Ranger
You're skilled at navigating the world's frontiers and wild places, either as a professional scout or a hermit of the wilderness. Though you're most at home in a certain kind of terrain, you're blessed with a hard-wearing fortitude and wisdom that quickly accustoms you to even unnatural obstacles. You tend to be the person that makes sure everyone has packed appropriate clothing, too.
You have advantage on all rolls involving the wilderness and natural obstacles, including camping and foraging. This applies when dealing with natural beasts, too.
When you voice a reasonable theory about an animal's behavior the GM will try to treat your opinion as fact. You can also tell whenever animals are influenced to act unnaturally, though you can't predict their behavior in that case.
When you forage, you gain an additional success option: "Cure a condition with a scavenged natural cure."
Merchant
You're a buyer and seller, a wanderer that plies goods across the trade routes of the world. You might be distinguished by your discerning eye and unusual acumen, your courage in braving conditions and frontiers that have not yet become common, or simply your wit and fortitude as a smuggler.
You have advantage on rolls to navigate trails, buy, sell and appraise valuable items, deal with customs, and to take the measure of anyone in your trade.
When you hold an item, you know how roughly how valuable it is. Fakes, therefore, seem off in your hands.
When you find trade goods as treasure, you can reroll the value. When you do so, multiply dice showing the same value together to sum for the final result. (So, if you roll 4, 4, 3, 2, they would add 16, 3, and 2 to the value of the goods. Good luck!)
Bard
You're one of the world's bards, traveling entertainers and storytellers that connect common folk with the wider world. In addition to being skilled at playing music and singing, you also are a trusted courier of letters and news.
You have advantage on rolls to interact with common-folk, to play music, or to travel along trails.
When you spend the evening entertaining and sharing useful news, you and your fellows only pay 5G per head for room and board. What news did you bring from the wider world?
When you visit a town, you can pick up a knicknack: A letter bound for your next stop, a specialty sweet that keeps on the trail, a book from a local scribe, or something similar. It doesn't take an item slot: if you give it away or deliver it at a different town, you earn a small favor from the new town - or at least, the recent gossip!
Archaeologist
You've mastered the known histories of the world's lost civilizations, and are tantalized by their weird mysteries and strange gaps. Whether you are a young hot-shot or a pre-eminent scholar in the field, there is simply no other option to satisfy your curiosity but to descend into ancient vaults yourself.
You have advantage on rolls to understand and employ long-lost technology and magic - including to identify items.
Through your studies, you have learned to masterfully decipher, translate, and possibly even speak one of the dead languages of the ancients, likely arcoscript.
You know the general location of all the great ruins in the world, including those believed only to be mythical.
Academic
As student or professor, you're a researching, adventuring member of one of the world's academic traditions. In addition to your mastery of academic lore and minutiae, especially in your field of study, you are connected to an international community of scholars - a network very useful to tap for knowledge, if you can handle the inherent eccentricities of the profession.
You have advantage on rolls related to the field of your study, as well as rolls related to navigating an academic context.
You know four academic experts, colleagues or mentors of yours - feel free to leave them undefined until needed. You may ask each expert a difficult question once (by letter, or in person) - you gain advantage while acting using their information. If you do a big favor for an expert, they probably owe you another good answer.
You can ask a question vaguely related to any of your studies as if you scored an automatic success on a skill check, once. Refresh this power when you spend downtime with access to academic resources, such as any well-stocked library.
Exorcist
Be you formally trained or a folk practitioner, you are a specialist in the ways and protocols of the various weird spirits that occasionally influence the mortal world: ghosts, devils, fiends, gods, and whatever other entities might possess, haunt, or hex the common folk. Some exorcists serve as diplomats and negotiators with the spirit world, others are more like strict enforcers. Ordinary folk and spirits both often view you with mixtures of fear, respect, pity and gratitude.
You have advantage on all rolls in a scene where signs or omens of hauntings have occurred.
Additionally, when you burn incense, you can perform a ritual to achieve certain effects: (You still get the benefit of the incense.)
You can perform a ritual to construct a spell-boundary, invoking holy power into a cord or drawn line. Define which supernatural entities this boundary wards against: when they cross the boundary, they must suffer pain as they break through and destroy it. Additionally, when they do so, you startle in a cold sweat (from sleep, if necessary) with a vision of what was happening.
You can perform a ritual to draw out a spirit representing a curse, fate, or natural phenomenon. This permits you to entreat or battle with abstract concepts. Specifically, you can summon a curse spirit representing an ally's bad condition - if you defeat it in battle, you can seal the curse spirit inside a nearby tree and remove the condition.
Seer
You possess a second sight, gaining occasional glimpses of knowledge you cannot possibly have. This might be a prophetic affliction, such as Indefinite Tontine Syndrome, or it might be practice in interpreting the signs of a ritual deck. You often perceive unusual things about people, seeing shapes and auras that suggest their fates or hidden natures.
You may occasionally feel ripples of distant events - that is to say, the GM may occasionally choose to describe meetings and occurrences happening worlds or ages away, which you wake from as if a dream. You can't remember specifics from these ripples, but you can choose to have them color your interests, actions, and opinions. (For example, if the GM describes the generals of the Empire preparing for a sneak attack, you can go "There's no way they plan to actually hold to that treaty!")
You can, as an action while resting, glimpse the future, rolling 1d8 on the chart below and asking a question - the answer appears to you in the form of a vision. The information available in this way can be impossible for you to have, if false. If you draw from a common ritual deck to do so, the names of the hearts majeur corresponding to these questions are listed. (Corps mineur are lesser signs, and that's what you get when you don't specifically open yourself to the universe while drawing. Funny how that works.)
1: "What monster lurks, forgotten, secret, somewhere?" (The Slayer)
2: "Who will suffer unjustly, betrayed?" (The Greatfish)
3: "What treasure awaits the brave?" (The Crane)
4: "What peril awaits the foolish?" (The Maiden)
5: "What catastrophe have we ourselves made?" (The Elixir)
6: "Whose love is the greatest?" (His Majesty)
7: "What cannot continue?" (The Fountain)
8: "Who's about to get away with everything, if we don't smarten up?" (Orchestra Accrox)
Emissary
You're the official emissary of a nation or other political entity, asked to curry favor in distant courts. Even villainous powers will often respect your political immunity, entreating with you as an equal so long as you do not get caught performing espionage.
You have advantage on rolls related to the intrigues of high society.
Whenever you visit a new nation, you will receive free hospitality, staying in an embassy or as guest of a local power. When you use this hospitality, someone will almost always seek to court your influence for a favor. Even if you don't accept, you will have learned something new in the process.
Once per expedition, when you consider an event that's happened or that might happen, you can ask who stands to lose or gain the most from it, among people you've met, as if you scored an automatic success on a skill check.
Free Knight
Throughout the world, there are knights of no order and no company - you're one of them. Free knights travel as gallant sell-swords, champions for hire slaying monsters or bolstering militaries in need. Your knighthood might be inherited, or it might have been purchased or traded for - it brings you a certain social cachet, though not as much as true nobility, and it also welcomes you to a brotherhood of others of your profession. Many free knights take the address "Sir", sometimes regardless of gender.
When you're in civilization, and you don't have a contract, you'll often be offered one: a contract is a job to go out and achieve some heroic task, and return. Pay for a day's work in the direction you were going already (one or two fights) is likely 20G. Work that takes you out of your way often pays more - about 100G - which is good, since you'll have to convince your companions it's worth doing. These rates are for monster-busting or bandit-fighting work — wartime service against the armed force of another nation usually pays about double that.
When you complete a contract, get paid and gain a point of Respect. Spend Respect 1-for-1 to turn failed dice into automatic successes on Charm or Streetwise rolls to gather information as your reputation as a professional hero opens doors. You can spend Respect in the same way whenever you make a social skill check to get permission from someone.
When you encounter a monster that troubles ordinary people, you can roll Academics with advantage to ask questions about it as if you had studied it - you have a professional familiarity with it.
You can slightly alter this trait to play a mercenary (say, if free knights don't exist in your setting) — if you do so, you lose the social cachet associated with a knighthood, but you can spend Respect on Coercion rolls.
Rat
You're a survivor of society's margins, gutters, alleyways, and under-cities all. Not necessarily criminal, but absolutely cast-off, you've been forced to dwell in forgotten places and among forgotten people, and have earned some recognition among the scrabbling, the homeless, and those who, for whatever reason, choose not to or cannot live in ordinary society.
You have advantage on rolls related to a city's forgotten places and slums, and with all people so-related, or to outwit authority.
Whenever you gather information in a city, usually by rolling Charm or Streetwise, score a bonus success.
You can find a hidden entrance into any place in a city: It will be one of hard to reach, dangerous, or require fast-talking.
Vagabond
Your past is a drifter's - a stranger to most places you've been, revealing little about themselves, chasing some new frontier or simply unable to settle down. Your travels have already brought you quite far, either alone or with a partner - hunting treasure or dreams, chasing the next job, or simply running away from something. You're full of road wisdom and unsettled business, and itch a little when you haven't hit the trail for a while.
When you take a full rest twice in a row in the same place, you become Weary. You recover from Weary by traveling, not resting. When you feel you've set your soul to peace, lose this ability.
When your condition is good, once per expedition add a bonus success to any skill check, including yours. You can explain this by intervening quickly (as a sort of super-assist), or with a piece of hard-won wisdom.
When you enter a place that you might have visited before, you can make a check to gather information about it. After asking your questions, the GM will ask you: "What do you think went wrong here?" or "What's your unfinished business?"
When you fan out to gather information in a town you've never been before, one of the worst characters in town will often make a bad impression on you. You'll know in an instant exactly how rotten they are.
Rebel
You're a resistance fighter against a much larger enemy, probably the Empire or, if they're active, the Patrons. Other members of the resistance look to you for support, inspiration, and guidance in their desperate struggle. Until the day you're all waiting for, they'll support you as best as they can.
You have advantage on rolls to sabotage equipment involving the enemy, to command the resistance against them, or to infiltrate their holdings.
When you arrive at a new town under enemy occupation, you may contact the local resistance cell. They'll provide hospitality at a safehouse as long as you're working to push back the enemy.
When you strike an explosive blow against the enemy, TODO: some sort of prize falls out.
When foraging or making a Streetwise check in enemy territory, you gain an additional success option: A kidnapped guard that's about one of your party member's sizes.
Crook
You're a career criminal, tangled in the underworld of heists, protection schemes, turf wars, and all their unending messiness. Your friends aren't exactly friends, and your lords aren't exactly lords, but they'll feed you a steady drip of information and opportunity and assets nonetheless. Nevertheless, respect for your skill and a sort of hard-wearing camaraderie earns you a welcome in all sorts of unusual and seedy places.
You have advantage on rolls to commit criminal acts, desperate escapes, and get yourself into worse trouble.
When you beg a boon from the underworld, you'll get something you badly need - hospitality and a safehouse for the night, medical treatment, vital information, or contraband items. Also, gain an Owed Favor.
When you rest, roll 1d6 for each owed favor. For each 1, a favor will come due - you'll hear about it soon. Ignoring owed favors is unwise.
Once per expedition per favor you currently owe, when you roll a skill check and dislike the result, you can throw one die away and then reroll the rest, taking that as the new result.
Assassin
You are a trained shadowy killer, deft of step and sure of blade. You might be member of (or exile from) a secret clan of killers, or simply a skilled and respected criminal. Either way, there are few that can match your skill, and you will recognize their handiwork in an instant if you ever see it.
You have advantage on rolls to evade detection and infiltrate secure locations. When you make a plan to get close to a target, you have advantage on all rolls to carry it out.
When someone is unaware or unsuspecting of you and has their back turned, you may kill them without a skill roll.
When you defeat someone in combat, even if they escape, mark them for death: The next time the party has downtime, after the end of the expedition, you may appear when that enemy least expects it and murder them. You will not be detected. You do not need to make any skill rolls to do this. Ask your GM before taking this trait who in their campaign cannot be marked for death in this way.
Sanctified
You are anointed in a holy duty, chosen - possibly from a young age - to carry out a pilgrimage of great ritual and magical importance. Your faith carries considerable weight among common folk, even among those who do not believe, and you enjoy a presumed and perceived neutrality from worldly matters.
You have advantage on rolls within your holy places, or within the presence of a cosmic evil you cannot hope to fight.
You are assumed to be neutral in worldly affairs, and so, unless you prove otherwise, will be left alone during times of strife and conflict. Borders will typically permit you passage. You can likely insist on your belongings not being searched, or make other requirements, for ritual reasons.
The first time you make pilgrimage to the sanctum of a holy place, and complete a duty or ceremony there, you gain Grace if you did not have it before. You may expend Grace to perform a holy act:
- To automatically succeed rescuing someone meek and common from trouble
- To demand someone wicked to leave peacefully,
- To ask, about a people or person, "What sacrifice did they make in times long past?" and understand it, intuitively.
Holy acts are ambiguously magical. It is possible they are simply proof of your own dedication.
Maxwellian Soldier
You're a Maxwellian Soldier - an artificial hero created by the genius of a distant, unknown civilization, sent - across time, space, or stranger frontiers - in order to fight a great battle on the behalf of the people of this world. You likely only have foggy memories of your creation - recollections of alien skylines, of tender moments shared with your creators, of implanted memories. Nevertheless, you feel a purpose thrumming deep within your chest, the pulse of your Atomic Heart.
You have an Atomic Heart, a sort of artificial soul. It renders you completely immune to any effect that would erase or alter your memory, including changes in the past due to time travel. It also renders you immune to anything that would cause you to stop existing without physically destroying you.
Whenever you gain a level, reflect back on your journey so far and record a lesson, embedding it in the atomic heart: Categorize this lesson about the world as either "Learning how to protect lives" or "Learning how to live". When you have more lessons about protecting people, you have advantage on rolls to act like an emotionless martyr machine, or to face impossible odds. When you have more lessons about living, you have advantage on rolls to show special consideration to those you care about, or to harm those you detest.
When you dislike the result of a skill check to act under pressure perform a physical feat or task, you may choose to push your body to its limits: you automatically succeed instead, at the cost of losing an arm. This limb takes up an item slot, and may be safely reattached when you rest, or with about an hour's time and a successful Machines check. Having a detached arm doesn't impair your ability to fight in any way, but does make many non-combat tasks more complicated.
Maxwellian Administrator
You're a Maxwellian Administrator - an artificial hero created by the genius of a distant, unknown civilization, sent - across time, space, or stranger frontiers - in order to guide the people of this world away from a terrible mistake into an age of wisdom. Or at least, this is what you have gathered about your purpose from the memories of your creation - overheard whispers of your creators, and the imperatives installed deep within your heart.
You have an Atomic Heart, a sort of artificial soul. It renders you completely immune to any effect that would erase or alter your memory, including changes in the past due to time travel. It also renders you immune to anything that would cause you to stop existing without physically destroying you.
Whenever you gain a level, reflect back on your journey so far and record a lesson, embedding it in the atomic heart: Categorize this lesson about the world as either "What guidance people need" or "What guidance I need." When you have more lessons about guiding people, you may, once per expedition, add your Machines skill to your rating of any skill for one task by treating the problem like a complicated machine. When you have more lessons about needing guidance, you have advantage on all rolls that use a non-Machines skill that someone else in the party is your equal or better at.
Don't roll dice for Charm skill checks. Instead, you pay 1 LP each for each success, up to the limit of your Charm skill. If you ever fall in love or establish a truly intimate friendship, you lose this ability.
If-Ys Sancta
You're the guardian spirit of a sanctuary, taking form as if-ys: No matter how far you travel, your heart remains in that holy place, your eyes deep with its blue serenity. It is possible you took form simply to see and experience more exciting facets of the world, but more likely you are taking on some sacred task or preventing some great calamity. Most If-ys, and many spirits and those so attuned, respect the solemnity of your charge.
You have advantage on rolls within sanctuaries.
You are the spirit of a sanctuary, and so maintain a presence there no matter how far you travel, either being invisibly aware of all that occurs there, or manifesting as a numinous being. When you manifest, you cannot really interact with those present, but can discuss and speak with your visitors. When you manifest, you continue to function normally in your usual form, your attention slightly split - this is not teleportation, simply having two bodies at once, very far apart.
You may bar anyone you wish from your sanctuary at any time.
Once per expedition, you may place an item in your heart. It will vanish and appear buried beneath your sanctuary, for you to retrieve later.
Driftin Khar
You're the leader / captain / chief / long-suffering parent figure of a Driftin fighting band: A Khar. Your people travel with you, serving as a good source of cheap labor and bad ideas. You might have been raised by your band, or might have run away to join them partway through life - either way, you've distinguished yourself to them through your wit and courage.
You have advantage on rolls to negotiate with other leaders, or on any roll in which throwing a bunch of hotshot bravos at the problem seems like it would help.
You have two trusted seconds-in-command, one of which is probably short and wide and the other tall and narrow. They can come with you when your whole band is more impractical than usual, providing the same benefit (but lesser in scale.) You should definitely include them in your Overdrives.
When you send the Band on a mission away from you, start a gauge at 0/6, incrementing it every time you rest and every time you're victorious in battle. When it's full, word gets back to you, and you roll Coercion to complete the project:
- They find a useful treasure or secret,
- They bring back word of the enemy's movements
- They struck a blow to the enemy with their tricks and courage
- They didn't draw undue attention,
- Injuries and strain don't take the Band out of commission until the next Long Rest.
(The gauge might be larger or smaller for various sizes of mission.)
Hundred Champion
You stand tall even among the Hundred, respected as a champion. Traditionally, this means you're viewed as an inheritor of the leadership of their ancient rebellion: a great hero, a warleader, a legate, a guide to the new ways of the world. The strength and endurance of the Hundred is manifest in you to the highest degree, and you carry it like a banner.
You have advantage on rolls in which large size and animal strength is of direct application, as well as rolls to interact socially with other Hundred, or destroy the works of the Ancients.
You have access to ancient war secrets, passed down by your people since old times: you automatically succeed skill checks to identify weapons, though you don't do so any faster than anyone else.
Once per expedition, you can rampage like a legendary Hundred: as long as you continue moving in one burst of brute power and speed, you can accomplish amazing feats of Prowess and Determination. As soon as you calm down - or after, say, an hour - the effect ends. Consider this to be license to automatically succeed related skill checks, as well, as, hey, to ignore small arms fire out of combat.
Chimerical Body
The Hundred were created as perfect soldiers, in experimental batches of one-hundred. Unique traits from these experiments are still expressed, at high potency, in your bloodline. Choose two abilities from the list below - you gain their benefits. Your Hundred body displays traits from one of the animal types mentioned, or another. (But you show traits from at least two animals.)
- Camouflage: You may remain imperceptible while motionless to those that are not expecting a camouflaged enemy, by pressing yourself up against a surface and shifting the texture of your skin. (Chameleon traits, Octopus traits, or insect traits.)
- Keen Hearing: You may discern precise details concerning distant loud noises. You can accurately overhear quiet conversations held the next room over. (Rabbit traits, or cat traits.)
- Winged Leaping: You have Advantage on Prowess rolls to jump and leap, assisting your movement with powerful beats of your wings. You may cling into sheer surfaces or the ceiling. (Bat traits, or bird traits)
- Scent Tracking: You can track someone if you know their scent, like a bloodhound, and have Advantage to do so. You have Advantage on Wayfaring rolls to find or evade animals, including Hunting. (Wolf traits, bear traits)
Feel free to work with your GM to design special powers to represent other animal characteristics than the above, too.
Iron-Studded
Certain Alloci take extreme precautions to resist magic - inlaying their flesh with carefully prepared studs of damask iron from a young age. This deadens them to the flow of the world, its light and magic, but also renders them spellbreakers without peer.
You have advantage on rolls to unmake or resist magic, especially to rolls to physically destroy magical objects. You can often destroy intangible enchantments with a Strength check.
You're immune to the Hex condition, and magical mental influence. Illusions seem shoddy and obviously fake to you. Whenever you touch a Dantali elf with your bare skin, your touch burns them, inflicting 1 Supreme damage.
You cannot taste food, and have no sense of smell.