Dungeon Delver’s Guide: Backgrounds that Don’t Fade into the Background
Now seems like a great time to talk about how Dungeon Delver’s Guide (coming to Kickstarter on August 30th), and Level Up, handles backgrounds.
One of the biggest rules changes we made in Level Up was moving 5E’s racial ability score increases to backgrounds. We decided that your training, not your genes, make you the hero you are today. With signs indicating that D&D is considering the same change, Level Up is even more compatible with D&D than ever before.
Although compatible with 5E and One D&D, the backgrounds in Level Up are by no means identical in design. A Dungeon Delver’s Guide background, besides being a collection of proficiencies and powers, is meant to be a tool for the Narrator to draw the character into the story. Each background is an adventure factory, containing dozens of loose threads and unanswered questions to lead you down into the dungeon to rescue friends, right past wrongs, or find lost treasures.
Once a character has gained a few levels, it can be easy for a background to be forgotten unless it’s integral to the character’s story. In order to supercharge adventurers’ stories, we give every character a connection (someone you know, often a loved one or an arch-enemy, that just might return) and a memento (a unique object that may still conceal mysteries to uncover). In each background’s Adventures and Advancement section, we also offer advice on how a character’s past can inspire further exploits. As a Narrator looking for ways to draw players into your game, your characters’ backgrounds are rich sources of adventure hooks.
In Dungeon Delver’s Guide, of course, all our backgrounds are dungeon-centric. A good dungeon, like any adventure, must have stakes the players care about, and a great way to accomplish this is by tying the dungeon to the characters’ past. Whether your adventurer is a deep hunter, a dungeon robber, an escapee from below, or an imposter who has claimed someone else’s life, the depths have marked you as their own and will inevitably draw you back in. When you venture below the surface, you’ll be returning to the place that made you—and you’ll have unfinished business to attend to.
Today let’s take a look at the Escapee from Below background. Like all of the Dungeon Delver’s Guide backgrounds, it offers plenty of reasons to venture into dungeons, from finding friends in captivity to recovering lost heirlooms. Your Escapee may even find themselves leading a rebellion and changing the social fabric of Underland itself.
From looking at this background, you may be wondering: why does it only grant two instead of three points of ability score bonuses? Well, that’s because, besides background and heritage, Level Up has a third leg of the origins tripod: culture. A Level Up culture—for example Shadow Elf or Underland Mariner—offers rich character options, spells, and other benefits that inform an adventurer’s identity and that scale up as a hero gains levels. For a bit more on cultures in Dungeon Delver’s Guide, read up on our heritages and cultures.