Star Signs & Public Discord LIVE NOW
Backgrounds are an essential part of character building, but what part of a character do they actually represent? It's easy to assume they're your character's day job, or their history, since that's what the name and all the examples in the PHB imply. However, what each background really has in common is that they determine what your character is like, beyond just what they can do or have done. As a result, there are a lot of ways to make a background that we as 5e players haven't explored yet.
The philosopher Tyler Durden (don't look it up) once said "you are not your job", and on that at least, he was right. Thus, to offer you all a new way approach backgrounds, we at Gelatinous Cubicles have created a new set of backgrounds, based on the astrological signs! With these, you can decouple your character creation from your characters' profession, and focus on the parts that really matter; exactly when your character was born, and where planets that definitely exist in Faerun were at the time.
In all seriousness, though, we have designed these backgrounds to focus specifically on personality and motivations without having to be bogged down in the specifics of a character's history. This focus leaves you the freedom to write a Taurus or Scorpio character with all sorts of possible histories, rather than having them be locked in early, and it lets characters with very different origins discover surprising common ground! We've already had a lot of fun using these to build characters for our own games, and we think you'll love them, too.
Our zodiac backgrounds are available right now to all of our $3 and up patrons on Patreon, so if you are eager and somehow not already a patron, that's the fastest way to get your hands on these backgrounds and more besides.
If you have a lot to say about these or anything else, you can comment below, or you can join our Discord, where you'll get to argue about DnD with us and get direct updates on our releases as they occur. We hope to hear from you there soon!
-the Gelatinous Cubicles Team