Monday Motivations #10

Article #10 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class.  I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.

What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.

BARBARIAN


5.  Left Behind - Last year your tribe set out on a raiding voyage and all was right with the world.  You pillaged a handful of villages along the coast, and then took the river inland like you had done many times.  However, when you rounded the bend near a particularly fertile spot of the countryside, to your horror the townsfolk were lining the banks of the river.  They'd never done this before, usually they were compliant and played by the rules, you raided their villages for crops, livestock and the odd wife and afterwards they went about whatever it was that they had to do to make ready for your visit next year.  When they started firing wave after wave if flaming arrows at the boat, the chief had had enough and ordered you to turn the boat around.  The oarsmen stroked the water with a new sense of urgency but it was not enough to put you out of range of the villagers bows.  When an arrow stuck you in the back you staggered to the side of the boat, slipped on the blood of your childhood friend Boggart and tumbled overboard, banging your head on the side of the boat.  You came too some minutes later as you drifted downstream, luckily you hadn't drowned, but there was no sign of the boat and you were a long way from home in a strange land full of people who wanted to kill you... 

CLERIC

5.  Roll the bones - your god demands blood sacrifice every solstice to give thanks for the bounteous crop which will sustain it through the winter.  This year however when you performed the choosing ritual and cast the bones to select a goat to sacrifice you were horrified.  Instead of pointing to one of the assembled animals it indicated that this years sacrifice would be human and would be the chieftains daughter.  You hastily performed the ritual three more times and each time the bones indicated that the god wanted the chieftains daughter in payment for his favours...

MONK

2.  World Harmony - Your order shoulders the heavy burden of  maintaining a ritual without which the world would eventually stop.   Your brothers chant perpetually all day every day, this constant background tone vibrates through everything on the planet and keeps the world in a constant state of movement.  People of a good nature will vibrate in harmony those of an evil disposition will vibrate dissonantly.  Your job is to journey out into the unknown and detect these dissonants and either train them to resonate harmoniously or to despatch them...


ILLUSIONIST


1.  Inquisitor - The king and his descendants have used your kind for hundreds of years to keep the kingdom free of dissent.  Your job is to travel from town to village to sniff out signs of rebellion using your powers of persuasion and mind reading.  "What happens after you write your report is not your concern" were the words of your old teacher, but you know that the people you report on are never seen or heard from again.  When you returned home some months ago, your father's mind was full of rebellious thoughts about the kingdom, you planted a masking which might last a year, but if another inquisitor were to read his mind he'd be able to tell that it was your spell...

2. The Puppeteer - You can't remember when your powers awoke, you've always been able to suggest things to people and they've done what you asked.  As you got older the tasks you asked people to perform for you were a means to enrich yourself and ultimately brought you to the attentions of the local sheriff and his mind was not as easy to control as the others especially when he had his mage with him.  You read the guards intentions from some distance away, the night they came to arrest you and you've been on the run ever since...