I wrote some more. And a bit more.
The mod does not require additional mods, but some backstories will take advantage of Vanilla Traits Expanded and Vanilla Armour Expanded if you have them, as well as Combat Extended and my trait mod.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Philosophy
Lore
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[*] Backstories should be lore friendly.
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[*] Backstories from other media franchises are fine, but should be adapted to be as lore friendly as possible, such at discworld dwarves becoming dirtmoles.
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[*] Most backstories are meant for players and their pawns.
[*] Almost all backstories will have the "offworld" to generate pawns for crashlanded.
[*] Science and spooky backstories come with the "researcher" tag for Anomaly DLC.
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[*] When I previously playing my anomaly colony, I kept generating the same backstories again and again; the pool felt exceptionally small.
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[*] Military backstories will have "ImperialFighter" when it would make sense to find this backstory in the Empire faction.
[*] Most backstories with "cult" don't work as anything but as Servants of Horax or some other large cult. They will not generate for your pawns.
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[*] Cult backstories are written assuming that they are Horax's cultists, but are generic enough for another mod to use them.
[*] Cult backstories have intentionally identical descriptions and cadence.
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[*] They aren't a hivemind, they are the true faith, united in the glory of the true master(s).
[*] Some cult memebers are not truly faithful, but they are in too deep at this point.
[*] Hopefully, this will add a nice creepy ambiance to any player who starts looking at the pawn bios during a raid.
[*] Cults are assumed to not be tell the faithless their core beliefs until they are initiated as one of the faithful or higher. They may have layers of what they publicly present to outsiders and then have secret beliefs for the truely faithful. IRL religions and their followers are generally pretty happy to tell you what they believe and why their particular belief structure is correct for the world or correct for them. Cults will tell you once your check clears/you're in too deep/there's no escape.
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[*] Religious/Ideoligion backgrounds are generic, except for the label, which will tell you where that idea came from.
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[*] As I'm Jewish, you'll find the tags reference some Jewish ideas or figures, but the descriptions have been made as inclusive as possible, for want of a better word. For example:
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[*] [b]Rosen_KosherHalal[/b] becomes
"[PAWN_nameDef] was a well respected scholar in [PAWN_possessive] ideoligion. [PAWN_pronoun] served in a council to decide whether certain animals found on the Rim were acceptable to eat based on their ideoligion's existing dietary restrictions."
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[*] This allows me to create the backstories I want, but not break immersion.
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Mechanics
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[*] I tend to avoid too many restrictive backstories as that is not what most players are looking for.
[*] Most Adult backstories are balanced around a +6/+4/+2 bonus.
[*] A +8 bonus is used if that is the only positive skill boost.
[*] Backstories are allowed to be stronger, but definitely need some drawback or must be extremely compelling.
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Traits
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[*] 2 rare traits have been added for my personal pawns. Their weight is 0.2 and 0.1 very very low, so they have a very very low chance of occurring naturally. They are quite, but not obscenely strong, which naturally means Cassandra will send a drop pop raid directly on top of that pawn the minute you recruit them, while randy will just give you a tamed rat and then give them triple malaria the next quadrum.
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