Some backgrounds lend themselves to joint ownership. Specifically, the members of a group may choose to pool their individual stores of Allies, Contacts, Sanctum, Influence, Resources, and Followers.

You and the other players choose one Background as the anchor that holds the shared assets together. For example, this Background might be Location, with the physical place the characters claim as their base of operations, which also acts as a meeting ground for the people they deal with, a repository for their wealth, and so on. Any of the poolable Backgrounds can serve in this role, however : Allies might be this group’s key to sustenance and stability. No Background pool can have more dots assigned to it than the Anchor Background does at any time. If the Background is damaged by events during play or between sessions, other assets drift away from the characters’ control, and it takes effort to win them back. Any character contributing to the pool may pull his stake out at any time. The dislocations guarantee some damage: The character gets back one dot less than he put in.

As the Anchor Background rating rises again, so do the ratings of those anchored to it, as a result of storytelling directed toward the goals of improving lost Backgrounds. Under normal circumstances, a group can’t change its Anchor Background, nor can it acquire a new Anchor Background. While it may choose to abandon a certain Background asset over the course of a chronicle (and thus free itself of the limitations of the pooled Backgrounds in question), the fact that Backgrounds usually change value only as a result of the story’s events means that the coterie must acquire new Backgrounds in that manner, rather than through experience points. In the end, most characters end up following personal goals over the course of their lives. Pooled Backgrounds are a great way for ambitious characters to gain an initial advantage in the Universe, but they quickly become outdated or even liabilities as the character formerly attached to them pursue their own, private agendas.

Pooled Backgrounds are shared resources; essentially the group’s communal property. Anyone who contributes to the pool (no matter how much they contribute) has equal access to it. Even if the character donates to only one of the pool’s associated Backgrounds, he still has equal access to it. Not everyone can use the pool simultaneously, though. A Retainer pool of seven dots can grant access only to the same, finite number of employees. Just how those points are split up depends on the circumstances and agreements between the characters.

Example: Four players decide that their characters are forming a Background pool. Their anchor is Resources (a thriving trade ), and they wish to get dots in Contacts (from the customers themselves), Location (money to purchase a new office), and Retainers (a few employees who can run things day to day). Jeff contributes three dots of Resources; Michelle contributes another two dots of Resources and two of Location; Joe contributes another two dots of Retainers, two to Contacts,and one to Location. Finally, Kelley — who is short on dots— contributes only one dot of Retainers. This makes the pool Resources 5, Contacts 2, Domain 3, Retainers 3. All the players can have their characters tap this pool equally, even Kelley, who contributed only a single dot. At the Storyteller’s discretion, players can agree to place individual access limits on shared Backgrounds, to reflect any agreements their characters have made with one another. Sometimes being the character who contributed fewer Backgrounds than the others comes with its own considerations.

By pooling points, a coterie can get Backgrounds that surpass the normal five-dot limit. This arrangement is normal, and it reflects the advantages of cooperation. A group can secure a larger Location or maintain a larger network of Allies and Contacts than a single character can. There is no absolute upper limit on the level to which a pooled Background can rise, but things can get downright ludicrous if you aren’t careful. It’s usually best for the Storyteller to impose a 10-dot limit on the Anchor Background (and thus on all others). The Storyteller should also take into consideration the scaling of Backgrounds, increasing their reliability rather than their quantitative value as the ratings escalate among the coterie. For example, if an average player group of four players each contributes a single dot or two to a shared Resources pool of 6, the effect shouldn’t be that they’re collectively the world’s secret billionaires, but rather that they’re of more modest means, and that those means are more difficult to wrest from them by other rival characters. This is a question of balancing player expectations with elements of the story, so be sure to set some guidelines for what the shared Backgrounds actually represent before the chronicle begins.