After spending way more time on this than I thought I would, it’s finally here! My first piece of homebrew! The Labourer, a player background for D&D 5e.
As our group’s Forever DM I often think about building out the world for my friends to play in. But who, in that world, actually builds all of those towns, castles and ships, and keeps them all running? The Labourer.
This background is versatile enough to fit into any setting. Every settlement has hard working folk that do the groundwork to create it and keep it running. The call to adventure can be heard by anyone, and it’s our working class hero who will answer.
It was important to me as a DM and builder of worlds to ensure that this background for creating a player character, that actually builds the worlds we’re playing in, has strong links and potential hooks to the setting. The “Tireless Work” specialisation aims to tie the character to a part of the world and the suggested characteristics includes hooks to people and places that the player and the DM can create together.
But enough about the flavour, what can the background do? The skill proficiencies lean into a variety of potential strengths. So there’s a choice of 2 from a curated list rather than 2 set in stone proficiencies like you would find in the Player’s Handbook. I really wanted to lean into the often underused vehicle proficiencies by including options for vehicles that may be used on work sites. The aim being to contextualise the proficiencies and and challenge players to find novel ways to make use of their vehicle of choice.
For the background feature I wanted something that draws on the past experiences of the background to solve a problem. Need to sneak into somewhere you’re not supposed to be? With the labourer’s Look Busy feature you can! This feature allows you to observe the workers at a given location to learn their working patterns and tasks so that you can blend in among them. Perfect for hiding in plain sight, eavesdropping, or even making new friends!
If you have any feedback I’d love to hear it! You can find my social links below. Fire questions at my Twitter or chat with me directly on Twitch every Tuesday at 19:00 GMT/BST.
You can download a copy of the Labourer right here! I hope you have fun with it!
