Here are some thoughts on how character creation and initiation scenes might go. I imagine that one of the major purposes of the pre-game in Firmament is filling out the locations on the map that your character has been to, is familiar with, or wandered lost through at some point. This gives characters initial hooks that can drive play early on.

Which Star Was Your First?

Players decide which star was their initial anchor that pulled them from earth out into the firmament. I imagine that, if the game is centered around the human culture that has developed in one general swath of the Milky Way, there are 50 or so stars that are likely candidates. If players want to do research and choose more obscure stars, that’s fine, but it means their character probably spent a significant portion of time lost before they encountered other people, since they grabbed a star with a pretty low density of humans operating nearby.

Recovery and Training

The next step is determining 1) who found you, 2) how long it took for you to be “recovered” by other people, and 3) how you were properly trained and socialized into human life among the stars. The amount of time you spent lost determines some crucial things, like how many weird psychological issues you start with, how much the cthuloid Void Spirit speaks to you, that kind of thing.

There are a variety of training options. One of the newest and gradually more common options is studying at the Celestial College (which probably should have a better name), where the three Departments teach the Three Sciences: Astronomy (the First Science, mystic communion with the stars), Cartography (the Second Science, the dances of star mapping and travel), and Anthropology (the Third Science, the study of humans amidst the stars, including digging up lost secrets or our predecessors). Players can also choose to have their characters simply apprentice themselves to other star travelers or bandit hordes or whomever else they encounter, but that gives them different starting skills and stat bonuses. Generally speaking, though, characters Major in one Science, Minor in another Science, and “dabble” in the Third, kinda like the way attribute points are split up in White Wolf games. If you’re trained by some abusive Void-mad hermit out in the midst of nowhere, though, you may have a significantly less firm grip on things, but have other advantages and traits that are also interesting.

Where Have You Been?

Your initial star and the history of your recovery and training give you a general idea of where you’ve already been, location-wise. However, instead of just jotting these down and making up hooks about things you encountered there, I think it’d be cooler to play through montages of your early days (or months, or years) among the firmament, like the initiation scenes in Dogs in the Vineyard. Perhaps you have one initiation montage that covers the time between your First Star and your recovery and another one that’s about your training.

These initial scenes, mechanically, would operate just like normal traveling scenes in the game, so players can learn the rules as they play. But, they are also speeded up because, a lot of the time, early travelers are pretty disoriented and scramble about trying to get home or looking for some place familiar. Additionally, you want to get through these relatively quickly. Still, while traveling around, characters will inevitably encounter bits and pieces of the setting. Maybe not people so much, because they are probably alone, at least at first, but you could encounter signs of early human activity amidst the firmament, you could encounter potential threats or places of interest, later on, after your recovery, you could encounter various human factions, make friends, make enemies, etc. All of these things would function like Loresheets in Weapons of the Gods, starting you down a path to uncovering more secrets and learning more about these elements of the setting.

And then, with all those hooks already pulling on the characters, with plenty of places and people to explore or track down, you’re ready to begin play properly.