Cloistered Scholar 5e

As a child, you were inquisitive when your playmates were possessive or raucous. In your formative years, you found your way to one of Faerûn's great institutes of learning, where you were apprenticed and taught that knowledge is a more valuable treasure than gold or gems. Now you are ready to leave your home – not to abandon it, but to quest for new lore to add to its storehouse of knowledge.

The most well-known of Faerûn's fonts of knowledge is Candlekeep. The great library is always in need of workers and attendants, some of whom rise through the ranks to assume roles of greater responsibility and prominence. You might be one of Candlekeep's own, dedicated to the curatorship of what is likely the most complete body of lore and history in all the world.

Perhaps instead you were taken in by the scholars of the Vault of the Sages or the Map House in Silverymoon, and now you have struck out to increase your knowledge and to make yourself available to help those in other places who seek your expertise. You might be one of the few who aid Herald's Holdfast, helping to catalogue and maintain records of the information that arrives daily from across Faerûn.

Source: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide

Skill Proficiencies: History, plus your choice of one from among Arcana, Nature, and Religion
Tool Proficiencies: None
Languages: Two of your choice
Equipment: The scholar's robes of your cloister, a writing kit (small pouch with a quill, a bottle of ink, folded parchment, and a small penknife), a borrowed book on the subject of your current study, and a pouch containing 10gp

Features

Library Access: Though others must often endure extensive interviews and significant fees to gain access to even the most common archives in your library, you have free and easy access to the majority of the library, though it might also have repositories of lore that are too valuable, magical, or secret to permit anyone immediate access.
You have a working knowledge of your cloister's personnel and bureaucracy, and you know how to navigate those connections with some ease.
Additionally, you are likely to gain preferential treatment at other libraries across the Realms, as professional courtesy shown to a fellow scholar.

Suggested Characteristics

Use the tables for the sage background as the basis for your traits and motivations, modifying the entries when appropriate to suit your identity.

Your bond is almost certainly associated either with the place where you grew up or with the knowledge you hope to acquire through adventuring. Your ideal is no doubt related to how you view the quest for knowledge and truth – perhaps as a worthy goal in itself, or maybe as a means to a desirable end.

Should You Be A Cloistered Scholar?

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Like most of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide backgrounds, Cloistered Scholar steals its entire structure from a Player’s Handbook background. This time, it's Sage, and offers nearly nothing to distinguish the two apart.

Feature: Library Access

Library Access lies to your face; it starts off saying you can go where people aren’t allowed to go in a library, then immediately takes it back by saying “it might also have repositories of lore that are too valuable, magical, or secret to permit anyone immediate access”. It’s a non-feature, even in terms of Player’s Handbook background features.
Sage at least lets you know where to find any kind of information regarding any study, not just academics related to libraries.

Skills:

History, Arcana, Religion, and Nature are the “lore” skills- they all sit comfortably in the “least likely to be used” skills bucket.
Of the four, Nature tends to come up most, as it can help reveal some dangers the natural world presents. Arcana is a close second, as its often used to inspect magic. Religion comes next, only being applicable to a handful of adventures centered around divine magic specifically, and History brings up the rear, only generally being a tool DMs can use to teach you about their deep worldbuilding that usually isn’t progressing the narrative forward.
They all can come up, but they’re definitely not skills I’d expect to use every session, or even every adventure.

Other Proficiencies

Languages aren’t a particularly meaningful upgrade. Language barriers are a major hurdle that people don’t necessarily want to sift through to learn about the world or progress socially- having two of your choice isn’t likely adding a lot to your means of engaging with various peoples and cultures when Common is as pervasive as it is.

Equipment

I love the presentation of the writer’s kit here; its the one element of the background I’d like to exist in the PHB, as its a concise way to give somebody writing tools. These are useful in and out of adventuring for leaving notes, silently communicating, or sketching runes or other frightening markings.
The borrowed book is also a great addition for building out your backstory, which is comparable to the letter from a dead colleague Sage offers. Unfortunately, sage also gets the writer’s kit in function, leaving the menial background feature difference and flavor item as the only differences between options.

Bonus Tables

You don’t get any! You get to use Sage’s, making no distinction between the two! Boo!

All Together

Cloistered Scholar takes one of the worst Player’s Handbook backgrounds, copies the majority of it with some flexibility as to which of the “lore” skills you want, gives it a worse feature, and prints it as a “new” option. Don’t be fooled- you’re as well off sticking with Sage, and by that I mean you probably want to pick a different background that offers better proficiency access at minimum.

Thank you for visiting!

If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.

The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.

‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.