Backgrounds in Dungeons & Dragons used to serve as little more than flavor for your character, acting primarily as a framework to help craft your character’s backstory. The background would give them a proficiency or a small feature that did little in the way of mechanics to improve the character but was a great way to start building a meaningful story for the character in question.
Because of this, many characters’ backgrounds may have been overlooked in favor of their class, which would provide extra features as they leveled. This is where Gate Warden stands out. Unlike its predecessors, Gate Warden introduces giving your character an effective feat by virtue of choosing the background, allowing your character more utility.
What Is The Gate Warden Background?
The Gate Warden Background outlines an individual who has grown up in an area like one of the many gate-towns in the Outlands, an infinite plane culminating in an area known as the Spire.
The Outlands are connected to all other planes, allowing portals or areas of planar influence to pop up. Gate-towns would often form around such portals from all the confluence and would usually draw on the culture of the portal it circulated around.
A Gate Warden generally spent a substantial amount of time around these areas of influence. A character with a Gate Warden background may feel comfortable interacting with beings from other planes, knowing how to navigate the varying morality and belief systems of creatures like fiends, elementals, and celestials.
Or, your Gate Warden may be particularly accustomed to manifestations of planar power, barely batting an eye at an eruption of divine energy.
Though the background works best with the Planescape setting, Gate Warden need not be limited to it. Portals exist all over the realms of Dungeons & Dragons, and the Gate Warden Background can contour itself to different established lore systems, so long as there’s some sort of planar influence.
This background will also provide you with a set of six suggested characteristics to help roleplay your character should you want something to build on, though these characteristics are by no means definitive nor necessary for creation.
These characters may be dynamic because of their exposure to so many walks of life and world states, and flexible when it comes to plans. By contrast, another Gate Warden character may be suspicious or untrusting when it comes to the various personalities one could encounter in a campaign, having been burned by one fey or fiend too many.
Species And Class Suggestions
Some species like the triton, genasi, aasimar, tiefling, and changeling may have this planar influence inherently. At the same time, classes like ranger and sorcerer may also suit a character affected by the convergence of planes. Other areas like the Domains of Dread function as a demiplane, further expanding your choices of portal within the Dungeons & Dragons canon.
If you want to maximize the background, you may want to avoid species or subclasses already resistant to the plane’s damage types when deciding where they’re from. For instance, you may wish to avoid playing a fallen aasimar from the Evil Outer Plane or an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer from The Outlands.
Gate Warden Background Features
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Planar Infusion |
You can find modest lodging in the area you grew up in. You also gain the Scion of the Outer Planes feat. |
The Gate Warden Background kicks off by giving you the ability to find and receive free housing and food in the society you were raised in. This typically won’t extend to nobility, but it does give you and your party the means to have a (mostly) less dangerous night than one would have on the road, as safe as being in an area where genies run amok can generally be.
You’ll also receive a skill proficiency in persuasion and one other skill proficiency of your choice. You’ll receive two languages of your preference, so choosing your plane of influence could inform the languages you want to know.
The features of the Gate Warden Background start to differ from those of the other sourcebooks by giving you the Scion of the Outer Planes feat right off the bat.
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Scion of the Outer Planes |
You choose a plane to be from: Chaotic, Evil, Good, or Lawful. Upon choosing your plane of influence, this feature will grant you a cantrip and resistance to a specific type of damage. The cantrips, resistances, and the planes that grant them are as follows:
You can cast the cantrip without material components and choose your spellcasting ability from your Intelligence, Charisma, or Wisdom, which is more effective for those who may already be playing a spellcasting class. This is slightly less useful for martial classes but still potentially gives them the option to do more with it than they might have if it were a set ability score. |
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Starting Equipment For The Gate Warden Background
You don’t receive much in the way of weaponry, but what you do receive is fun: a ring of keys to unfamiliar locks, the choice between an ink pen or quill, a set of traveler’s clothes, a bottle of black ink, and a pouch with ten gold pieces inside.
Unlike the equipment you receive from your class, this is going to be a largely interpretive amount of items and may only really stand out if your Dungeon Master tracks how much paper and ink you have on hand for message-writing purposes. Still, the boost to starting gold is always good, and the ring of keys lends itself to some fascinating roleplay potential.