5e Backgrounds: God’s Chosen

God’s Chosen

You were selected as an ideal candidate for your religious order. Whether you were intended to become an avatar of your deity, a ritual sacrifice, or a powerful practitioner, your early life was dominated by seclusion and study. Every aspect of your days was spent in the purest ideals of your faith, studying, practicing, and working. You are no longer cloistered away and now you seek worldly experience to balance yourself, to escape the confines of your early life, or to complete the tasks your deity commands.

Skill Proficiencies: Two of Insight, Religion, or History

Tool Proficiencies: Calligrapher’s Supplies and Forgery Kit

Equipment: A religious text, a wooden holy symbol, calligrapher’s supplies, and a bag of 15 gp.

Meditation: You only need ¾ the rest of a normal member of your race. Additionally, when you are searching through tomes or text, you can read through them at twice the normal speed.

Suggested Characteristics

Those selected to become a divine avatar or vessel of their deity are often chosen and trained to be intellectual, personable, and devout. Due to their lifestyle of cloistered religious devotion, they often lack worldly faults but also lack experience and perspective.

d8 Personality Trait:

1. All it will take to bring about the future my deity promised is undying devotion and will.
2. The temple that raised me lied and misled me, but it isn’t like the rest of the world is any more truthful.
3. I can get just about anyone to like me, so long as I try hard enough.
4. I tell the truths that people do not always want to hear, but it is for their own good.
5. The answers I seek can be found if I search carefully enough in texts and the words of other scholars.
6. My journey and emotions are my own, I will not burden others with them.
7. After being denied the outside world for so long, I want to experience everything I can.
8. A cloistered upbringing has centered me and I can use that to help others.

d6 Ideal:

1. It is through me that my deity will remake this world, even if it must suffer first. (Judgement Day)
2. Those who do not follow my faith must be given the opportunity to learn. (Preacher)
3. It is up to us mortals to stand against evil, even at great cost. (Crusader)
4. Only by understanding the faith of others can I hope to reconcile my own inner turmoil. (Understanding)
5. I must discover the knowledge that was hidden from me by my faith. (Truth)
6. By becoming a living example of my deity’s ideals I can inspire change. (Perfection)

d6 Bond:

1. My monastic order still maintains the temple I grew up in.
2. I am friends with a demi-god or extraplanar servant of my deity.
3. In my studies I came across a powerful secret about my deity.
4. The church of my faith has granted me an honorary title.
5. I have a mentor from my monastery that is like a parent to me.
6. Despite being sent away, I still kept in touch with my family.

d6 Flaw:

1. My isolated upbringing means I am innocent about the ways of the world.
2. To escape my boring childhood I became quite the daydreamer, even when I should be paying attention.
3. I lack the moral flexibility of someone who has dealt with conflicting moralities in society.
4. An offshoot of my faith or the faith I left behind are obsessed cultists seeking to return me to the fold.
5. The religion or group I was cloistered with is not widely accepted by society.
6. My deity was betrayed by or betrayed another and their adherents hate me.