Character Creation: Career (Patreon)

A few weeks ago, I showed off the culture rules for the RPG. But you don’t just pick ancestry and class and build a culture to make your character. You also get to pick a career!

(It’s James.) What exactly is a career? Well, your ancestry and culture describe your hero’s birth circumstances. Your career is what they did for money before they become an adventuring hero.

Before we dive into careers, I want to talk a little bit about our character creation philosophy. In the MCDM RPG, building a character is about more than adding up your stats, picking skills and abilities, and recording it on a character sheet. You’re building a hero, a main character in a story be it a one-shot or a heroic campaign. We want players to think about the personality and past of who they’re creating. That’s why we have folks build a culture rather than say, “pick three skills and a bonus language.” (Side note, it’s totally possible and valid to create a hero that way in our system, and the rules will likely say it, but we’re also supporting a system that allows you to create a richer, more complex hero.) We want players to imagine their heroes complexly.

Culture is one part of really developing your hero. Career is the next (and then incident, but that’s another post).

What’s My Job?

In many medieval fantasy worlds, people head to work as soon as they’re able to help bring in money and put food on the table. Life in Vasloria is like that for a lot of folks, regardless of your ancestry or culture. Nearly every place has artisans, criminals, and laborers. Some folks might have a more niche vocation, like gladiator or mage’s apprentice. We’ll have a good variety available in the core rules. In fact, here’s a list of what might be included:

Acolyte

Aristocrat

Artisan

Agent

Beggar

Criminal

Explorer

Farmer

Gladiator

Laborer

Mage's Apprentice

Performer

Politician

Sage

Sailor

Soldier

Warden

Watch Officer

Your career is a way to further differentiate your hero from other heroes with the same class. Sure, Balistyl and Greta might both be tacticians, but Balistyl the Bold is a high elf and former gladiator who grew up in an aristocratic culture and entered the ring to prove his upbringing hadn’t made him soft. Meanwhile, Greta “Sparks” Siggis is a human who grew up on the streets of Capital and got caught picking the pocket of a mage, who took the girl under his wing as an apprentice rather than report her to the authorities. She never excelled in magic (save for one spell that allows her to make harmless sparks from her hands), but she did make an excellent bodyguard for the mage, who has since mysteriously disappeared! We’d expect both of these warriors to have different statistics based on their careers—one a gladiator and one a mage’s apprentice.

What Do I Get?

While your culture gives you skills and a language, your career gives you a lot of training (either formally or informally), and therefore has more of a mechanical impact on what you do. Let’s take a look at the text, which breaks down what exactly your career gives you.

Hero isn't a job. It's a calling. Before you answered destiny, you had a different job that paid the bills. Thank the gods for that, because the experience you gained in that career is helping you save lives and slay monsters. Your career describes what your job was before you became a hero.

Career Benefits

When you select a career, you gain the following benefits, the details of which are specified in the career's description.

Skills

Each career gives you at least two skills, and some provide three. If a career gives you a skill you already know, you can select a different one.

Languages

Some careers allow you to learn extra languages, chosen from those available in Languages.

Renown

Some careers increase your starting Renown score. See Renown for more information.

Project Points

Some careers provide project points that you can put toward research and crafting projects once you begin them (see Research and Crafting). These points can be divided among multiple projects, but they can't be used more than once. At the Director's discretion, you can already have the materials needed for one or more projects and immediately put your project points toward them.

Career Title

Your career provides you with a common title. See Titles for more information.

So more skills and languages can come from your career. That seems pretty self explanatory. But you can also see that your career gives you Renown, project points, and a title. Let’s talk about each of those for a second.

Renown

As you accomplish heroic deeds, your fame allows you to influence NPCs and attract followers. Your infamy among enemies also grows, and their hatred and fear of you causes them to lash out. Every hero has a Renown score that represents how they can use their reputation to Renown others. The higher the score, the greater your impact with those who know of your legend.

At the start of character creation, your Renown is 0. Your career can increase that amount, and you gain Renown at the end of an adventure (typically when you level up). You don’t spend renown, you simply accumulate it.

During a negotiation, Renown determines if the NPC you’re talking to is impressed with or scared of your overall reputation. If they are, you get an edge on skill tests made to influence them (happy skills like Flirt and Lead if they’re impressed with you and forceful skills like Interrogate and Intimidate if they’re scared of you).

Renown also allows you to attract followers, like sages and artisans, who can work on crafting and research projects at your stronghold while you’re off adventuring. It can also be used to attract retainers! The more renown you have, the more followers you can attract.

We’ll learn more about Renown in another post!

Research and Crafting

As a team, you and your fellow heroes can achieve great things. But the time between adventures gives you a chance to pursue your own goals: uncover forbidden lore in ancient tomes, forge weapons of great power, or build ships that can sail the skies. Research and crafting allow heroes to obtain important information and make new equipment and strongholds.

When you begin researching a subject or crafting something, you start a project. You can start as many projects as you like, but you can’t work on more than one at a time during a respite. Eventually, you’ll be able to hire creatures who can work on additional projects for you. You can track project progress on your character sheet.

As you work on a project, you look over old books that you’ve found in your travels, perform experiments, converse with experts and scholars, or work with tools to create something.

Each project has prerequisite material. You might need a magic gem or special ore to forge a magic sword or a specific tome to research the location of a Ashyra’s tomb. Once you have those materials, you can begin the project!

To work on a project, you must have access to the prerequisite materials during a Respite. Then you can work on the project as your respite activity and make a special kind of test called a project roll. The project roll doesn’t have success or failure as an outcome. Instead, you record the result and add what you get to the project’s total number of project points. Once you achieve the total number of project points required to complete the project, it’s done! You made the sword or found the location of the tomb.

That’s research and crafting in a nutshell, but the system is deeper than these few paragraphs. There are complications that can arise, language plays a role in interpreting the materials you get, you can find manuals that instantly add project points to your total, and skills help you research and craft faster. But again, that’s all for another post.

Titles

Titles are a bit like feats in many d20 fantasy games, they give heroes a feature or two outside of their class. Our game has titles of different strengths, the weakest being a common title, which is what you get from a career. This is the only title you are guaranteed.

Unlike feats in most other d20 fantasy games, titles are, for the most part, earned. Your class or character advancement table doesn’t tell you when you earn them. The Director decides when you’ve earned a title. For instance, slay a dragon threatening a forest city, and you might earn the Dragon Slayer or Wode Protector title. Dragon slayer might give you a few benefits, like a swappable elemental damage immunity, bonus damage while battling dragons, and an edge on tests made to intimidate dragons. Wode protector might give you a unique ability that allows you to talk to trees and swing from tree to tree like Tarzan. I dunno yet, I haven’t actually written those titles, but you get it. There will be guidance for Directors about when and how to award titles during a campaign to avoid a hero getting stacked with A BUNCH of titles and becoming OP.

However, when your character becomes a hero, they’ve already earned a title through their career that gives them a unique feature to help make them distinct and tie them to their past. These common titles granted by careers give your hero something they excel at outside of combat.

Questions to Answer

Each career also includes a short list of specific questions for a player to answer about their hero and get them thinking about what significant events happened or relationships were made on the job. We don’t need to give you a long and rambly description of what a farmer is, but we do want YOU to think about what your time as a farmer meant. That’s the point of the questions, to help you author your hero’s story.

Preview Time

All right, enough design talk out of the way, let’s preview some careers, shall we?

Here’s the artisan, laborer, mage’s apprentice, and performer.

Artisan

You made and sold art or useful wares. 

What did you create?

Who taught you your craft?

Was there any particular creation you were known for?

Did you have a shop or did you travel to sell your wares?

Artisan Benefits

Skills: 2 crafting skills

Languages: 1 language

Project Points: 100

Title: Expert Artisan: Whenever you make a test as part of a research or crafting project that uses a crafting skill you have, you can roll the test twice and choose either result.

Laborer

You worked as a builder, lumberjack, miner, or other profession engaged in hard manual labor.

What type of manual labor did you do?

What important friendship did you make on the job?

Where did you go with your coworkers to blow off steam when the job was done?

What aspect of the job was the physically toughest for you?

Laborer Benefits

Skills: 2 exploration skills and Endurance

Languages: 1 language

Project Points: 50

Title: Team Backbone: When you take your first turn during a montage test, you can assist another hero and make a test.

Mage's Apprentice

You studied magic under the mentorship of a more experienced mage.

Who did you study under and what kind of person were they?

What area of expertise did your mentor have?

What parts of magic did you struggle to comprehend?

Why did you stop working with your mentor?

Mage's Apprentice Benefits

Skills: 2 lore skills plus Magic

Languages: 1 language

Renown: 1

Title: Hedge Mage: You gain the Arcane Trick ability. 

Arcane Trick

You cast an entertaining spell that creates a minor, but impressive, magical effect.

Keywords: Magic Time: Action

Effect: Choose one of the following effects:

You teleport an unattended size 1 object within 1 square of you to an unoccupied space within 1 square of you.

A part of your body shoots a shower of harmless, noisy sparks that give off light within 1 square of you until the start of your next turn.

You ignite or snuff out (your choice) every mundane light source within 1 square of you.

Make up to 1 pound of edible food within your reach taste delicious or disgusting.

Make your body exude a particular odor you’ve smelled before until the start of your next turn. This smell can be sensed by creatures within 5 squares of you.

Place a small magical inscription on the surface of a mundane object within your reach or remove an inscription left by you or another creature using this ability.

Cover an object of weight 1 that you touch with an illusion that makes it look like another object. A creature who handles the objects can see through the illusion. The illusion ends when you stop touching the object.

Performer

You can sing, act, or dance well enough that people actually pay to see you do it. Imagine that!

What is the tone of your performances?

What song, role, or dance are you most known for?

Did you perform in the same place each night, or did you travel?

Were you part of a troupe or a solo act?

Performer Benefits

Skills: 2 interpersonal skills plus Music

Renown: 2

Title: Dazzler: When a creature watches you perform a song, dance, or role for at least 1 minute, you gain an edge on tests made to influence the creature for 1 hour after the performance ends.

Discord Reminder

That’s it for now. And just a reminder that if you’re a member of the MCDM Discord channel, you should link your Patreon and Discord accounts. You can read about how to do so here. Linking your accounts will give you access to our #mcdm_rpg-patrons channel on Discord. It’s a great place to discuss the MCDM RPG!

—James