[D&D5] Descent into Avernus | ходы игроков | Генерация

It’s said that every faith in the world has a believer in Baldur’s Gate. Not only are most established faiths tolerated — even if some of them, including most of the openly evil faiths, are relegated to the Outer City’s Twin Songs neighborhood — but new ones arrive constantly, carried by travelers and proselytizers from far-flung lands. A character with this background might aspire to greater things, not for themselves, but for their faith.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Religious Community

You’re tightly connected with the religious community of Baldur’s Gate. You know if a deity has a following in the city and any places that faith openly congregates and the neighborhoods those faithful typically inhabit. While this isn’t remarkable for most of the city’s larger faiths, keeping track of the hundreds of religions newcomers bring with them is no mean feat.

Everybody’s always trying to get a leg up on somebody in Baldur’s Gate. One group’s con artist might be another’s revolutionary. Or maybe you’re just in it for yourself. In any case, characters with this background have a plan to hit the big time; all they need is audacity and a little time.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Long-Lost Heir

You’re well-versed in the mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of Baldurian patriars and other nobles, imitating them smoothly enough to convince even the snootiest family heads of your authenticity. You’re skilled at posing as the long-lost heir to some imaginary or extinguished patriar lineage.

Because of your skill in passing yourself off as a patriar, you have a Watch token that allows you alone into the Upper City of Baldur’s Gate. You might be able to bluff others through with you, or even convince members of the Watch that you’re a patriar. However, any true test of your authenticity is likely to reveal your deception.

No career criminal in Baldur’s Gate operates without being aware of the Guild. Some studiously keep a low profile, carrying just the occasional smuggled load in with legitimate merchandise, or only breaking knees when it can plausibly be claimed as an act of personal revenge. Others join up with crews for protection, or with the Guild itself. A few former Guild members have been cast out of the organization due to incompetence or after offending a more powerful member, and now shuffle for scraps to survive.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Criminal Connections

In Baldur’s Gate, crime is just another business. As a result, you can arrange a meeting with a low-ranking operative of nearly any business, patriar family, crew, government institution, or — certainly — the Guild. This operative will hear you out and, at their discretion, take your information or request up their chain of command. These meetings almost always occur in shady venues.
Criminal Origins

Criminals are pervasive in Baldur’s Gate. If you wish, you may roll on the Criminal Origins table for an event that began your life of crime.

Criminal Origins
d8 Origin
1 You crippled a Guild kingpin’s cousin without realizing the connection. You got the Guild to back off demands for your death by offering to make amends by working for the criminals, but even so the kingpin still plots a personal revenge.
2 The Guild took over your family business, ran it into the ground, and burned the building for insurance money. You were driven into crime yourself, but you’ll never work for the Guild. You take special joy in hitting its targets first, tipping off its con victims and otherwise frustrating its schemes.
3 It’s always been about money. You’re not paid what you’re worth, working for someone who has more than they deserve. But the Guild offered you a way to fix that. You keep doing what you’ve always done — guard work, dock labor, business accounting — but what you learn you pass on to the Guild.
4 The inequality of Baldur’s Gate has driven you to take matters into your own hands. You steal from patriars and rich Lower City residents, funneling the money through charitable fronts to help the needy.
5 You got into crime as a bored patriar looking for excitement. Your family has no idea of your activities, and neither does the Guild. If either of them ever finds out, your life as you know it will be over.
6 A close friend or relative joined the Guild and vanished mysteriously. You’ve worked your way into the lower ranks hoping to find out what happened to them.
7 You’ve always wanted to be a member of the Guild. As a child, you looked up to the Guild members’ swagger, their flashy dress, and their competence, which all marked them as different from the other adults you knew. As soon as you could, you joined the organization.
8 To you, this is just a way to earn a living. You go to work, do what needs to be done, and get paid. Anyone who pursues crime for thrill-seeking, to strike back at unjust authorities, or anything else are amateurs, and they’re liable to get you arrested or killed with their idiocy.

From the Oasis Theater’s spectacular singers and acrobats to the pantomimes and shadow puppeteers of the Wide, Baldur’s Gate hosts a colorful array of performers. Good acts can always find ready audiences, and the constant flow of travelers means that both new spectators and new spectacles are always passing through.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Backstage Pass

You’ve learned that most of the real business of entertainment (or any other venture) happens behind the scenes. It’s easy for you to case what sorts of audiences attend what venue — like how toughs gather at the Blushing Mermaid or how brash patriars congregate at the Helm and Cloak. After a successful performance, you may meet an enthusiastic member of the crowd — someone of an occupation or social class that frequents the establishment. This contact is delighted to talk with you, and to listen.

Being who you are, you could never be a hero. Whether due to your class, your people, your family, or your sins, something about you prevents you from effectively pursuing the path you’ve chosen. Even so, that doesn’t stop you. You’ve left your old face behind, taking on a new persona, becoming something more.

Characters with the faceless background don a disguise — literally or otherwise — as they adventure. This persona might be dramatic or subtle. In a way, though, many characters have such larger than life personalities. Therefore, this background largely focuses on detailing the hero behind the mask.

Skill Proficiencies: Deception, Intimidation
Tool Proficiencies: Disguise kit
Languages: One of your choice
Equipment: A disguise kit, a costume, a pouch containing 10 gp

Faceless Persona

A faceless character adventures behind the mask of a public persona. This persona is as natural to them as their hidden, true face, but it disguises their identity. Roll on the Faceless Persona table to determine your persona, or work with the DM to create a persona that’s unique to your character and suits the tone of your game.

Faceless Persona
d10 Persona
1 A flamboyant spy or brigand
2 The incarnation of a nation or people
3 A scoundrel with a masked guise
4 A vengeful spirit
5 The manifestation of a deity or your faith
6 One whose beauty is greatly accented using makeup
7 An impersonation of another hero
8 The embodiment of a school of magic
9 A warrior with distinctive armor
10 A disguise with animalistic or monstrous characteristics, meant to inspire fear

Feature: Dual Personalities

Most of your fellow adventurers and the world know you as your persona. Those who seek to learn more about you—your weaknesses, your origins, your purpose—find themselves stymied by your disguise. Upon donning a disguise and behaving as your persona, you are unidentifiable as your true self. By removing your disguise and revealing your true face, you are no longer identifiable as your persona. This allows you to change appearances between your two personalities as often as you wish, using one to hide the other or serve as convenient camouflage. However, should someone realize the connection between your persona and your true self, your deception might lose its effectiveness.
Suggested Characteristics

A faceless character usually plays their persona — the hero or extraordinary person they are every day. That’s all a facade, though, or a part of them expressed to an extreme. To define a persona, feel free to choose characteristics from other backgrounds, particularly folk hero, hermit, or noble. For the person behind the persona, the one who truly strives to be faceless, consider a distinct set of faceless characteristics. As a result, those with this background have two sets of characteristics, one for their persona, and one for their faceless selves.

Faceless Personality Traits
d8 Personality Trait
1 I’m earnest and uncommonly direct.
2 I strive to have no personality — it’s easier to forget what’s hardly there.
3 I treasure a memento of the person or instance that set me upon my path.
4 I sleep just as much as I need to and on an unusual schedule.
5 I think far ahead, a detachedness often mistaken for daydreaming.
6 I cultivate a single obscure hobby or study and eagerly discuss it at length.
7 I am ever learning how to be among others — when to stay quiet, when to laugh.
8 I behave like an extreme opposite of my persona.

Faceless Ideals
d6 Ideal
1 Justice. Place in society shouldn’t determine one’s access to what is right. (Good)
2 Security. Doing what must be done can’t bring the innocent to harm. (Lawful)
3 Confusion. Deception is a weapon. Strike from where your foes won’t expect. (Chaotic)
4 Infamy. My name will be a malediction, a curse that fulfills my will. (Evil)
5 Incorruptibility. Be a symbol, and leave your flawed being behind. (Any)
6 Anonymity. It’s my deeds that should be remembered, not their instrument. (Any)

Faceless Bonds
d6 Bond
1 I do everything for my family. My first thought is keeping them safe.
2 What I do, I do for the world. The people don’t realize how much they need me.
3 I’ve seen too many in need. I must not fail them as everyone else has.
4 I stand in opposition, lest the wicked go unopposed.
5 I am exceptional. I do this because no one else can, and no one can stop me.
6 I do everything for those who were taken from me.

Faceless Flaws
d6 Flaw
1 I am callous about death. It comes to us all eventually.
2 I never make eye contact or hold it unflinchingly.
3 I have no sense of humor. Laughing is uncomfortable and embarrassing.
4 I overexert myself, sometimes needing to recuperate for a day or more.
5 I think far ahead, a detachedness often mistaken for daydreaming.
6 I see morality entirely in black and white.

Baldur’s Gate is a city badly in need of heroes, and every so often, one rises from among its own. Ordinary people who rise to greatness are beloved in local history, but the popular imagination can turn on such champions almost as quickly as it anoints them.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Social Vengeance

You’ve lived your entire life in the Lower or Outer City of Baldur’s Gate. You grew up seeing arrogant patriars flaunt their wealth while your hardworking neighbors struggled. As a result, you know how eager commoners in Baldur’s Gate are to see any patriar get what they deserve. While in a busy part of the Lower City or Outer City of Baldur’s Gate, you can spend 2d10 minutes to convince 1d6 commoners to perform a non-illegal act that inconveniences a member of the Watch or Flaming Fist, a patriar, or some other wealthy looking individual.
Folk Hero Origins

Folk heroes might rise from a variety of circumstances, or their origins might be a secret as they do their work anonymously. If you wish, you may roll on the Folk Hero Origins table for an event that started you down your heroic path.

Folk Hero Origins
d6 Origin
1 You helped get healing for a sick child. Now the sick come to you, knowing you’ll help them find a way to salvation.
2 You helped break a Guild protection racket afflicting a community of immigrants in the Outer City. Now, you can’t travel through that part of the city without your dozen adopted grandparents inviting you in for a meal.
3 Seeing a lost patriar after dark in the Outer City, you guided the wayward noble through back streets to safety. The patriar repaid your help by paying for improved roofs and lamps in your neighborhood, causing the entire community to celebrate your deed.
4 Fueled by alcohol, you faced down a carrion crawler that slunk out of the sewer, knocking it out with a single punch. Since then, however, the ale you once credited with your heroism has drowned it, and even your most patient admirers are losing hope. You’re hoping for one last chance to win back the goodwill you’ve drunk away.
5 You once defeated a raging bugbear with a hand mirror, a mounted deer’s head, and two kicks to the groin. Later, you and the bugbear became friends.
6 Last winter, you dove into the frigid river to haul out a foundering fishing boat with your bare hands, saving all aboard. Now, everyone on the docks knows your name.

Numerous guilds and professional associations exist in Baldur’s Gate, covering every imaginable trade and discipline from gravediggers to moneylenders.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Professional Courtesy

You’re familiar with the city’s crews, their territories, and inter-crew politics. Choose one of the three districts of Baldur’s Gate: the Upper City, the Lower City, or the Outer City. This is the district where you conduct most of your business. Whenever you need information about something in one of that district’s neighborhoods, you can seek out crew members in that area and learn the local gossip. You can also gain unimpeded entry to nearly any bank, guild hall, place of business, workhouse, or crew meeting place in your district.

While some might think it strange to find hermits in a bustling city, others know that sometimes the most profound solitude exists in the midst of a crowd. Baldur’s Gate holds a handful of souls who manage to find isolation amid its tumult.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: The Real City

You know the Baldur’s Gate most Baldurians ignore, the dog-eat-dog world of the homeless and unfortunate. You know where to go in the Lower City and Outer City for anonymity. In these slums and alley camps, you can get a damp bed and a bad meal, but also a degree of privacy and no questions asked. Living here isn’t comfortable, but it’s unlikely anyone will find you — and you can stay as long as you want.
Hermit Origins

Any number of personal choices or ill-fated circumstances might have led you to turn away from society. You may, if you wish, choose or roll an origin event from the Hermit Origins table.

Hermit Origins
d6 Origin
1 You led an ill-fated expedition into the Riverveins. Your friends were swept away by flooding, and you’ve never been able to shake the guilt of causing their deaths over a frivolous lark. You’ve maintained a solitary vigil outside the cavern entrance ever since.
2 You crossed the Guild in a bad way. Fortunately, its members think you’re dead. Less fortunately, maintaining that deception might require you to stay in hiding until you actually are.
3 You study the puzzles of mortal natures. You’ve seen followers of evil deities perform miracles for the helpless at Twin Songs, and you’ve seen patriars who worship good deities turn their backs on the poor daily. Bearing witness to such things, and meditating on their contradictions, fills your hours.
4 You tend to some part of the city’s forgotten history: the unmarked graves in Cliffside Cemetery, the crumbling remains of dead patriar families’ manors, or a collection of religious texts stuffed into an attic and forgotten when a believer’s patron deity died. In this solitary work, you’ve learned secrets no one else knows.
5 You killed a patriar’s scion in an illegal duel. The family swore revenge, and you fled to the slums rather than risk bringing their wrath down on your kin.
6 You aren’t originally from Baldur’s Gate. You came here seeking something else, only to learn that the quest that drove you had become impossible to fulfill — its object was destroyed or its purpose was negated by some superseding event. Suddenly directionless and unable to return to your homeland, you have lingered, adrift, in this wretched city.

The patriars of Baldur’s Gate live in the Upper City, where they host grand galas and flaunt cosmopolitan fashions, but are walled off from the poverty and squalor of the less fortunate districts and their neighborhoods. Although they might visit prosperous Bloomridge to try a fashionable restaurant or boutique, or watch a spectacle at the Oasis Theater, the patriars have little reason to venture into the dirtier, more dangerous parts of the city. If they do, it is generally as thrill-seeking tourists or enclosed by a retinue of armed guards, not as friends or neighbors. As a result, many patriars are at once acutely attuned to the nuances of royal courts half a continent away and shockingly ignorant of what life is like for the poor outside their own doorsteps.

This combination of worldly savvy and local blindness characterizes almost all the nobility of Baldur’s Gate. As a result, for those who wish to play patriars, the Patriar feature below replaces the Position and Privilege feature of the noble background. Those who wish to use the background’s standard feature might have gained their standing in Baldur’s Gate from business rather than inheritance.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Patriar

As a member of one of the elite families of Baldur’s Gate, you may pass through city gates without paying tolls, mingle among the Gate’s nobility unquestioned, and impress those on the lookout for wealthy patrons. You are welcome in the Upper City and may stay there after dark without being harassed or evicted. Your word is accepted over others’ without question, and any corruption among guards or government officials tends to work in your favor, not against you — at least until you make some effort to expose it.

Coming to Baldur’s Gate might seem like a good idea for a spectrum of reasons. Profit, excitement, and cosmopolitan opportunities all present tempting prospects, but rarely does one start on the path to Baldur’s Gate fully understanding the complex social morass that awaits. You enter the city an outsider, and it’s likely that — no matter how long you spend in the city — you’ll leave an outsider, if you leave at all.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Immigrant Experience

Even after your short time in Baldur’s Gate, you’ve learned the city holds more walls and gates than those the Watch and Flaming Fist patrols. You are known within the city’s immigrant communities. Should you ever need to learn about a foreign land, people, tradition, or history, you know where to find someone with firsthand experience — likely somewhere in the Outer City.
Outlander Origins

Foreigners of all kinds come to Baldur’s Gate daily, drawn by countless reasons from countless lands. The Outlander Origins table provides ideas for how your character might have come to Baldur’s Gate.

Outlander Origins
d6 Origin
1 Someone stole something precious from your people. You tracked the thief to the city gates, but finding clues in an urban environment is very different from tracking someone across the wilderness. You don’t know where to go from here, but your people need you to succeed.
2 You’ve always been fascinated by the glitter and glamor of city life, so different from the slow pace of life in your homeland. Now you’re here, ready to make your mark in the world, but unsure how to begin.
3 War, plague, famine, or a marauding monster ravaged your home, forcing you to flee for your life. You don’t even know how many of your people survived or where to find them. Alone or accompanied by a handful of equally bereft survivors, you must navigate a new life that you never asked for.
4 You were captured by kidnappers and taken far from your home. The Knights of the Unicorn freed you and brought you here, but now you’re on your own.
5 You were exiled for breaking a trivial-seeming taboo. For this seemingly minor transgression, you lost your friends, family, and homeland in one fell swoop, and were given little choice but to strike out on your own.
6 A peddler once brought something astonishing to your homeland — a Gondan clockwork, shimmering cloth of gold, a trained speaking bird, or some other small wonder — and told you that it came from Baldur’s Gate. You’ve come to see the source of such wonders, and perhaps learn to create them.

Baldur’s Gate has a modest academic community centered around the libraries of the High Hall and the various temples dedicated to gods of learning and innovation. Lecturers, researchers, and historians all participate with passing scholars from Candlekeep in a lively exchange of ideas, debating and collaborating in book-filled halls across the Upper and Lower City. The city is also rife with opportunities for arcane study, although its masters are dispersed across individual wizards’ abodes and lack concentrated communities.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Rumor Monger

Via your personal rumor mill and articles published in Baldur’s Mouth, you can surmise a great deal about Baldurians’ secrets — who’s practicing necromancy, who’s involved in spying or smuggling, who would purchase or craft dangerous magical wares without batting an eyelash. Whenever a noteworthy crime or mysterious happening occurs in the city, you immediately have a list of 1d4 suspects who, if they aren’t involved, have a strong chance of knowing who is.

Baldur’s Gate was founded by sailors, and its harbor is still the city’s beating heart. Several patriars are descended from captains of yore, the commerce of the Lower City is built on the port, and even the Outer City’s rhythms are dominated by the ebb and flow of river trade. Because sailors are as fundamental and ubiquitous to Baldur’s Gate as the cobbles on its streets, characters with this background are common.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Smuggler’s Sense

You’re familiar with the docks of Baldur’s Gate, the movement of inspectors and tax collectors, the way cargo and coin flows. As a result, it’s easy for you to hustle a load of cargo ashore or see such a cargo onto a cooperative ship without attracting suspicion or taxation. You also know the movements of the Gray Wavers — the Flaming Fist harbor guards — and have a sense of how to operate the city’s mechanized cranes.

Mercenaries, private guards, Watch soldiers, and members of the Flaming Fist number among just a few of the many soldiers on the streets of Baldur’s Gate.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: City Guard

You may choose to currently serve in either the Flaming Fist or the Watch. If you do, you have responsibilities related to your post. For as long as you perform these responsibilities, you gain benefits. If you stop performing your responsibilities, though, you lose access to the benefits and might suffer further fallout. Should you lose these benefits, you may regain them by having an unpleasant conversation with your commanding officer and fulfilling your responsibilities for a month.

Flaming Fist. If you serve in the Flaming Fist, once every ten days, you must report to the Seatower of Balduran for training, and you’re required to take a regular shift patrolling either the Lower City or the Outer City. In return, you have access to the Flaming Fist’s fortresses and a direct line of communication with Flaming Fist officers and other soldiers. You can also pass through the city’s gates without question — although you can’t bring guests into the Upper City as a member of the Watch might. Additionally, you’re always welcome at the Three Old Kegs, where the Three Old Toads are glad to greet you with a smile and a mug of ale.

The Watch. If you serve in the Watch, you’re required to conduct a regular patrol in the Upper City or take a regular shift at its gates, and must report for training in the Watch Citadel once every ten days. In return, you have access to the Citadel and a direct line of communication with Watch officers and officials. Your word carries considerable weight in the High Hall, and most establishments in the Citadel Streets neighborhood are happy to give you and your friends free meals. Additionally, you can escort people into the Upper City without question, regardless of whether they are patriars or have Watch tokens. Outside the Upper City, however, most people regard you with suspicion, and you generally get a chilly reception while in uniform.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Loyalty Test

You’ve had enough dealings with crooked soldiers that you can spot the behaviors common to corrupt guards and military officers a mile away. While awareness of such corruption doesn’t equate to evidence of it, and your sense certainly isn’t foolproof, your instinct proves a useful starting point when determining who might take a bribe, who might turn a blind eye to a crime, or who might have criminal connections. You can also use this sense to get a feeling about who might fulfill their duties strictly by the book.

Bands of orphans and runaways band together in the Outer City, running after passersby in ragged throngs to plead for scraps. In the Lower City, urchins are often recruited into the lowest echelons of the Guild or pressed into dirty and dangerous work by unscrupulous masters.

Baldur’s Gate Feature: Gateguide Connection

Even though you might not be a member of the Gateguides crew, you’ve associated with enough of them that you know their torch-based code. From the lighting, placement, and type of torch arranged on or near a structure, you can gather a great deal of information about those who live or do business there, particularly if they deal fairly with strangers, have Guild or government connections, or have either helped or denied the Gateguides in the past.