Rewarded 5e
You were living a difficult life before your destiny suddenly changed through a miraculous turn of good fortune. Perhaps a benevolent deity gave you precisely what you most desired. You might have stumbled across a Deck of Many Things and drawn a card with a potent, positive effect. Or maybe you inherited a modest fortune from a distant relative you didn’t know you had.
Regardless, you left the daily miseries of your old life behind in favor of adventure and excitement. Your old debts have been paid, responsibilities you thought inescapable are behind you, or you suddenly possess rare and unusual skills unknown to ordinary folk.
Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Persuasion
Languages: One of your choice
Tool Proficiencies: One gaming set of your choice (such as playing cards or three dragon ante)
Equipment: A bottle of black ink, an ink pen, five sheets of paper, a gaming set (matching your chosen proficiency), a signet ring, a set of fine clothes, and a pouch containing 18 gp.
Feature: Fortune’s Favor
Your unexpected good fortune is reflected by a minor boon. You gain the Lucky, Magic Initiate, or Skilled feat (your choice). Your choice of feat reflects the transformation that changed your life. An encounter with a genie who gave you three wishes might have resulted in magical powers represented by Magic Initiate. If you paid off all your family debts with a fortuitous round of three-dragon ante, you might be Lucky instead. Alternatively, you could use the Skilled feat to reflect whatever trial you endured to secure your new destiny and to model the knowledge and abilities imparted to you by whatever force transformed your life.
Rewarded Characters
Review by Sam West, @CrierKobold
Pain and misery is a bread and butter experience for a D&D character; Rewarded shakes that up, instead putting your character in a priveledged position that comes with insane luck. You had loving parents who you talk to all the time- and hey! Look at that! You also hit the lottery! It's one of the two fate and fortune related backgrounds from the Book of Many Things. Of the two, this one is better, because it's kind of busted.
Skills
Insight and Persuasion set up for a good-aligned negotiator, somebody who wants the job of navigating social interactions honestly. These fit great on classes like Paladin, who get both options from their class. Alternatively, Warlocks with good patrons, such as a Celestial warlock, can find access to both of these skills fit perfectly with how they want to engage with the world, and how they differ from a typical evil or neutral-aligned member of their class.
Other Proficiencies
Languages are usually going to be a flavor-enhancer on your sheet; they tell about your background, and aren’t going to regularly be pivotal or powerful elements of your sheet. One of your choice makes this background fairly open to a wide variety of archetypes that can stretch from the mundane to the magnificent.
The gaming set proficiency fits in a similar category; nothing that is going to regularly empower your character, but a nice boon to enhance their flavor.
Equipment
Rewarded get similar equipment to Nobles, trading a small bit of gold for the paper and gaming set. Having pen and paper always surprises me in its utility- of the equipment here, its the items I’d recommend marking down and thinking about from time to time.
Feature
Fortune’s Favor is utterly busted. I can’t stress that enough. Lucky is a feat so powerful it's likely the most house-banned content in the game, and this background gives it to you out the gate for free. Even if it's not an option for you, Magic Initiate opens up spellcasting to you immediately with two cantrips and a 1st level spell of your choice. To get the most juice out of this singular spell, consider something like Find Familiar, which functions differently from a typical 1st level spell and is ludicrously powerful. It's a second character sheet with a myriad of abilities and senses you can summon and dismiss at will.
Normally, this costs you an Ability Score Improvement at 4th level. Sometimes, you can forgo that and get it with just your species by playing Variant Human. Now, you can take this background to get access to either, making it even easier for a variety of characters to slot either of these busted feats onto their sheet.
Oh, and I guess you could pick Skilled, which is fine. It definitely fits within the realm of “fair” background feats.
All Together
It turns out stapling Lucky or Magic Initiate to a background is disgusting. The skills you get are pretty reasonable, to- Persuasion and Insight both are commonly used to navigate any social encounters your confronted with. Sure, the proficiencies gained aren’t that spectacular, but they don’t need to be when you’re offered superb feats for almost no tradeoff.
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