Professional

You have worked as a middleclass professional doing a job that requires classroom study and interpersonal skills. Your clients are usually governments, businesses, or wealthy citizens. In some cases, such as scribes and doctors, the middle class can afford your services.

  • Skill Proficiencies: Depends on your chosen professional field, below
  • Tool proficiencies: Abacus Languages: One of your choice
  • Equipment: A set of clothes, a wax tablet and stylus, a reference book related to your profession, a pouch containing 15 gp.

Professional Field

Professionals have a particular set of skills related to their field of study. They are usually found in cities large enough to support several professionals practicing the same field. However, your profession may have a network of representatives in small, rural communities as well. Work with your DM to determine the nature of your profession. You can select your field from the table below or roll randomly. As an academic, you might be a teacher or instructor. You could be a sophist or an actual philosopher. You might even be a weapon instructor, sports coach, or scientific researcher. As a doctor or pharmacist, you might specialize in diseases of the mind or women’s care. You could be a general practitioner or a veterinarian. You have likely had experience treating war injuries.

Business managers might be shop supervisors, factory bosses, caravan masters, or ship captains. A majordomo who supervises an estate may be a business manager. Inspectors and auditors include tax collectors, court agents, offshore cargo inspectors, and government auditors. In Egypt, government agents monitor water usage. Diplomats are professional lobbyists, advisors, and ambassadors who serve in the halls of power. As a diplomat, you are familiar with the inner workings of government. Bureaucrats and clerks fill office buildings across the Mediterranean.

They document everything from business transactions to marriages. Some work in licensing and permitting offices. Others provide government funds to widows or disabled veterans. In most Roman towns there is an office that collects, analyzes, and files reports of omens seen across the republic.

As a scribe, you earn a living making copies of manuscripts, books, and legal contracts. You may work for a library, a government office, or be a private contractor, taking jobs from fellow citizens. Scribes in Egypt often write Books of the Dead for their clients.

d8 Profession Skill
1 Academic History, Nature
2 Doctor/pharmacist Insight, Medicine
3 Business manager Insight, Persuasion
4 Inspector/Auditor Insight, Perception
5 Diplomat Insight, Persuasion
6 Bureaucrat/clerk Investigation, Perception
7 Lawyer/advocate Deception, Persuasion
8 Scribe History, Religion

Feature: Professional Contacts

As an established and respected professional, you can rely on certain benefits from your peers and clients. Your fellow professionals will provide you with lodging and food if necessary, and pay for your funeral when needed. In some cities and towns, like-minded professionals congregate in certain areas of the agora or marketplace, creating a central location where you can meet other members of your profession and find patrons, allies, and clients.

d8 Personality
1 I believe in providing the best possible service to my clients.
2 I have an inquisitive mind and love facts and details.
3 I’m arrogant about my job and the status it provides.
4 I can quote all the famous philosophers and quite a few infamous ones as well.
5 I’m contemptuous of people who can’t keep up with my intellectual conversation.
6 I can talk for hours about my profession.
7 I sometimes donate my service to worthy clients.
8 I expect my professional reputation precedes me by now, and I am surprised when I meet people who don’t know of my achievements.
d6 Ideal
1 Community. The service I provide is an integral part of any functioning community. (Lawful)
2 Proactive. Practicing my profession is the best way I know to do something positive in the world. (Good)
3 Order. Whether I help people find justice, understand truth, recover their health, collect their dues, enlighten themselves, or run their business, the work I do reduces chaos in the world. (Lawful)
4 Greed. I picked this profession for the status and money. (Evil)
5 People. I got into this line of work to help the people I care about, not for an ideal. (Neutral)
6 Aspiration. I work day and night to master my profession and make a name for myself. (Any)
d6 Bond
1 The school where I studied holds a special place in my heart.
2 I seek a patron or client who is worthy of my great skills.
3 The community of fellow professionals has made me the person I am today.
4 I pursued this career to obtain social status and respect.
5 One day I will prove that I am the greatest of all time at my profession.
6 Jealous rivals or malicious interlopers have destroyed my livelihood. Now it is time for revenge.
d6 Flaw
1 I’ll do anything to get a major contract with a wealthy client.
2 I am suspicious of most other people.
3 No one can ever know that I cheated on my final exams.
4 My ambition causes me to take on questionable clients.
5 I would kill to turn this job into an aristocratic title.
6 I can’t stand it when someone else might be as good at my profession as I am.
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Amazons vs Valkyries: Backgrounds and Homelands, Copyright 2022, Bloodstone Press

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