Sam’s Dojo
Sam’s Dojo is located in a strip mall convenient to the campaign. It’s not much to look at, visually: the Dojo is essentially a big open space with a lot of mats on the floor, an office in one corner, and a bunch of karate equipment scattered about. The place is clean and well run, and its owner Sam Cohen is a genuinely nice guy and good teacher of American Kenpo, but he’s also about as generic a karate instructor as you’re likely to ever see. You kind of have difficulty remembering what he looks like, once Sam’s out of your field of vision.
And he has almost no paper trail. Neither does the dojo, come to that. And nobody can quite remember when Sam started teaching students.
…And no, this isn’t all a sign that Sam’s Dojo is secretly a top-secret ninja school, or the front for a heroic order of anti-vampire martial artists, or the favorite hobby of an AWOL Archangel of the Lord, or anything else that’s seriously esoteric. Merely that it could be, someday. Sam and his Dojo don’t have a proper past because they haven’t been assigned one, yet; they’ve been effectively formed out of raw possibilities, and are just waiting for a sufficiently compelling story to come by to claim them. Once that happen, they’ll suddenly have always been …whatever… and the universe will insert all the necessary details with nary a bobble.
So how do you get Sam’s Dojo that backstory? That’s a good question, and one that several different groups with differing agendas are asking, right this very second. Most of those groups would probably love some assistance, of course. Even if they’re not really sure what form useful ‘assistance’ might take. Besides: not all of those agendas are nice ones, so at the very least there’s an incentive to make sure that Sam’s Dojo doesn’t turn out to be bad, right?