Learn how background skills in Mongoose Traveller RPG help define your character’s homeworld, upbringing, early training, and life before their first career.
Mongoose Traveller Character Creation: Background Skills
Part 2 of the 11-part series, The Ultimate Guide to Playing Mongoose Traveller RPG.
In Mongoose Traveller character creation, background skills represent the things your character learned before entering a career, attending university, joining the military, drifting, or heading out among the stars.
These early skills help answer an important question: who was your character before the dice started building their adult life?
For the complete official rules and full background skill list, refer to the Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022. If you want to try Traveller first, the Traveller Explorer's Edition is a low-cost introductory PDF.
What Are Background Skills?
Background skills are skills your character gained through childhood, education, homeworld culture, family expectations, early jobs, hobbies, local environment, or life experience before their first formal career.
Unlike career skills, background skills are not tied to a specific job path. They are broad, foundational abilities that explain how your character functioned before adult life began.
Once you have rolled and assigned your characteristics, choosing background skills is the next major step.
Start with a Character Concept
Before choosing background skills, take a moment to think about your character concept.
You do not need a full biography yet. A few useful ideas are enough.
Consider these questions:
- Where was your character born?
- What is their homeworld like?
- Do they come from a wealthy world or a poor world?
- Do they come from a high-tech world or a low-tech world?
- What was their family life like?
- What did they learn before adulthood?
- Why did they leave home and seek adventure among the stars?
Jot down a few answers and use them as a guide. You can always revise the concept later as character creation creates new surprises.
Background skills should help support that concept. A character raised on an agricultural world might choose Animals or Survival. A character raised on a space station might choose Electronics, Mechanic, or Vacc Suit. A character from a diplomatic family might choose Language, Admin, or Carouse.
Examples of Background Skills
There are many background skills available in Mongoose Traveller. Each one can suggest something about your character’s past.
Here are a few examples:
Admin: Your character may have learned bureaucracy, paperwork, scheduling, regulations, or resource management through school, family business, clerical work, military preparation, or local government.
Carouse: Your character may have learned how to socialize, drink, network, party, make friends, read a room, or survive local nightlife.
Language: Your character may have studied another language, grown up in a multilingual community, lived among offworlders, or prepared for a diplomatic or trade career.
Medic: Your character may have learned basic medical care through first-aid training, family responsibility, volunteer work, emergency service, military preparation, or life in a dangerous environment.
Survival: Your character may have grown up on a frontier world, harsh colony, wilderness settlement, desert planet, cold world, or low-tech environment where practical survival mattered.
Vacc Suit: Your character may have grown up around spaceports, stations, belters, orbital habitats, hostile atmospheres, or ships where vacuum safety was part of everyday life.
The Background Skill List
Now that you have a basic concept, consider what skills your character may have learned throughout childhood and teenage years.
Characters receive a number of background skills based on their EDU modifier. In simple terms, characters with stronger education may begin with more background skills, while characters with weaker education may begin with fewer.
Background skills are usually gained at level 0. That means your character has basic familiarity with the topic, but is not yet a trained professional.
Examples of available background skills include:
- Admin: Managing organizations, paperwork, procedures, and resources.
- Animals: Handling, training, or working with animals.
- Art: Artistic expression, performance, design, or creative work.
- Athletics: Physical training, movement, sport, climbing, jumping, swimming, or endurance.
- Carouse: Socializing, nightlife, drinking, entertainment, and informal networking.
- Drive: Operating ground vehicles.
- Electronics: Understanding, using, or repairing electronic systems.
- Flyer: Operating aircraft or grav vehicles.
- Language: Speaking, reading, or understanding another language.
- Mechanic: Repairing and maintaining mechanical equipment.
- Medic: Providing basic medical care.
- Profession: Earning a living through a specific trade or profession.
- Science: Understanding scientific principles and methods.
- Seafarer: Operating boats, ships, or watercraft.
- Streetwise: Understanding street culture, criminal networks, informal contacts, and underworld behavior.
- Survival: Staying alive in harsh environments.
- Vacc Suit: Operating and maintaining vacuum suits.
What Are the Best Background Skills?
The best background skills depend on your character concept, campaign type, and likely career path.
There is no single correct answer, but some skills are broadly useful.
If you are planning a merchant or trade-focused character, useful background skills might include Admin, Broker-related support skills if available, Carouse, Language, Streetwise, or Vacc Suit.
If you are planning a scout, explorer, or frontier character, useful background skills might include Survival, Medic, Electronics, Mechanic, Science, or Vacc Suit.
If you are planning a social, noble, diplomatic, or criminal character, useful background skills might include Carouse, Language, Admin, Streetwise, Art, or Profession.
If you want a deeper dive, see the companion article: Traveller Character Creation: Best Background Skills.
Should Background Skills Support or Contrast My Planned Career?
It is usually smart to choose background skills that support your character concept. However, background skills are also a great chance to make your character more versatile.
You can use background skills in two ways:
- Reinforce your concept: A future Scout takes Survival and Vacc Suit. A future Merchant takes Admin and Carouse. A future Scholar takes Science and Language.
- Add contrast: A future Marine takes Art. A future Noble takes Streetwise. A future Scientist takes Animals. A future Rogue takes Medic.
Contrasting skills can make a character feel more real. People are rarely only one thing.
A military officer with Art may have a diplomatic hobby. A scholar with Streetwise may have grown up in a rough port district. A noble with Survival may have spent time hunting on a frontier estate. A merchant with Medic may have worked as a shipboard emergency responder before entering trade.
Now You Have a Background
Background skills are an important part of creating a memorable Traveller character.
They help explain your character’s homeworld, upbringing, early training, personality, and first areas of competence.
At this point, your character is about 18 years old and ready to take on the universe.
Your next step is to decide whether your character will attend university, apply to military academy, enter a career, drift, or take another path into adult life.
Where to Go Next
When you are done selecting background skills, you may be ready to play, but most Traveller characters continue into at least one term of university, academy, or career service before adventuring.
Ready to choose a career? Continue with the next article:
Mongoose Traveller Character Creation: Careers
You can also return to the full series hub:
The Ultimate Guide to Playing Mongoose Traveller RPG
Keep Building Your Traveller Toolkit
If this guide helped you understand background skills, Beyond the Horizon: The Ultimate Guide to Playing Mongoose Traveller expands on the ideas in this article series with more practical guidance for players and referees.
New to Traveller? You may also want to download the free Introduction to Traveller PDF for a quick beginner-friendly overview.
Running or preparing a Traveller campaign? Explore the CyborgPrime AI Tools for Game Masters for character creation, campaign prep, worldbuilding, and referee support.
Your Turn. What Do You Do?
What background skills would you choose for your next Traveller character, and what do they say about where that character came from?
Please share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
If you found this article helpful, please give it a good rating at the top. Thanks!
E-mail Notification Opt-in
Want more Traveller RPG articles, tools, and referee resources?
Join my private mailing list and I’ll let you know when new Traveller-related posts are published.
YES! Please notify me of new Traveller RPG posts!
You can also join me and other Traveller fans on the CyborgPrime Discord server.
