These Traits describe special advantages that are granted to a character by birth, opportunity, or circumstance. When choosing Backgrounds, make sure to flesh out the what, why, and how. What did you do that leads your Allies to trust you? Why did you inherit a fetish rather than someone else? How does your Pure Breed manifest? What relation are your Kinfolk? Most Backgrounds improve as a result of the events in the story: making new contacts, discovering new parts of your pack's prophesized fate, or landing a significant financial windfall.
As such, they cannot be raised with experience points. The Fate and Totem Backgrounds are the exceptions to this rule: the only way to increase them is through experience points. This chart may be used to determine the level of skill a character has based on the dot rating for a Trait. Some tribes have restrictions on which Backgrounds a character can take at character creation. Usually, discouraged Backgrounds are social in nature and restricted Backgrounds are supernatural.
Discouraged Backgrounds are essentially very rare: While most Bone Gnawers start with no Resources, anyone who buys a ticket can win the lottery. Discouraged Backgrounds can be purchased with freebie points at character creation, though the Storyteller is within rights to request that they not be purchased, cost double the amount of freebie points, or be limited to only a dot or two per character.
Some groups may prefer to waive these restrictions entirely, or keep them in place on a tribe-by-tribe basis to fit their own take on the tribe -- if, in your chronicle, the Wendigo have less of an isolationist streak, it makes sense to remove their restrictions entirely, but the same group may still consider a rich Bone Gnawer to be an outlier. Restricted Backgrounds have a closer tie to the nature of a tribe -- a Bone Gnawer with Pure Breed, for instance, is going to be the focus of a lot of attention from the Garou Nation.
If none of his ancestors had it, where did it come from? They are explicitly not attainable without Storyteller permission. That said, the Storyteller may allow characters to purchase restricted Backgrounds with freebie points or a Silver Fang to start with fewer than three dots of Pure Breed , but only after talking it through with the players and making sure that everyone appreciates the impact such a choice will have.
