Backgrounds

Also known as what you did before you decided for some damn fool reason to hie off into the hills and become an adventure.

Every Story has a beginning. Your background provides you with important story cues about your character’s identity, motivations, and past, reveals where you came from, lays a possible basis for how you became an adventurer, and shows your sense of your place in the world, drawn from experiences of your own and of those around you. It also can be handy to pick up some extra skills and odd little tricks.

All backgrounds are focused on what your life was like during each of three periods during one’s life. Some people have varied backgrounds, some folks have fairly direct backgrounds. Each person has three Origins, three backgrounds, that describe what their life was like in each of those three periods. This builds the history of a given character.

Childhood Origin

This is the period of the earliest memories, when the sense of self arises and one begins learning about their immediate world – parents, family, friends, their corner of the neighborhood. Childhood Origins do not provide benefits. Childhood backgrounds are more about the status and nature of their family than of the character directly and represent the start of the character’s story.

Youthhood Origin

Youth backgrounds are the backgrounds from the period in a person’s life where they learned about themselves and the world around them and formed the major ways they thought about and deal with the broader world around them. Covering the period between 11 and 15 years old, this is when they become aware of the world around them and prepare for the transition to apprenticeship and responsibility. The strongest memories of their youth will come from this period, and how they will be seen. Youthhood origins provide skills.

Juvenal Origin

Juvenal Backgrounds address what happened once you reached the age of 16 – your Juvenal years. These will blend in with your choice of profession and provide the reasoning for why you became what you became. This is typically the age at which someone is considered an adult and expected to learn a trade and begin to make their way on their own. This has the greatest impact on their lives as adults. Juvenal backgrounds provide skills, tools, equipment, and ability score increases.

Existence Origin

Additionally, all characters have a basic set of background qualities that come from their existence. All told, that is four background aspects to each character.

Connecting Origins

When choosing a background for each period, the most important question to ask about your background is Why Things Changed, though the question that most people will want to know if they are wise is What Changed?

Wyrlde doesn’t offer a huge number of possible lives, or life paths. It allows for creativity, but the goal remains to understand what happened to your character during each of those three periods, even if it was the same as before, up through their apprenticeship and the start of their adventuring career. Origin Backgrounds are backgrounds of your background, in a way – they deal in the circumstances of one’s early childhood.

Background Features

Unlike normal 5e Backgrounds, Wyrlde backgrounds are more limited in what they provide to you. They are a key part of your journey on Wyrlde, and it is hoped they provide you with some value, though it is not required. Rafael knows how to crochet, but she certainly won’t be admitting that or using it where anyone can see – unless she takes off her boots and you spot her socks.

Backgrounds are limited – a background should be able to be found in every city, in every town, even in every village to some extent, and decidedly not according to local customs. Thus, there is no background for Akadian Housekeeper. They would simply be a Housekeeper, and the particulars would depend on the homeland drawn from.

Building Backgrounds

Using the rules here, you can build a Background from scratch or customize a premade Background, focusing on details related to the backstory you have in mind for your character.

When you build a Background, you make choices for those features, so think about your character’s past.

Description

The background needs a description.

History

Where did they come from? (Child Origin)

Where did they spend most of their time? (Youth Origin) (Juvenal Origin)

What did they do for a living? (Juvenal Origin)

Ability Scores

How did their past affect their ability scores?

When you determine your character’s Juvenal Origin, choose two separate ability scores that reflects what you did, and increase each by 1, then choose 1 Ability score that reflects an area neglected and reduce it by 1.

The Ability Scores possible to impact are:

Skill Proficiencies

What skill did they learn during this time that has stuck with them?

For your Youth Origin and Juvenal Origin, Choose one Skill. Your character gains Proficiency in that.

Tool Proficiency

What Tool or Kit did they become proficient in?

For your Juvenal Origin, Choose one Tool or Kit. Your character gains Tool Proficiency with it.

Equipment

What possessions did they acquire?

For your Juvenal Origin, your character gains 50 sp to spend on background equipment. The character keeps any unspent sp as spare coin. This is an addition to your starting wealth.

Wealth Bonus

Your wealth bonus applies to both your Youth Origin and Juvenal Origin.

Feature

Features only come into play during the Juvenal Origin.