Backgrounds
Every path shapes the walker.
In The Crescent, your origins matter as much as your destinations. The merchant's child knows trade routes by heart, while the farmer's daughter reads weather patterns in cloud formations. These occupations become entire ways of seeing the world, passed down through generations like family heirlooms.
For class information and how the stars shape destiny, see birthsigns.
Setting Context, Not Mechanics
These pages explore how various life paths develop within The Crescent's culture and society. They're meant to inspire character backstories and inform roleplay, not replace or modify D&D 5e background rules.
Urban Lives
City folk grow up surrounded by opportunity and complexity in equal measure. They learn to navigate crowds and politics, to read social cues and market trends, to find their place in intricate hierarchies of guild, family, and faction. Urban life offers specialized education, cultural sophistication, and connections that span continents, but it also demands constant vigilance against crime, disease, and the subtle corruptions that fester when too many people compete for too few resources.
Wardtowns
These settlements cluster along The Road like pearls on an ancient string. Their prosperity flows from the constant stream of merchants, pilgrims, and adventurers who rely on the Wardstones' protection. Wardtown folk master the delicate arts of hospitality and commerce, knowing when to welcome strangers with open arms and when to bar the gates. They understand that information travels with every caravan, that a kind word to today's penniless wanderer might secure tomorrow's lucrative contract, and that the ancient Wardstones that guard their homes demand both respect and vigilance.
For examples, see Major Road Settlements.
Frontier Towns
Beyond the Wardstones' reach but still within The Crescent's claimed borders, these communities raise an obvious question: why choose such dangerous isolation? Frontier folk tend toward directness over diplomacy, results over reputation, and they know their neighbors' strengths and weaknesses with uncomfortable intimacy. Survival often demands arrangements that wouldn't be necessary closer to civilization. These settlements produce people comfortable with moral ambiguity and skilled at not asking inconvenient questions.
For examples, see Remote Settlements.
Deep Wild
The true wilderness shapes those who embrace it into something fundamentally different from their civilized cousins. Whether hermits pursuing esoteric studies, survivors who found conventional society lacking, or communities following paths that cities cannot accommodate, the deep wild attracts those willing to accept nature's harsh bargains. Some find wisdom in solitude and seasons, learning to speak with ancient trees and forgotten spirits. Others discover that the wilderness offers its own forms of protection for those bold enough to seek them. All emerge changed, carrying knowledge that cannot be shared in polite company.
Outlander
Catch-All Background
If none of The Crescent's specific cultural backgrounds fit your character concept, this works as a flexible alternative. While we've mapped the major surrounding regions, plenty of distant lands remain undefined - fill in whatever homeland serves your story.
Beyond The Crescent's borders stretch countless other lands, each with distinct peoples, customs, and dangers. While specific details vary wildly, certain patterns hold across most known regions: civilizations struggle with their own failing infrastructure, monstrous threats lurk in uninhabited spaces, and political complexity tends to increase alongside population density. Outlanders bring exotic knowledge, foreign perspectives, and useful skills, though they often puzzle over The Crescent's particular quirks and find themselves homesick for familiar foods, customs, or weather patterns.
Choose your background not just for its mechanical benefits, but for the stories it tells and the connections it creates. In The Crescent, your past shapes your future, but it need not define it.