Background

Your background shapes your character based on things that happened before the character became an adventurer. Creating you characters background is a 4 step process:

  1. Determining ability scores

  2. Select skills, languages, and tools

  3. Selecting a background perk

  4. Selecting your ancestry and heritage

Determining Ability Scores

Much of what your character does in the game depends on their six abilities: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Each ability has a score, which is a number you record on your character sheet.

Each of your ability scores start at 8 and you have 27 points to spend to change your ability scores. The cost to change a score is as follows:

  • Score 9. Costs 1 point

  • Score 10. Costs 2 points

  • Score 11. Costs 3 points

  • Score 12. Costs 4 points

  • Score 13. Costs 5 points

  • Score 14. Costs 7 points

  • Score 15. Costs 9 points

Increasing Background Ability Scores

Once you have your ability scores, you can increase some of those scores further to represent how your background influenced the character you have become.

You either increase one of your ability scores by 2 and a another ability scores by 1, or you can increase three ability scores of your choice by 1 each (e.g. you may decide that your character was a soldier and choose to increase the character’s Strength and Constitution to represent that background).

Select skills, languages, and tools

You choose any two skills and gain proficiency with those skills. You also learn two languages or gain one tool proficiency on top of that.

Select a Perk

See the list of background perks and select one

Select your Ancestry

Select one ancestry and one of its heritage features.