I love creating characters, giving them backstories for programs I’m working on. Giving a character a rich backstory can help in fleshing out plotlines later in stories. When I was a younger, I played AD&D and would come up with elaborate situations and biographies for characters.

Here is the quick backstory to a character I created on Star Trek Online. It was early this morning and I was watching the news as I was building this guy. My parents live in South Carolina, which is way recent events have been on my mind. This is the name and biography I came up with for the character.

At the age of five, Vesey lost his parents to a lone attacker who assaulted the Holy Mother Church of Tonles Rach, one of the most revered sites of his people. For centuries tensions between the two races of the planet Alincaro, in the Thous system, had grown. The attacker, from the majority population Nydal, was killed soon after the attack, but her actions instigated stringent restrictions against the minority population, the Noir. Rumors spread that the Noir where using revered sites to plot rebellion against the Nydal and that the attack on the revered site was orchestrated. At the time, The Federation was debating a request by Alincaro for membership. After the church killing the request was denied and the Noir were considered the factor that caused the denial of membership.

The church attack plunged the planet into a 15 year civil war. Many Noir were killed or relocated to inhospitable areas of the planet. Over sixty percent of the Noir population was wiped out by war, starvation or harsh conditions. The Nydal applied for admission to the Federation again, claiming that the conflict between the two races was over. As a show of peace on the planet, the Nydal allowed Starfleet to observe the planet and see that the Noir weren’t being mistreated. A puppet group of representatives of the Noir met with Admiral Wainwright and his delegation, who assured him that conditions had changed on the planet. As the Admiral left, with a feeling that all was well with Alincaro, Vesey was able to bypass security protocols, stowaway aboard the ship and when they left orbit and returned to Earth revealed himself gave a truthful account of the conditions of his people.

The petition of Alincaro was rejected again. Vesey contemplated returning to Alincaro but the wonders he saw on Earth, with thousands of different species interacting with each other in peace made him think it might be possible to one day to return to a united Alincaro.

You can obviously see how I worked in the events in Charleston into the backstory of Vesey. I anagrammed a few of the names associated with the Charleston event. The name Vesey is actually the name of a free black man who is noted for his plans for a major slave revolt in 1822. He was among the founders of the church which would become the Emanuel AME church, the same church where the shooting occurred. Vesey’s first name was Denmark, and that is the name I gave his ship. Now I have a character with a rich background and motivation for a possible long and complicated history in the Star Trek MMO.