First and foremost I asked my players to specifically not come up with characters for the campaign until yesterday's session - I'm well aware that some of them have been rarin' to play certain things and that's fine, but I didn't want any characters built in a vacuum like they usually are.

The session started off with some pretty intense explanation and history of the Eberron setting, some of my players being completely unfamiliar with it. Doing this I was able to get something of a read as to what parts people got jazzed by and what they didn't. I laid out the map on the gaming table and using it to illustrate the different countries, the history of the continent, the culture of each, the disaster of the Mournland (Eberron's own Hiroshima), but mostly in general terms.

Then I pointed to the player's starting country (Aundair) and start getting more specific. With a stack of post-its handy, I started laying out some of the elements of the campaign that might be relevant to a character's story, I could quickly jot a name or description of it down, and then stick the post-it near it's "location" on the map, like so:

• "So down by this village are the floating towers of the Arcane University, and you can see them from miles around."
• "Along this river are a tribe of half-elf gypsies, they control a lot of the trade because it's a shallow river and they know the route, but people generally distrust them as thieves and spies."
• "Here in the Eldeen Reaches the people have turned to hobgoblin mercenaries from the south to help protect them from fell beasts from the woods."
• "Just after the Mourning a Feyspire appeared here in Karrnath, greatly disturbing the king, who has laid it under siege for over a year now."

And so on. As this wen't on, the players were given an assignment on their Character Generation sheet: they have to come up with both an Attribute and a Goal for their character.

The Attribute is a general statement about their character that hints as to what race/class they might want to be. The statement must be established and somewhat character and personality-defining: "My guy is a loner forest scout.", "My girl is a bookish mage.", etc.

The Goal must be a sentence that combines something that they (the player) wants their character to be doing based on something that they (the player) thinks is cool about the setting. "My guy is after the Brelandi soldiers that came over the border and kidnapped his sister when the Aundairan troops pulled back from the West.", "My girl desires to make her way up the ranks of the Arcane Knights in order to be a voice of reason in the eventual reoccupation of Thaliost."

To help with this, the players were forced to jot down at least three things they thought were awesome about the setting.

Players were welcome to come up with their own campaign elements to use in writing out their Goal, and those got worked to fit into the setting, written up on the Post-its as well, and tacked onto the map. Based on what they came up with for their Attributes/Goals, each player began to describe some history of their character, why they're like the way their Attribute describes them, why they're after whatever it is their Goal is. And then the Player Name (once they've thought of it and some thought has been given as to where they're from) gets put onto a post-it and placed onto the map.

Now the players all have a sense of basic history of their character, plus they've come up with a bit of their personality and motivations. I likewise now have a little cluster of organizations and locations on the map I know are tied to the characters.

Now they had to figure out how the characters have gotten to know each other. As before, it's important for me as the DM to give them some background to start things off. So I started by throwing the players some plot hooks, encouraging some of the characters towards being part of a well-trained but inexperienced unit that fought together for Aundair in the final days of the Last War. They didn't all have to be explicitly working for the Aundairan military, some of them may have gotten involved with the others some other way. I gave them an NPC or two, say a commanding officer or an "agent" in the Aundairan Royal Eyes to use if they want to.

Like Spirit of the Century, each player was now required to integrate at least two of the other characters into their histories somehow. Sometime you select these randomly but we just went around the table working it out. It was important that these character connections be somewhat significant and not just a random meeting, so beforehand I had each player define and write down two key "moments" in the life of their character that helped define their Attribute or Goal, and then pushed the cross-character integrations to occur somehow during those crucial turning points.

From there we focused on actually picking Character/Race combinations, and obviously combat complimenting was a primary focus on that discussion. I was worried that this would require some mediation, as both a player and a DM I favor niche protection but that ended up not being a problem.

Our session finally broke and now everyone is free to roll up their characters, and finish fleshing out their character's history on the campaign wiki.

Goals turn into primary character Quests, with experience rewards to be offered as they are met or they evolve (characters can change goals as they like as it makes sense to do so). I'd like to institute some sort of ongoing mechanic to encourage goal pursuit, something perhaps as simple as a natural +2 enhancement to any combat or skill roll done in specific pursuit of completing a goal. If there's some way to figure out a reward for Attribute usage too, I'll probably want to implement it, but I'd like that to be more "reactive", like a +2 to any defense once per encounter where a player can argue their Attribute comes into play, but we'll see.