5e Character Backgrounds: Toymaker

Toymaker

Before taking up the mantle of adventurer, you lived a simpler life where you designed and crafted all manner of toys. It might have been a hobby turned profession or perhaps you had apprenticed to a more experienced toymaker. Your toys might have made royalty squeal with delight, brought joy to the downtrodden, or may have just been the market niche you found your way into. Regardless, your keep was earned in creating toys, puzzles, games, and diversions for all ages.

 

Skill Proficiencies: Sleight of Hand and Persuasion

 

Tool Proficiencies: Tinker’s Tools and Woodcarver’s Tools.

 

Equipment: Artisan’s outfit, a bag of 15 gp, 15 sp of miscellaneous materials, Tinker’s tools, and Woodcarver’s tools.

 

Feature:

Curio Savant: Over the course of a short rest, if you have access to artisan tools you are proficient with and appropriate raw materials worth 5 sp, you can craft a toy prototype. This tiny object of your choice can be used as an action to recreate one effect possible through the Prestidigitation spell, chosen during creation, with the effect lasting up to one minute. After each use, roll a six-sided die, and on a result of 3 or less, the toy breaks. You can only have one such object at a time, but unless destroyed, toys can be reused for parts.

Suggested Characteristics

Toymakers took up their unusual line of work out of a passion for making curious objects of fun and the child-like joy they bring to people. Most find their way to this profession by way of a family trade or personal hobby, especially in creating games and toys for the children in their life. Some toymakers, however, use their gifts as a cynical ploy to separate the gullible and innocent from their coin with deceptively marketed toys. It takes a certain dedication and imagination to turn offal and cast-off bits of wood into objects of enjoyment and wonder.

d8 Personality Trait:

1. I make toys because I enjoy them, and I only reluctantly give one away.
2. With all these ideas in my head, it is a certainty that some fall out to become real.
3. Art is defined by how others interact with it, toys are true art.
4. I wouldn’t want to waste my life away with a boring job.
5. Children and fools are easy marks, and toys are their favorite purchases.
6. With lives so dreary, the curious and fun are necessary distractions for all people.
7. I am just following my family’s traditional line of work, it’s not my passion.
8. I invent toys to help support my own esoteric line of research.

d6 Ideal:

1. I give toys away to give hope and joy to those without it. (Charity)
2. Toys and trinkets are a way to test what is possible, prototypes for greater designs. (Invention)
3. As markets grow and cities flourish, people have more gold to spend on knickknacks. (Profit)
4. I never want to lose my sense of childlike wonder and curiosity. (Marvel)
5. By creating toys, I can try to replace what I have lost. (Obsessive)
6. Toys and gadgets are great gifts, an expression of how much I care for those I love. (Gifts)

d6 Bond:

1. My workshop is my sanctuary.
2. A trail of disappointed customers have seen my toys fall apart after I left town.
3. Grown children still remember my kind gift of a toy from years ago.
4. I have created some dangerous or troublesome gadgets in the past, and they haunt me.
5. As part of a professional guild, I pay dues, but I can call on their support for materials or tools.
6. A noble or wealthy individual is obsessed with my works.

d6 Flaw:

1. When an idea takes hold, I have to build it, or at least sketch it out.
2. I cannot resist taking advantage of people who seem gullible or childish.
3. If one of my toys breaks, I break inside.
4. Children suffering or being deprived tugs my heartstrings until I help them.
5. I find it difficult to talk to others without using toys to gesticulate or emote.
6. I have to know how unique mechanisms and traps function so I can copy their designs.