Origins of Craft & Trade — Backgrounds & Feats for 5e / 5.5

Before the road called, there were orders to fill, tools to maintain, customers to satisfy, and work that could not wait. Origins of Craft & Trade focuses on the craftspeople, merchants, healers, laborers, and other professionals who carried years of practical experience with them when they became adventurers. Their trades influence how they solve problems, earn trust, and face responsibilities that cannot be settled with steel or spellcraft alone.

Expanded Backgrounds, Feats, and optional Origin Flaws bring these working lives into the heart of the campaign. Alongside them, the modular Mastery & Toil system reflects both the confidence earned through experience and the burden of pushing oneself too far. Together, these options give players and GMs new ways to make labor, expertise, reputation, and professional pride meaningful parts of an adventurer’s continuing journey.

Contents

Our Backgrounds are designed to integrate seamlessly into any 5e or 5.5e campaign. They achieve compatibility by drawing on shared elements from both rulesets without requiring a mechanical overhaul.

A broad selection of General Feats and Origin Feats allows characters to carry their professional training into life on the road. Origin Flaws take a more personal approach, reflecting the habits, injuries, anxieties, and stubborn instincts acquired through years of demanding work. These optional drawbacks can be paired with a fitting benefit, allowing the same experience that complicates a character’s life to become a source of strength when it matters most.

The book also presents Mastery & Toil, a modular system for representing professional growth and the pressure that accompanies it. Mastery rewards patience, judgment, resourcefulness, and dedication, while Toil reflects fatigue, damaged equipment, mounting obligations, and the consequences of taking on too much. The system gives GMs a flexible way to recognize skilled labor and place meaningful pressure on working characters without turning their professions into a collection of extra calculations.

Pledge Tiers

We offer the following pledge tiers:

Craft & Trade Origins - Digital Edition (PDF) (€6) - You get the complete book, including all unlocked stretch goals, delivered in PDF format.

Craft & Trade Origins - PDF & Credits (€8) - You get the complete book, including all unlocked stretch goals, delivered in PDF format, plus a name of your choosing engraved in the special "Thank You" section of the book, as a token of our appreciation.

Guildbound Edition (Softcover POD) (€12) - Includes everything the project has to offer, along with a Print-on-Demand (POD) link to order a physical Softcover copy of the book via DriveThruRPG (Printing and shipping costs not included).

Guildbound Edition + Credits (€14) - Includes everything the project has to offer, along with a Print-on-Demand (POD) link to order a physical Softcover copy of the book via DriveThruRPG (Printing and shipping costs not included), plus a name of your choosing engraved in the special "Thank You" section of the book, as a token of our appreciation.

Stretch Goals

Every unlocked milestone adds more character options to Origins of Craft & Trade, expanding the range of working lives that can become part of an adventurer’s story.

• €500 - Unlock 2 Origin Feats and 2 General Feats 🔓
• €1,000 - Unlock 1 Background and 2 Origin Flaws 🔓
• €1,500 - Unlock 2 Backgrounds and 2 Origin Feats 🔓
• €2,000 - Unlock 3 General Feats and 2 Origin Flaws 🔓
• €3,000 - Unlock 2 Backgrounds, 2 Origin Feats, and 2 Origin Flaws 🔒

More stretch goals will be announced once all of the above are unlocked.

Add-ons

Origins of the Blade - Backgrounds & Feats for 5e / 5.5

Origins of the Blade is our third project and the second book in the Origins series. After exploring forbidden knowledge and hidden traditions in Origins of the Occult, we turned our attention to characters whose lives were defined by training, warfare, and survival. We wanted a soldier’s discipline, instincts, and lasting scars to remain meaningful throughout the campaign rather than fade into a few lines of backstory.

The book brings together expanded Backgrounds, General Feats, Origin Feats, and optional Origin Flaws, all built around distinct martial identities. The Origin Flaws explore the physical and psychological marks left by conflict, offering specialized benefits alongside consequences that give those experiences a continuing presence at the table.

It also introduces the modular Discipline & Strain system. Discipline represents the composure and conditioning developed through rigorous training, while Strain reflects the pressure created by danger and prolonged conflict. The system gives GMs a flexible way to reward martial resolve, escalate tension, and show that surviving the battlefield does not always mean leaving it behind.

Origins of the Occult - Backgrounds & Feats for 5e / 5.5

Origins of the Occult is our second project, and honestly it came from a question we kept asking ourselves at the table: why does a character's background stop mattering after session one? We wanted to fix that. The book dives into characters shaped by forbidden knowledge, funerary rites, and hidden traditions, giving their past real mechanical and narrative weight throughout the entire campaign.

The core of it is three things working together. Expanded Backgrounds that actually feel distinct, a library of Feats that reinforce who your character was before the adventure started, and Origin Flaws, which are our personal favorite. These are optional trade-offs that let you carry the psychological scars of your past in exchange for a specialized edge. Surviving the unknown always costs something, and we wanted that to show at the table. In total, the book brings over 100 individual pieces of content to your campaign, from Backgrounds and Feats to Flaws and system mechanics, all built around a single idea.

We also built in a modular Influence and Corruption system that tracks how the world responds to a character drawing on forbidden power. No heavy bookkeeping, just a flexible GM tool that adds pressure and consequence in a way that feels natural to the story.

D100+ Pirate Rumors for TTRPGs

This project is our first real dive into the world of pirates, a theme we’re honestly obsessed with when it comes to building campaigns. It’s all about that classic exploration vibe, treasure hunts, naval battles, and the kind of high-seas adventure that gets everyone’s adrenaline going. We wanted to build something that makes saving the day feel just as intense as finding the treasure itself, focusing on those "edge of your seat" moments that keep a table hooked.

To keep your world feeling alive, we’ve included adventure hooks and rumor tables that are perfect for on-the-fly inspiration. These are designed to be totally versatile; if your current game isn't nautical, you can easily swap a pirate crew for a band of mercenaries or a ship for a traveling caravan. It’s a "your table, your rules" approach that gives you a quick burst of narrative energy whenever your players start asking questions at the local tavern.

Printing & Shipping

The book’s trim size is 8.5" x 11". The final printing cost of Origins of Craft & Trade will depend on the total page count, which may increase as stretch goals are unlocked. Based on an estimated length of 65–70 pages at least, the softcover printing cost is expected to be around $6.00-$6.50. Shipping costs will vary depending on your location. For detailed information on shipping rates, please refer to: Shipping Rates (DriveThruRPG)

About Us

We're Mira and Katrin, two friends from Germany who spent years working in tech companies across Japan, back in the mid-2000s through the early 2010s. We landed right in the middle of something special, honestly. The TRPG scene there was already massive by the time we arrived, and we got to watch it evolve in real time. Record of Lodoss War was still cultural touchstone stuff, and everyone around us was either playing Sword World or diving into whatever new systems were dropping.

But here's the thing, we fell hard for D&D. While everyone else was playing their local systems, we were the weirdos obsessed with the Player's Handbook, running campaigns in the Forgotten Realms, arguing about mechanics on forums at midnight. We didn't plan to get that obsessed with it, but it happened. We started playing, got pulled into campaigns, started running our own games, and just... never stopped thinking about D&D specifically.

Once Mira settled back in Germany last year, we decided it was time to turn all of that experience into something more. There was no reason to keep it to ourselves. We began working seriously on homebrew D&D content and launched our first Kickstarter in 2025, after reconnecting with the creators behind CraftRiot, whom Mira already knew. In many ways, that was just the beginning.

Narrative Ninjas stands as our way of saying that everything we’ve learned from years of playing and running D&D is meant to be shared. We are still learning, still refining our craft, but now we’re doing it with purpose, shaping those experiences into something others can bring to their own tables.

So yeah, that's us. Two D&D obsessed Germans split between Germany and Japan who found magic in those rules and never looked back.