You do not need a shared backstory. You need to step off the same wharf within moments of one another and be curious about the same job.
The Chain
The opening runs wharf → market → tavern → forge → the troubled farm. Each step hands you the next one for an ordinary, practical reason — nobody has to be told to go anywhere.
The Wharf
Some of you came up the lake on a small local ferry, others off a larger schooner. It does not matter. You all set foot on Cooper’s Wharf at roughly the same moment, strangers in a loud and unfamiliar town. A dock agent, mid-shout at her own crew, jerks a thumb at a notice board and mentions that Fort York’s forge is looking for hands.
The Tavern
North through St Lawrence Market and across the road, the tavern is at the end of a long workday — noisy, warm, full of regulars. Among them is Walter Croft, a cooper, currently being good-naturedly teased by the whole room about his fondness for a certain tiefling forge worker.
Word arrives that the fort’s forge needs urgent work done for a supply wagon heading west toward the Credit Valley. Anya, drawn by kinship with the forge’s tiefling workers, has every reason to push the party to take the job.
The Forge
At the forge you meet the tiefling workers properly — hard labour, real camaraderie, and some casual prejudice from others that Anya notices and bristles at. Amid the noise and heat, someone mentions almost offhand that the wagon is headed toward a farm that has been having trouble: rotting crops, spooked animals, strange mist rolling in from the tree line at night.
West
That is the thread that pulls you out of town and toward Benares, and the Bradley Farm in particular.
Why it is built this way
Fort York gets planted twice — once on the notice board, once in the tavern — so that by the time you arrive it feels like your own idea. Everything you do in the first session, you do for a reason your character would actually have.