What did you do before you took up your adventuring career? Were you a mercenary? A weaver? A street performer? Although you no longer follow your old trade, your background provides you with ability score bonuses, skills, and other benefits that will serve you in your coming adventures. If your background provides a skill or tool proficiency you already have from another source, you can instead gain a different proficiency of the same type. Also be sure to inform your Narrator of your connection (the person from your backstory provided by your background). Your past may not be done with you yet!
You were trained as a servant of a particular god or gods. Whether or not you have access to divine magic, you are authorized to perform the rites of your faith, and you are recognized and respected by its faithful. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 75)
Aeronauts are folk who ply the skies aboard airships of every description. Much as a sailor, an aeronaut must be quite familiar with their vessel, skilled with every role from pilot to navigator to engineer to ensure the ship gets from port to port in one piece. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #16
You have lost your memory. Almost all hints as to who you might have once been are now gone—except for your memento and that one person who seems to recognize you. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
Your trade is the healing arts—but different cultures each have their own medical traditions. You might be a scholar of medicine (“doctor”), a medical alchemist, a nurse at a religious institution, a combat medic, or even a “witch” whose services are poorly understood. You might even be one who has turned their back on healing, using your medical knowledge to undermine mortal lives. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
As an apothecary, you are often one of the first people someone calls when a loved one is ill or injured. In your hands, herbs and roots become tinctures, salves, and expectorants. And while most people seek you out for remedies and cures, your herbal and even chemical knowledge extends to other sundries as well, such as perfumes, soaps, and lotions. See more.
Source - Hearth and Home
For some bees represent something to be feared, but you delight in the sound of their industrious buzzing because it heralds one thing: honey. You dote on your hives, making sure that the bees in your care are happy and healthy, and in exchange you harvest the excess honey that they produce. As the local beekeeper, you are often somewhat of a community fixture, providing your neighbors with honey and beeswax. See more.
Source - Hearth and Home
Though most eyes look to the future, the past fascinates you, and you have found wisdom in exploring the ruins of civilizations that fell to disaster, or that gave birth to today’s world. Perhaps some day you’ll explore the planets above and the ruins of surely long-dead cultures there. See more.
Source - Adventures in Zeitgeist
You are skilled enough in a trade to make a comfortable living and to aspire to mastery of your art. Yet here you are, ready to slog through mud and blood and danger. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 76)
Innkeeps, chefs, baristas, and bartenders. The inns and taverns where barkeeps work are essential to the economy of the fantasy world—how else will towns attract the adventurers they so desperately need? Of course, your role is also essential for the everyday people, giving them a venue to congregate and celebrate, an outlet for their energy. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
Those that lack homes, ask for alms, and other impoverished folk have been, broadly, left behind by whatever society they are a part of. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #24
The ocean is both wide and incredibly bountiful, and, when filled with tempest and torment, some of that incredible bounty can be torn loose. Perhaps a ship beleaguered by the ocean upon storm-tossed waves has come to grief, or a storm has raged with sufficient power to swirl up previously buried treasures from the oceanic depths and abyssess and bring them to a peaceful rest upon a beach. It is the beachcombers who walk the borders between the water and the land who come to harvest what others would consider trash and which they consider treasure. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #17
Enforcers, mercenaries, and “private contractors.” When the people of means (legal authorities, aristocrats, and crime bosses) are unable to reach their offenders, they hire out these needs to people such as yourself who aren’t afraid to get their hands a little dirty while on the hunt. No doubt, most adventurers could call themselves bounty hunters, but few adventurers dedicated their previous lives to this profession—which to the surprise of many does have certain standards of behavior. After all, you don’t bring people kicking-and-screaming to the feet of the law (or whomever) out of your sense of charity. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
You are a brewmaster: an individual who has dedicated their life to the art of brewing beverages—beer, mead, wine, or even tea. With a careful eye and an elevated palate, you blend ingredients together to create a drink that isn’t just nourishing, but an experience to be had by all. One thing’s for certain, though: you always make friends no matter where you are. And for one reason or another, you’ve been called away on adventure. See more.
Source - Hearth and Home
Mayors, magistrates, politicians, functionaries, and other civil servants. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
Stewards, butlers, maids, governesses, custodians, and groundskeepers. Caretakers are people who directly care for the things which elite institutions and noble families value the most. Depending on the wealth of the family or the size of the estate, it may require the supervision of several custodians in specialized roles to get all the work done. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
People call you a con artist, but you’re really an entertainer. You make people happy—the separation of fools and villains from their money is purely a pleasant side effect. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 77)
You keep the records, maybe itʼs for a small town, or the tax o ice. Maybe itʼs for a secret investigative task force and you were doing the expenses until you got sent out to investigate something? Or maybe youʼre just the most educated person in your village and you write letters for the illiterate. See more.
Source - Homebrew & Hacking
You have done time. Quite a lot of time, in fact; enough to fully acclimate to the life of a prisoner, whether you deserved it or not. Your time incarcerated has shaped you as an individual and it is highly unlikely that you bear much resemblance to the person you were before you went inside. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #8
A cottage garden is often a point of pride for those who tend to them. The artful blend and arrangement of perennial flowers and greenery, along with carefully-placed stepping stones, is indeed its own kind of art form. Whether you look after your own garden or tend to that of a wealthy individual, flowers and plants always seem to flourish in your care. See more.
Source - Hearth and Home
As a career criminal you were acquainted with murderers, thieves, and those who hunt them. Your new career as an adventurer is, relatively speaking, an honest trade. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 78
You were raised as a cube herder, a hard and dangerous profession with long days and lonely nights. You’ve packed it all in to seek your fortune as an adventurer, far from the familiar acrid smells of your herd. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #12
You were a member of a sinister cult. You performed ancient rites found in forbidden tomes, seeking to empower a fiend, a false god, or a terrible being from a strange and distant realm. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 79)
Perhaps you broke an oath or angered a god, or your parents promised their child’s soul to a fiend. Whatever caused it, you are cursed. The power that laid this upon you has not necessarily made itself known, but its effects are felt regardless. It has shaped your life and interactions with others, made you wary and careful. A tiny slip, a failed moment of etiquette, a dirty glance—any may trigger the curse. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #2
You kept a city running through the sweat of your brow, loading and unloading ships, serving as an extra pair of hands on a construction site, and performing other tasks. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #24
You are skilled at hunting monsters in underground environments. You have spent much of your training alone in the dark, honing your senses to pick out the slightest sound or notice the most subtle disturbance in loose sand. You are relentless in your pursuit, for you know the danger your quarry poses. See more.
Source - Dungeon Delver's Guide
You seek the treasures of empires long vanished. The world’s dungeons are brimming with lost secrets and artifacts of unimaginable power—and they belong in a museum, or at least in your living room. While others call you a tomb robber, you consider yourself an archaeologist, a collector, or an explorer. See more.
Source - Dungeon Delver's Guide
Most researchers take a very slow, methodical approach to their studies, carefully changing one variable at a time and recording every boring result. You, however, take a far more proactive approach, often to unearthly—or even explosive—results. This disturbing, unconventional, or dangerous undertaking may have cost you friends, respect, and even a digit or two. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #8
You’re a performer who knows how to dazzle a crowd, an artist but also a professional: you never forget to pass the hat after a show. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 80)
You spent long years captive to an Underland empire, where you grew accustomed to ways that aren’t your own. You are now a stranger to your own people, having replaced their social mores with those you learned while underground. Your bizarre ways mystify them: you don’t wake and sleep with the sun, you eat strange foods, and you often use words and phrases that they’ve never heard. See more.
Source - Dungeon Delver's Guide
Your homeland is barred to you and you wander strange lands. You will never be mistaken for a local but you find ready acceptance among other adventurers, many of which are as rootless as you are. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 81)
You served – and may still serve – an organization trying to influence events--either a public entity, a criminal organization, or a secret society that the public only knows through rumors and whispers. See more.
Source - Adventures in Zeitgeist
You were raised a farmer, an occupation where the money is short and the work days are long. You’ve become an adventurer, a career where the money is plentiful but your days—if you’re not careful—may be all too short. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 82)
No one can be sure how a fey chooses what mortals to spare, transform, help—or simply abide for a time. Your unlikely host may have been a creepy gremlin, a stern satyr, or some similar denizen of the Feywild. They spared you from many of that realm’s dangers all while you somehow resisted the inevitable change the Land of Faerie visits upon most mortals who remain too long. Even so, now no matter where you travel you carry a bit of the fey realm with you. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #4
In your hands, simple cut flowers and bits of green leaves become elaborate works of art that decorate the tables of nobility or are carried by celebrants at festivals and weddings. You know how to artfully blend color and texture, weaving together just the right flowers for special days. You also know that flowers are more than just pretty to look at—they can be their own form of language too. See more.
Source - Hearth and Home
You were born to a commoner family, but some event earned you fame. You’re admired locally, and tales of your deeds have reached the far corners of the world. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 83)
You spent a significant amount of time in captivity—or at least confinement—where you were changed in some way. No longer, though; now you are free in the world and able to choose your own path. See more.
Source - Bloody Heretics
You left adventuring for your own reasons and set up to what you long considered to be an honest profession. Whether it was tending bar at a tavern, mending broken tools at a blacksmith, or some other work, it has kept you in relatively good shape, even though you may be constantly looking over your shoulder. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #16
You haven’t met your match at dice or cards. A career of high stakes and daring escapades has taught you when to play close to the chest and when to risk it all—but you haven’t yet learned when to walk away. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 83)
A gravedigger performs an essential role in any community, ensuring that the physical remains of loved ones are properly interred. Of course, sometimes those loved ones might need digging up again for their valuables and thatʼs where someone who knows their way around a spade might come in handy. See more.
Source - Homebrew & Hacking
Whether you worked as a sentry, constable, member of the city watch, or even a knightly order, rich folk used to pay you to protect them. These days you’re looking after yourself. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 85)
It never hurts to be part of a team, and when you’re part of a guild opportunities knock at your door. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 85)
You made your living ending the lives of others. Depending on your society, these executions may have been swift and merciful, lingering and cruel, or a mix of the two. They may have also been private or public. See more.
Source - Thematic Toolkit: Judge, Jury, and Executioner
Spirits exist. It’s a simple fact of reality that most people forget until the specter of some long forgotten soul appears before them. But for you, it’s a constant reality. For some, the spirit that follows them has been there since childhood, as an imaginary friend or a monster in the dark. For others, the dead come at a later date, often in the wake of a terrible tragedy. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #2
You are a hedge witch: a soothsayer and herbalist with extensive knowledge of the plants and fungi that grow in wild places. You also often practice some mundane form of divination by way of tarot readings, casting bones, using pendulums, or other methods. You do not know which of your readings are true or false, nor do you know which are destined to come to fruition. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #11
You lived for years alone in a remote shrine, cave, monastery, or elsewhere away from the world. Among your daily tasks you had lots of time for introspection. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 86)
After a long period of captivity, you returned to the surface and were welcomed with open arms, despite your scars and aged appearance. You’ve resumed the life you left behind, re-establishing old connections. The only problem is, it’s not your life to which you’ve returned—you are an imposter. See more.
Source - Dungeon Delver's Guide
You might be a criminologist on the city payroll, a public prosecutor, part of a military tribunal, or a private amateur whom the local authorities rely on to help solve crimes. Consider what case might have most affected you, and whether you are still in contact with any of the victims or perpetrators. See more.
Source - Adventures in Zeitgeist
You served as a magistrate or arbiter, hearing criminal and/or civil cases and making judgments accordingly. Judges are usually well-compensated and comfortable, but also tend to have to deal with a lot of liars and frequently have quite a few enemies. See more.
Source - Thematic Toolkit: Judge, Jury, and Executioner
Your life has been chiefly defined by your charge to protect a great treasure or secret which must be kept from the prying eyes of outsiders. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #20
Law is the public ritual (or some would say cosmological force) which demands the respect of commoner and king alike. This makes the rule of law a kind of magic, and the wielders of this magic are lawyers. From presenting legal arguments in courts, presiding over courts as judges, to drafting groundbreaking legislation—lawyers are indispensable allies when advancing your cause in the eyes of the law. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
Whether for an upstanding bank, a riotous tavern, or a criminal organization, you made a living by cracking skulls and looking menacing. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #24
You were a member of an outlaw band. You might have been part of a troop of cutthroat bandits, or a resistance movement battling a tyrant, or a pirate fleet. You lived outside of settled lands, and your name was a terror to rich travelers. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 87)
Through intense training by a master of the art, you’ve made your body a deadly weapon and you have speed and precision to use it effectively. What called you to leave such training in favor of adventuring. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #13
As a medium, you possess a unique talent for communing with spirits—or at least convincing others that you are. Whether your talents are real or just an act, you have been called to adventure. See more.
Source - Bloody Heretics
You have some sort of wisdom, training, or expertise that is your responsibility to pass on to others. Given the wide breadth of specialized knowledge that exists and the even wider range of teaching and leadership roles that exist, this can manifest in a truly dizzying number of ways. See more.
Source - Sinuous Sentinels
Miners bore into the bones of the earth, extracting wealth from below for the world above. In subterranean civilizations—like those of certain dwarves, gnomes, and elves—miners also have the key role of breaking ground on new places to live. T he work is backbreaking to all but the most hardy laborers, and the dusty conditions can undo even the most rugged miner. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
Whether you were driven by personal vendetta, fueled by stories of renowned figures, or something else entirely, you’ve made a career out of hunting monsters. This is dirty, dangerous work, but not as fatal as the average person might believe—an individual skeleton or giant rat can pose a serious threat to a commoner, but with the right tools and preparation even an amateur hunter stands a better-than-even chance. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #8
You come from a family with hereditary power. Since you’re taking up a life of adventuring, it’s quite likely that you’re a second child or more distant heir with no vast inheritance to look forward to. You’ve got to make your own way in the world with only your years of training from armsmasters and private tutors, your many rich relatives and friends, and your not inconsiderable personal wealth. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 88)
Some approach the study of magic and the unknown from official academic channels. Others leverage their innate understanding through their heritage or their sorcerous bloodline. You approach it an even different way: studying the esoteric and the forbidden. Perhaps you are even part of some sort of secret society yourself. But, unlike a cultist, you do not seek to serve or venerate these powers. You study them to combat them—or control them. See more.
Source - Bloody Heretics
You lived far from the farms and fields of civilization. You know the beauties and the dangers of the wilderness. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 89)
You are aware of your counterpart, of course. But more than that, you loathe them. You have started your adventures, at least in part, in order to find this person, remove them in some fashion, and take their place. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #23
You have done what few have managed: you have aged gracefully out of adventuring. Maybe exhaustion overtook you, maybe you had accomplished all you had dreamed. Whatever happened, you have done exceedingly little since then. Maybe you drank yourself into darkness each night, or maybe you’ve been content to just watch the flowers glow on a small plot of land you’ve bought yourself. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #16
You used to be dead. Now you’re not. Whether you have been brought back to life or returned as an undead, you have experienced the Other Side and are still around to tell the tale—if you remember it. You may be the product of a miracle, a tragedy, or an experiment, but it’s unlikely that your existence could be called “ordinary. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
You are a seeker of the world’s truths and an expert in your chosen field, with esoteric knowledge at your fingertips, or at the farthest, in a book you vaguely remember. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 90)
You’re an experienced mariner with a keen weather eye and a favorite tavern in every port. Hard voyages have toughened you and the sea’s power has made you humble. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 91)
You’ve had to make a living with your fists, but you’ve never had time to develop a particularly attractive style of fighting. The world is a rough place to make it in, and if that meant breaking a chair over your opponent’s head or taking them down with a grapple, then so be it. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #13
While most shadowcasts prefer not to contemplate their counterpart, you are deeply curious about them, even going as far as finding a portal to the Material Plane, planning to find and observe them—perhaps not unlike a naturalist studying a rare animal. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #23
You ran a small shop, market stall, or similar business, buying from suppliers and selling on to others. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #24
You’re a hard-bitten veteran accustomed to long marches, short supplies, and the sight of blood. A career as an adventurer seems like the logical next step. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 92)
You are a covert operative. Spies serve in a wide variety of circumstances and use whatever means are most expedient to acquire intelligence while remaining undetected. You might be the product of an elite program that produces world-class espionage operatives, or you could be a self trained member of an extensive grass-roots resistance movement. Spies vary in terms of employer, social location, methods, and training. See more.
Source - Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
Whether it came from army training, time with a mercenary band, a military education, or some less-conventional source, you’ve been taught the art of war. Battle is far more than just swinging a sword, after all, and you likely spend as much time with tactical manuals and maps as you do conventional weapons. See more.
Source - Gate Pass Gazette #13
Youʼve worked in ale houses for as long as you can remember, serving food and drink to people who need it. Youʼve heard exciting tales from travelling storytellers and lost yourself in dreams of where you could be if you didnʼt have to go to work every day and every night. See more.
Source - Homebrew & Hacking
You were trained to guard a holy site such as a temple, sacred grove, or the location of a miracle. Unlike with a tomb guardian, your duties included making the site available for visitors, though the specifics could vary from a few important religious dignitaries to teeming throngs of unruly pilgrims. Depending on the nature of the assignment, you may have been expected to be friendly and helpful or to exude menace and authority. See more.
Source - Sinuous Sentinels
You were trained, perhaps raised, and ultimately trusted to guard the resting place of … something. The reasons for guarding a tomb basically break down to two main possibilities: what is interred there cannot be trusted to stay dead (or just in the tomb) indefinitely if left alone or there is something in the tomb that others may want to come remove for their own purposes (and of course, these possibilities are by no means mutually-exclusive). See more.
Source - Sinuous Sentinels
You served your apprenticeship among merchants and traders. You’ve traveled dusty miles and haggled under distant skies. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 92)
You grew up on the streets. You know where to hide and when your puppy dog eyes will earn you a hot meal. See more.
Source - Adventurer's Guide (Pg. 94)