Backgrounds

Your background captures who your character was before the adventure began — their trade, their station, and the world that shaped them. Xindeler has 24 backgrounds across 7 categories.

A background never restricts your race or class choice. A Noble can be a Barbarian, a Criminal can be a Cleric — it's purely a story hook and a starting point, not a build constraint.

Spiritual

• Acolyte — trained since youth in a temple of the Luminaries (or, rarely, one of the Unfaithful).
• Hermit — a recluse who withdrew into solitude and found a hidden truth out there.
• Inquisitor — served a Luminary's tribunal hunting heretics and cultists.

Academic

• Sage — a scholar of the great arcane academies or a lord's private library.
• Archaeologist — a delver into ruins and places lost to time.
• Scribe — a copyist for an academy or a noble chancery, sharp-eyed for forgeries.
• Investigator — gets access to people and places through fast talk and official-looking papers.

Martial

• Soldier — a veteran of a city levy, a standing army, or a mercenary company.
• Guard — stood watch at a gate, wall or noble estate.

Criminal

• Criminal — part of an underworld network, keeps a reliable contact on hand.
• Charlatan — a con artist with a false identity and forged papers.
• Bounty Hunter — tracks quarry through the city's back-channels.

Social

• Noble — born into one of Xindeler's great houses, welcome wherever fine people gather.
• Entertainer — a traveling minstrel, acrobat or tumbler.
• Folk Hero — a commoner who stood up to a monster or a corrupt lord and was remembered for it.
• Merchant — a trader of the road and caravan circuit.

Trade & Craft

• Artisan — a maker of fine goods outside any formal guild structure.
• Farmer — worked the land through drought, blight and harvest.
• Fisher — lives by the water and the catch.
• Miner — dug ore, stone and gemstone from the deep places of the earth.

Wilderness

• Outlander — raised beyond the borders of settled law.
• Guide — led travelers through wild edges and trackless reaches.
• Sailor — a deckhand of the coastal and river trade.
• Urchin — a street-child who learned the city's hidden passages early.

Choosing a Background

Backgrounds are purely a roleplay and flavor choice today — pick whichever story hook appeals to you. There's no mechanical penalty for mixing an unusual background with a given race or class.