Building a character

In Keepers in the Dark, you likely play a criminal. Even if your character don’t have a backstory of criminal, the premise of the game is that they will be committing crimes, repeatedly. Ergo, criminal. But they might not consider themselves a criminal, so this manual calls them the fairly neutral term of ‘team member’ or just ‘character’.

So here’s some questions to answer:

Why can they do what they do?

Regardless of what they think of themselves as, they got their skills somewhere. Here’s a few options.

Criminals. That’s the obvious answer.
People falsely accused of being criminals, who ended up forced into the criminal world.
People who are in a legitimate field that has people with criminal skills, like an ex-spy or a security expert that is paid to try to stop criminals.
Normal people who are just oddly good at various things when the chips are down, a martial artist, an actor, a computer programmer, just one really smart guy, etc.

The characters don’t need to have the same answer, it’s much more interesting if things are mixed up a bit. However, they will need to somehow start working together.

There’s no mechanical changes of having different origins, except different Knowledge & Aptitudes. There’s no set origins types, you don’t get special abilities based on this.

Why is your character here doing these things?

In a Doylist sense, they do that because that’s the premise of the game. But in a Watsonian sense, what is their motivation within the game? This is something that would vary between characters, but there should be at least an idea of why other people think they’re helping.

And these motivations can change over time.

Motivations that work good to start with but likely should slowly change:

They got pulled into events that endanger their own life or safety, and have to deal with them. Maybe they even were retired and got pulled back in to help some friends.
They want vengeance for something done to them.
That wealthy backer pays really well.
They’re literally just bored and nothing provides a challenge anymore.

Longer term motivation:

They’re a good person, and just want to help people.
They’re trying to find redemption for a life of evil.
They personally couldn’t care less, but their found family is going to keep doing it regardless, so they have to help to make sure everyone’s safe.

(The character sheet can be found here. You will want to save your own copy.)