Backgrounds

Every story has a beginning. Your character’s background reveals where you came from, how you became an adventurer, and your place in the world. Your fighter might have been a courageous knight or a grizzled soldier. Your wizard could have been a sage or an artisan. Your rogue might have gotten by as a guild thief or commanded audiences as a jester.

Choosing a background provides you with important story cues about your character’s identity. The most important question to ask about your background is what changed? Why did you stop doing whatever your background describes and start adventuring? Where did you get the money to purchase your starting gear, or, if you come from a wealthy background, why don’t you have more money? How did you learn the skills of your class? What sets you apart from ordinary people who share your background?

The sample background in this chapter provides both concrete benefits (features, proficiencies, and languages) and roleplaying suggestions.

Proficiencies

Each background gives a character proficiency in two skills. Skills are described in the Using Ability Scores section.

In addition, most backgrounds give a character proficiency with one or more tools. Tools and tool proficiencies are detailed in the Equipment section.

If a character would gain the same proficiency from two different sources, he or she can choose a different proficiency of the same kind (skill or tool) instead.

Additional Languages

Some backgrounds also allow characters to learn additional languages beyond those given by race. See “Languages” earlier in this section.

Equipment

Each background provides a package of starting equipment. If you use the optional rule from the Equipment section to spend coin on gear, you do not receive the starting equipment from your background.

Suggested Characteristics

A background contains suggested personal characteristics based on your background. You can pick characteristics, roll dice to determine them randomly, or use the suggestions as inspiration for characteristics of your own creation.

Customizing a Background

You might want to tweak some of the features of a background so it better fits your character or the campaign setting. To customize a background, you can replace one feature with any other one, choose any two skills, and choose a total of two tool proficiencies or languages from the sample backgrounds. You can either use the equipment package from your background or spend coin on gear as described in the Equipment section. (If you spend coin, you can’t also take the equipment package suggested for your class.) Finally, choose two personality traits, one ideal, one bond, and one flaw. If you can’t find a feature that matches your desired background, work with your DM to create one.

Backgrounds
Each background has its own page and description, along with other features.


 * Acolyte
 * Anthropologist
 * Archaeologist
 * Athlete
 * Charlatan
 * City Watch
 * Clan Crafter
 * Cloistered Scholar
 * Courtier
 * Criminal
 * Entertainer
 * Faction Agent
 * Far Traveler
 * Folk Hero
 * Grinner
 * Guild Artisan
 * Hermit
 * Inheritor
 * Mercenary Veteran
 * Noble
 * Outlander
 * Sage
 * Sailor
 * Soldier
 * Tribal Warrior
 * Urban Bounty Hunter
 * Urchin

This is Your Life
The character creation rules in the Player's Handbook, in conjunction with the background pages here, provide all the information you need to define your character in preparation for a life of adventuring. What they don't do is account for all the circumstances that shaped your character during the years between your birth and the start of your career as a member of a class.

What did your character accomplish or experience before deciding to become an adventurer? What were the circumstances of your birth? How large is your family, and what sorts of relationships do you have with your relatives? Which people were greatest influences on you during your formative years, for better or worse?

To answer these questions and more, you can use the tables and the advice in this section to compose a well-developed backstory for your character - an autobiography of sorts - that you can use to inform how you roleplay the character. Your DM can draw from this material as the campaign proceeds, creating situations and scenarios that build off your previous life experiences.

Ideas, Not Rules

Even though these pages are full of tables and die rolls, they don't make up a rules system - in fact, the opposite is true. You can use as much or as little of this material as you desire, and you can make decisions in any order you want.

For instance, you might not want these tables to help you decide who your parents and siblings are, because that's among the information you've already come up with. But you can still use other parts, such as the section on life events, to provide added depth and detail.

How and When to Use the Tables

If you're comfortable with letting the dice decide a certain fact about your character, go ahead and roll. If not, you can take charge and make the decision, choosing from among the possibilities on a table. Of course, you also have the option of disregarding the result of a die roll if it conflicts with another result. Likewise, if the text instructs you to roll on a table, that’s not meant to be taken literally. You can always make your own choice.

Although these tables are meant to augment the step-by-step character creation process in the Player’s Handbook, they don’t occupy a specific place in that process. You can use some of them early on - for instance, it’s possible to determine your parents and other family members immediately after deciding your character’s race, but you could also wait until later in the process. You might prefer to establish more facts about your character’s game identity - such as your class, ability scores, and alignment - before supplementing that information with what‘s offered here.

Section by Section

This material is divided into four sections, each addressing a different aspect of your character's backstory.


 * Origins: To find out who and where you came from, use the "Origins" section. When you're done, you will have a summary of facts about your parents, your siblings, and the circumstances under which you grew up.
 * Personal Decisions: After you have selected your character's background and class, use the appropriate tables to determine how you came to make those choices.
 * Life Events: Your character's existence until now, no matter how brief or uneventful, has been marked by one or more life events - memorable happenings that have had an effect on who you are today.
 * Supplemental Tables: Your life has intersected with the lives of plenty of other people, all the way from your infancy to today. When a result mentions such a person, you can use the supplemental tables (page 72) to add needed details - such as race, class, or occupation - to that person. Some tables in the other sections direct you to one or more of the supplemental tables, and you can also use them any other time you see fit.

Origins
The usual first step in creating your character's life story is to determine your early circumstances. Who were your parents? Where were you born.