Starting Occupations

Characters typically had a life prior to becoming adventurers. Starting occupations give you a way to flesh out your character’s background and gain a bit of a bonus from it. Any bonuses or drawback’s from a character’s starting occupation apply immediately at the time of character creation before a character gains the first class level (prior to level 1, even if starting play at a higher level).

Occupation Descriptions

Prerequisites

Many starting occupations have a prerequisite that the character must meet to qualify for the occupation. This may be related to a character’s age, ability scores, race, or some other requirement. A character must meet all prerequisites of a starting occupation to select it.

Skills

Each occupation may provide a number of additional permanent class skills that the character can select from a list of choices. Once selected, a permanent class skill is always considered to be a class skill for the character, regardless of what class the character takes. If the character’s first class level also has the selected skill as a class skill, the character also gains a permanent bonus for skill checks made using that skill.

Feats

Some starting occupations may provide one or more bonus feats as part of the occupation. A character still must meet any prerequisites for these bonus feats.

Miscellaneous

Certain occupations have unique or unusual benefits or drawbacks, which will be described in that occupation’s entry.

Starting Wealth

Finally, a starting occupation modifies the character’s Starting Wealth. This is represented as a modifier, which adjusts the Starting Wealth Rating by that number of steps. For example, a character who would normally begin play with a Wealth Rating of Respectable but gains a +1 Wealth from her starting background would instead begin play as a Rich character.

Starting Wealth cannot increase beyond Kingly nor drop below Impoverished.

The Starting Occupations

Choose one occupation from the available selections and apply the benefits to the character as noted in the occupation’s description.