What's mostly on my mind is the game I'm prepping to run atm, but one of my players will see this, so I can't talk about that.
So let me tell you about a trick I pulled years ago. As most of you presumably know by now, my degree is focused on gothic fiction. So once, during grad school, I happened to be digging around in the old RPG stuff a friend gave me, and came across a Victorian Earth Ravenloft box for AD&D. You can imagine I was intrigued.
It had three adventures in it, and I talked to my friends from undergrad and we got together to play one weekend when I was back home. My partner, then my joyfriend, joined as well. The setting was explicit that there was no magic before the events of the plot, and so the players shouldn't have access to magic.
But I wanted to give them something to kind of replace that. So I took a deck of tarot cards, and set up in the office upstairs, and had the players come in one at a time. They each told me their back stories and got one trump card, at which point I came up with a special ability for them, keyed to their story. Obviously I had skeletons of ideas in mind to begin with, but I really did wait until I saw the card and heard their story to solidify them.
They said later they enjoyed that, and one of them said years later they still remembered it, they told the story to a mutual friend. I take that as high praise, they play a lot more tabletop games than I do.