Kickstart Your New TTRPG With ‘Calls To Action: Extraordinary Party Backgrounds For 5e’

Welcome to the table.

One of the hardest things for a Storyteller in 5e to do is get that first couple of games with a fresh party finished. The players may not know each other, the player characters may not know each other, the players themselves may have not figured out exactly how they want to run their characters, in short, it’s almost inception-level layers of confusion like some weird land filled with strange puppets accompanied by sick Phil Collins drum beats.

Well, what Doug Levandowski, Ben Brown, Matthias Bonnici, and the team have put together is a pretty great little project to help jumpstart that process and help you get through the clunky parts at the start of your campaign. The project is called Calls to Action: Extraordinary Party Backgrounds for 5e. It provides Storytellers with a collection of party backgrounds to establish a shared history that the characters have. This provided narrative will help the Storyteller forge connections between the player characters and also start to flesh out some story hooks that knit those backgrounds together.

Each background contains four prompts which can either be rolled for or answered by players. You also get three questions for each player about how their character specifically interacts with the background and ten bonuses that you can use with the characters to reflect a special talent that they’ve cultivated because of their background. There are also four skills that they can choose from based on their shared background and ten questions for characters to choose from or roll for to establish connections between your characters. You also will get five questions for Storytellers to flesh out details of those backgrounds that Player Characters aren’t privy to yet and eight story hooks that could serve as a first adventure for the group, all of which related directly to that specific background. You basically get a road map to bake in party unification with this offering.

The wildest part to me is you get at least 12 party backgrounds in a PDF for $5.

For $5, you’ll get at least 12 party backgrounds in a PDF. Currently, those include:

Child of Polymorphed Sentient Weapon
Chosen Ones
Deity’s Descendants
Displaced in Time
Experimented On
Isekai’ed
Magical Malady
Monstrous Bloodline
Raising Magical Animals
Reincarnated
Survivors of Slaughter
Transformed into a Baby

For $3 more, you’ll get the above and at least an additional 8 backgrounds about being raised by a powerful creature or NPC in a larger PDF. Currently, those include:

Raised by a Abberation
Raised by a Celestial
Raised by a Dragon
Raised by a Fiend
Raised by an Elemental
Raised by an Epic Adventurer
Raised by an Intelligent Undead
Raised in a Lost Dungeon or Labyrinth

The project (found here) is already well over-funded and has a week to go as of me putting this article together. I have worked with Doug on a few projects and I can comfortably endorse anything he puts out as being not only quality but filtered through sensitivity readers and done so with consideration and care for ALL players who come to the table.

For Storytellers who need a little help pulling things together, this is for sure a project you are going to want to take a look at.

Until next time, teamwork makes the dream work!