Chapter 2 - Character Options is the one players will be most interested in, and the reason the book strongly recommends creating new characters to play a Neverwinter campaign. It’s divided into four major sections: Character Themes, Racial Backgrounds, New Domains, and the Bladesinger class.

In this post, we’ll introduce the concept of character themes.

What is a Theme?

Character Themes are described here as the “third pillar” that defines your character alongside race and class. I also describe them as the “thing” you have in your Heroic Tier, just like Paragon Paths are the “thing” in Paragon and Epic Destinies are the “thing” in Epic. They were first introduced in Dark Sun, and I think we also got a few generic ones in Dragon before this point.

Here, themes are meant to give each character special knowledge and social ties that firmly ground them in the Neverwinter campaign. Unlike a character class, a theme is a thing that always exists and is acknowledged in the setting. People will never really call you “a fighter”, but they will definitely notice if you happen to be the lost heir to the throne of Neverwinter!

Aside from these narrative hooks, a theme also has several mechanical widgets. At levels 1, 5 and 10, you gain a Feature specified by your theme, which gets added on top of everything you already gain from your class. It gives you access to a few optional utility powers which you can take instead of a class power at levels 2, 6 and 10. And it also works like the backgrounds from the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2: each theme lists a handful of skills, and you pick one. If it’s already a class skill you get a +2 bonus to it. If it’s not you can make it into a class skill, and become able to choose it during character creation.

These features and powers can act to reinforce a character’s mechanical roles, or to broaden it in ways that weren’t possible before. The narrative bits can provide excellent reasons for the party to work together beyond the usual “you all meet in a tavern”. They’re not exclusive either. Several PCs can pick the same theme, and you could theoretically have a party where everyone does that. Some of the themes are better for this than others.

Technically, themes are entirely optional. A heroic-tier character without a theme would be just as viable. In practice, I’ve never seen anyone refuse to choose a theme once they became widely available. A hypothethical edition that refined the concepts of 4e would probably include them right in the PHB.

The next few posts will be dedicated to looking at the Neverwinter Campaign Setting themes in detail, and we’ll start with the most spectacular one.