Everything you know, something or someone else taught you. Your mentor could've been a single figure who tested you for years and watched what you did with their unfinished work before they trusted you with their secrets. Or you were taken in by something larger — a monastery, a guildhall, a fully formalized academy — and learned to watch the results list to make sure you kept making the cut. Knowledge of all types and from all places bearing the fingerprints of others.
Fingerprints that leave deep marks all on their own. You still hold a pen a certain way because of how the calligrapher corrected your grip. You still brace yourself before you speak thanks to old reflexes expecting you to be picked apart. You still find yourself correcting other people's wrong assumptions about what you've learned whether it was asked for or not. For better or worse the standards impressed on you have become the framework for how you learn, decide and practice.
When you venture out into the world in pursuit of more knowledge, how will your teachings shape and be shaped by you? Will you cling to them so tightly that even the smallest alteration becomes a betrayal? Will you reject them completely, thinking of them as useless bunk that failed to enlighten you in the ways you wanted? Will you land somewhere more in the grey and murky in-between, accepting some of what you were taught while rejecting others? After all, now it's your hand holding the pen and your mind getting to decide what the answers will be.
- Ability Scores: Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom
- Feat: Choose between Healer, Skilled, Keen Mind or Magic Initiate (Wizard)
- Skill Proficiencies: Perception and one other of your choice among Arcana, Investigation, Nature, History, Medicine and Religion.
- Tool Proficiencies: Calligrapher's Supplies
- Languages: Two of your Choice
- Equipment: Choose A or B: (A) Calligrapher's Supplies, Book (the subject of your current study) Robe, Lamp, Oil, Parchment (12 sheets), 10 GP; or (B) 50 GP
To determine the nature of your scholarly training and expertise, roll a d10 or choose from the options in the table below.
| d10 | Scholarly Specialty |
|---|---|
| 1 | Alchemist: You spent your training over crucibles and reagents rather than books alone. You can identify whether a substance is poisonous, medicinal, or inert by taste or smell alone, no check required. Additionally, given 10 minutes and access to mundane herbs or reagents within that once per long rest, you can produce a rough antitoxin potent enough to grant advantage on a single saving throw against poison. |
| 2 | Astronomer: You charted the movement of stars, planets, and celestial cycles. So long as you can see the sky, you always know your compass direction and can determine the approximate time of night or date to within a day, no check required. |
| 3 | Cryptographer: Ciphers, codes, and hidden meanings were your specialty. You automatically decode simple substitution or transposition ciphers on sight. Once per long rest, given 10 minutes with a more complex code or cipher, you crack it with no check needed at all. |
| 4 | Discredited Academic: You proposed a theory your peers refused to accept, and it cost you your standing. When you make a claim and argue it purely on evidence and reasoning, you have advantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks. When you instead invoke your own credentials or reputation to back it up, you have disadvantage on the same check because your name carries baggage you can't argue your way around. |
| 5 | Field Naturalist: Your education came from direct observation, not secondhand text. You always know, without a check, whether a plant, fungus, or creature you can see is dangerous to touch, eat, or drink. Once per long rest, you can automatically succeed on an Intelligence (Nature) check to identify a specimen or terrain hazard, rather than rolling. |
| 6 | Historian / Archivist: You preserved and organized the past. Given even a fragment of a document, you can determine its approximate age and origin at a glance. Once per long rest, you may ask your DM one yes/no question about a historical event or figure your character could plausibly have encountered in their studies, and receive a truthful answer. |
| 7 | Linguist: Languages, living and dead, were your focus. You always know whether an unfamiliar language is related to one you speak. Once per long rest, you can puzzle out the general gist — not the exact meaning — of a short passage written in a language you don't know, no check required. |
| 8 | Physician-Scholar: Your studies were medical or anatomical. You can stabilize a dying creature automatically, without needing to make a Wisdom (Medicine) check. Once per long rest, a creature you stabilize this way also regains 1 hit point. |
| 9 | Theologian: You studied doctrine, scripture, and the history of belief. You automatically recognize common religious symbols, rites, and doctrines on sight, no check required for anything reasonably well-known. You also always sense, without rolling, whether a display of devotion from a creature you can closely observe is sincere or performed. |
| 10 | Wizard's Apprentice: You trained under, or alongside, a practicing spellcaster. So long as you've personally witnessed a given spell cast before, you can identify it again on sight from its verbal or somatic components alone even though you can't cast it yourself. |
Where others need interviews, references and hefty fees to access even a fraction of your source's collection, you walk in through the front door. Senior scholars share notes they wouldn't hand a stranger, archivists and librarians are quick to help you navigate their collections and you gain access to private reading rooms locked to everyone else. Away from your source, other institutions and archives tend to extend you the same courtesy on sight. One scholar recognizing another, whether or not they'd ever admit to respecting your particular field. That trust only goes so far, though: some knowledge, materials, or specimens are locked away even from you.
Spell List
| Spell Level | Spells |
|---|
Suggested Characteristics
Cloistered scholars are defined by the source of their learning and their characteristics reflect those roots. Devoted to a defined institution, master, or tradition, a cloistered scholar measures their own judgment against it. Sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with resentment.
| d8 | Personality Trait |
|---|---|
| 1 | I quote my old mentor so often that people who've never met them could still probably pick their voice out of a crowd. |
| 2 | I have a habit of answering questions with more questions, which reads as testing everyone I talk to. |
| 3 | I've kept the tools of my training long after I stopped needing them: a worn primer, a chipped inkwell, notes I could recite without looking. |
| 4 | I flinch, just slightly, when someone criticizes the method I was taught even on the days I privately agree with them. |
| 5 | I measure every new place against the one that raised me, and it's rare that anywhere else comes out ahead. |
| 6 | I correct people's techniques before I've caught myself doing it. |
| 7 | When I don't know an answer, I still reach first for what my mentor would have said and invent the rest if I have to. |
| 8 | I collect some small token from everywhere I study now, the way I once collected approval from the one place that mattered. |
| d6 | Ideal |
|---|---|
| 1 | Debt. Whatever I've become, I owe to those who shaped me and such a thing cannot stay quiet forever. |
| 2 | Inheritance. What I was taught isn't mine to change, but to protect until I can hand it on exactly as I received it. |
| 3 | Proof. Someday I'll go back and show them what I've made of myself, whether it becomes a homecoming or a reckoning. |
| 4 | Correction. My training wasn't perfect and neither was I when I left it. I'm still sorting out which parts of me are worth keeping. |
| 5 | Protection. Whatever it cost me to leave, I won't let anyone hurt the place or person that made me who I am. |
| 6 | Succession. Someone will need to carry on what I know when I'm gone. I haven't decided yet if I want that person to be anything like me. |
| d6 | Bond |
|---|---|
| 1 | I still write to the person who trained me, though I stopped expecting a reply a long time ago. |
| 2 | There's a name still carved somewhere at my old institution and I mean to either fill that place again or empty it for good. |
| 3 | Someone trained alongside me and left on far worse terms than I did. I owe them an accounting I still haven't given. |
| 4 | The last thing my mentor ever told me was unfinished. I won't rest until I know how it was supposed to end. |
| 5 | My training cost someone else something I didn't understand the price of until it was too late. |
| 6 | I stumbled onto something in my source's collection that I swore never to reveal. I intend to keep that promise, whatever it costs me. |
| d6 | Flaw |
|---|---|
| 1 | I need to be the most knowledgeable person in the room and something ugly comes out of me when I'm not. |
| 2 | I've mistaken my own cruelty and that of others' for rigor, because that's what rigor looked like where I trained. |
| 3 | I doubt anyone whose knowledge didn't come from a proper institution or mentor — self-taught, self-made, doesn't matter how good they actually are. |
| 4 | I hoard what I know rather than share it. Where I trained, information was currency, and generosity looked like weakness. |
| 5 | I've told the story of how my training ended so many times with so many changes that I'm no longer sure which version actually happened. |
| 6 | When I'm afraid, I lean on procedure instead of courage and hope no one notices the difference. |
Contacts
Nobody trains for years at a defined source without becoming entangled in the ambitions, rivalries, and quiet debts of everyone else who trained there alongside them. Roll a d8, or choose to determine who from your old life is most likely to resurface for better or worse.
| d8 | Contact |
|---|---|
| 1 | The mentor who constantly says how proud they are of you, in a way that leaves no room for you to have become anyone other than who they sculpted. |
| 2 | A fellow student who outpaced you by every measure your source cared about, and still writes to you as though you were close friends. |
| 3 | An administrator who once looked the other way for you, and has never once let you forget that debt. |
| 4 | The rival who left on openly bad terms, and has spent every year since telling anyone who'll listen that they were driven out unfairly while you were the one who stayed quiet and let them take the blame. |
| 5 | A junior scholar who reveres you, and who you're privately certain misunderstood everything you actually meant to teach them. |
| 6 | The one who trained beside you and washed out. They don't blame you for it. You suspect they should. |
| 7 | A gatekeeper — archivist, registrar, chief clerk — who answers every request strictly by the rules, and lately the rules have not been going your way. |
| 8 | Someone from your source who vanished without explanation years ago, and has just resurfaced, expecting you to still consider them family. |
Previous Versions
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7/20/2026 3:27:11 PM
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8/9/2026 6:42:29 PM
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