You have spent your early life being a studious person, researching, learning and gathering knowledge and various skills to be prepared for the future to come. At one point in time you were touched by knowledge itself. It seems that an entity, cosmic construct or power by choice or chance has favored you. Worshiping this specific entity or knowing no reason or a "why" you have been touched by knowledge itself, you try to live your life either knowing and maybe worshiping or not knowing and wondering why you have these weird thoughts that pop in your mind. Said feature is popping up day by day going forward. You find yourself having a hunger for knowledge, spreading and teaching it and learning more. Interestingly, in addition to that hunger, for a few times a day certain things you never knew or could have learned in your younger days spawn in your mind. It is fascinating you.
- Skill Proficiencies: Nature,Religion,Investigation,History,Arcana
- Tool Proficiencies: Three of your choice
- Languages: Two of your choice
- Equipment: two large tomes and a set of spell books or books of other content,a set of adventurous clothes, a 50 foot rope, a bag, a torch,200 pages of paper, 100 pages of parchment and 1 lb of leather to write manuscripts, 700 ml of ink, a leather pouch containing 15 gold, various treasures that you found in seeking knowledge in the depths of dangerous spaces or by chance worth 250 gold, Calligrapher's Supplies
Due to being touched by knowledge you find yourself being able to be an Expert on almost everything unnaturally. As per trait the user is able to have Expertise for 20 seconds on skill or saving throws of the Wisdom or Intelligence kind for 2 times per long rest.
In addition to being unnaturally cunning on certain times of the day the time needed to research or find specific information is halved. This applies to research both verbally and by written type.
Suggested Characteristics
Having this hunger for knowledge, you may find yourself throwing yourself in dangerous situation and analyzing every thing or cause, planning every little thing, so the situation fits your liking. Furthermore, knowledge can be cruel. You would do much for knowledge: deceive, kill, expand your life or even become a lich. For you power may be knowledge and only time that which may be restricting you
Their study of the history, religion, the arcane - literally anything - may affect your mannerisms and ideals. Also you will find having a problem with not being able to amass more skills or knowledge, which can lead you to try many ways of gathering such
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Posted May 9, 2018Backgrounds are pretty simple to homebrew as they all follow the same formula.
- 2 Skill proficiencies.
- Some combination of 2 either tools, or languages.
Here you have given 5 skill proficiencies, 3 tools and 2 languages, which is quite a lot over the top.
In addition, the supplies you have given easily eclipse (multiple times) the standard equipment given for a background.
And finally... The features for backgrounds are usually flavourful, and give a roleplay benefit, not a mechanical one. The benefit here is very mechanical, and is extremely overpowered.
I think conceptually this is an interesting background, but I think you may do well to go over the backgrounds from the PHB and try to emulate the structure of them to achieve a better result.
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Posted May 12, 2018Well thank you for the kind remarks.
As you might have guessed already, I am not quite proficient in home-brewing quite jet. I will be sure to change the background to a more moderate version, so it fits into the standard of the PHB. Though - I have to say - I loved the way it pushed the boundaries of what is possible with a background and seemed still to have a little flavor.
Thanks for the review!
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Posted May 2, 2021This is quite an interesting concept, it just needs some work to balance so it’s not so overpowered. I would suggest something like this:
Skills: player’s choice of two from Nature, Arcana, Religion, History (dropped Investigation, the others go nicely with your knowledge theme, this is already more powerful than most backgrounds since you get a choice, usually the skills are set)
Toolkits: proficiency with Calligraphy Toolkit (goes with the theme of the background and you already have it in the equipment so it makes sense)
Language: 1 exotic language of the player’s choice (again with the general theme, I think a less known language fits here better than just any common one, just 1 since you gave them proficiency with the toolkit)
Equipment: in short, you are giving WAY TOO MUCH here, this is more than a level 1 character would have including their class equipment + background items, usually the background offers a few items and a small amount of gold, try something like this: Calligrapher’s Supplies, a journal containing notes about your most interesting discoveries, a small trinket you found seeking knowledge in unknown places, a leather pouch containing 20gp, a book on a topic of your choice
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Posted May 30, 2022I wish I could upvote comments, this is very helpful and more people need to see this