The 2024 Player's Handbook will be released on September 17, but early copies will be distributed at Gen Con in August. In the meantime, Wizards of the Coast continues to detail the contents of the book, recently showing the 10 playable tribes that will be included, and now explaining how the new background and origin feet will work.

“The 2024 Player's Handbook has changed the order in which characters are created. Think of it as going back through your character's history.” Start with where your character is at the start of the game, their class, then look at the path that led them to this heroic point, their background, and finally how life with your tribe began.”

In the past, background was a nice way to add a little flavor to a character - a paladin being a reformed criminal or formerly a hermit - but its mechanical impact was slight and easily overlooked. But its mechanical impact was often overlooked. Now, backgrounds are not only the source of proficiency and starting equipment, but also determine bonuses to ability scores. Each background has a choice of three characteristics to improve, one of which can be selected to increase the score by two points and another to increase it by one point.

The background also determines the origin technique, a free basic version of the technique that most characters do not get until level 4. Giving free feats at level 1 is a fairly common house rule to make characters more unique. Origin specialties include Lucky, which gives Luck points that can be used to gain an advantage or disadvantage an opponent, and Magic Initiate, which allows the player to start with a handful of basic spells.

Normal specialties still exist, and two other beneficial abilities have been incorporated into the specialties category. Fighting Styles, which some classes gain upon leveling up, and Epic Boon, which is gained at level 19, now also count as special skills.

Many of these rules were carried over from the playtest with some tweaks. I used the playtest version of Origin Feats in a Spelljammer campaign I ran last year and it worked fine, with Lucky Feats being a popular choice. Of course, there is always a lot of fuss on the internet over minor points, especially with the revised version of Ranger already starting to get a lot of flack.