Cubicle 7 recently announced a new addition to their Vault 5E collection, A Life Well Lived. It features ways to enhance the lives of your heroes beyond the dungeon-delving antics they get up to as adventurers and is not only live on Kickstarter but already funded!

A Life Well Lived Kickstarter// Cubicle 7 Entertainment

This new supplement will be compatible with the 5th Edition rules and the upcoming C7d20 system and comes packed with loads of ways for you to build on the backstory of your heroes from before they led the adventuring life through Cubicle 7's new Lifepath system.

The book contains a host of additional content to help flesh out your characters beyond a stat stick in your games and the Lifepath helps to shape them with a home and family before, and perhaps even during, their adventuring days.

There are a host of Downtime Activities that the heroes can explore between adventures adding depth to the characters beyond portaling from one inn-based adventure to the next. Letting you craft an adventurer that has friends, family, and goals beyond a wheelbarrow filled with gold and experience.

Likewise, there are the Campcraft Activities that offer up more interactions with your party in the quiet moments before the storm, or enraged pack of kobolds, descend upon you. Added to this are the options for Patrons for the heroes to be the driving force behind your adventures and there is always the goal of a quiet cottage in the country when it is time to hang up your cloak and hand down your sword and board to your heir. Who knows you may even become a patron of the next generation!

As a companion to Cubicle 7’s Uncharted Journeys this sounds like an ideal book for GMs especially those who are new to the game. One of the hardest parts in an RPG is crafting a character who is more than a two-dimensional caricature and has more anima to allow players to think beyond their statistics and abilities. The addition of crafting a life for your character not only aids in making it a richer playing experience but also opens up a wealth of possibilities for storytelling and for the GM to use the past as a story hook in a more meaningful way than being told that you knew the corpse at your front door with the map from your village.

One of my favourite parts of the Pendragon RPG in the past was not the adventuring itself, but the idea behind creating a family, and handing down a legacy. Indeed it is intrinsic to that game and often you will end up playing descendants of your original character and can hark back to when your great-grandfather was gifted these lands for some heroic action. This new book allows that style of long-term story to be woven into the 5e games and develop very organically and I look forward to seeing what can be done with this in the fullness of time.

You can check out the Kickstarter right now.

Have you ever managed to retire a hero?