Since the launch of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, one of the features I’ve enjoyed the most is Backgrounds. These archetypes are a fun and simple way of differentiating characters outside of the mechanical rigor of classes and lineages, and they tie characters to the game world. They might tell us what your character’s occupation was before embarking on a life of adventure, or tell us where they are from or how they were raised.
Knave is a beautiful, elegant OSR system that is getting a 2nd Edition over on the Questing Beast Patreon. One of the things I’ve been tinkering with is adding 5E Backgrounds to Knave. Doing so provides two interesting facets that can change up how character creation works and how the game plays out:
- You tie your Knave character to the world, just like Backgrounds are meant to do: most Background features translate to Knave without conversion!
- You can remove dice rolls for starting gear.
The first one is self evident, I think, so I’ll just add that I have tables for randomly determining Backgrounds in Knave. This has the add-on effect of working a lot like rolling for random job in Dungeon Crawl Classics for your 0-level funnel characters. Joining an undertaker, cartographer, and gong farmer on an adventure has a very different feel from a fighter, wizard, and rogue.
Here’s a sample table only using the Backgrounds found in the Basic Rules.
D6 | Background
- Acolyte
- Criminal
- Folk Hero
- Noble
- Sage
- Soldier
But my table is much, much bigger. I use the Backgrounds from Into the Unknown, plus a bunch of the OGL ones found on 5eSRD.com, as well as a bunch from dandwiki.com.
One more thing: if the Background has a note about determining its specialty, area of focus, or whatever, I leave that in. So, a Criminal still rolls on their criminal Specialty table, while a Sage rolls for their knowledge Specialty. We like random tables, after all!
The other part of this exercise for me is the starting gear. I use the equipment chapter from Into the Unknown (which is effectively the same as D&D 5E) in my Knave games, mostly because the consistency and depth for gear like burning oil, fighting with a flaming torch, deploying caltrops and ball bearings, etc. But I don’t think that really changes anything here, anyway.
Backgrounds provide a handful of specific items, as well as some starting coin. For my purposes, the PCs start with everything on that list except the coin. Then, they get one simple melee weapon of choice, and two choices:
- 1 additional simple weapon (melee or ranged with 2d6 ammo, if needed) OR shield
- 1 suit of light armor OR 1d4 Level 1 spells
This outfits characters similarly quickly to the tables in Knave, but does provide just a little bit of choice, and adds a bunch of flavor via the Background gear. And, admittedly, eats up some inventory slots with that same gear, which translates to fun during the game when the players are trying to find ways to use those items to survive a dungeon crawl.
Converting Backgrounds
In summary, converting a Background from 5th edition rules to Knave looks like this:
- Note the background’s Feature. This provides your character some benefit in the campaign setting or in the game’s mechanics.
- Note the background’s Equipment; exceptions below! This makes up most of your starting gear.
- The following are exceptions to the Equipment section; exclude these items from your starting gear.
- Any coin.
- Any clothing: this is assumed among the clothes you wear.
- If you have a specialty or defining aspect that you roll for or choose — Alchemist’s Apprentice alchemical specialization, Fortune Teller’s specialty, etc. — you must roll one.
- Ignore everything else about a background:
- Skill Proficiencies
- Languages
- Suggested Characteristics
What do you think?
Comments, questions, suggestions? Leave a comment!