Does Forbidden Lands need a peasant class?

“All the player characters are adventurers, but you have learned a thing or two before the game begins.” (Player’s Handbook, p. 22) But it seems like the professions are what type of adventurer you are, and it’s not always clear how professions could apply to non-adventurers. Does it even make sense to give a standard profession to non-adventurer NPCs?

Some professions assume travel

The immediate problem is that some professions assume that you are able to travel from place to place, and the game is otherwise very clear that most people haven’t been able to do that for about 260 years.

The most obviously-problematic profession is rogue: given how the average village size is about 100 people, and the median village size is about 30-40, and you can’t travel because demons will eat you, there is no chance of stealing from anybody and not being found out eventually. You can’t travel to find a fence, and even if you could, you can’t convert valuable personal possessions into anonymous coins. If you keep hold of the stolen object, someone is eventually going to snap and say “OK, we’re going to search everyone and everywhere” and find it. If you hide it somewhere, why bother stealing it in the first place? (Unless you occasionally go to your hideaway place and gloat at all the stuff you’ve stolen, in which case the exasperated person from the previous example will eventually catch you in the act.)

OK, you could steal stuff and immediately destroy it; or you could steal food or firewood and immediately eat or burn them respectively. Still, it feels like you’d eventually be found out, when people wonder why you’re full and warm when others are hungry and cold, and you haven’t demonstrated particular talents at e.g. hunting in the woods or chopping wood.

The inability to travel is a similarly-obvious hindrance to pedlars. Sell stuff to whom, exactly? Even assuming your village uses coins or favours or something else that you can manage to corner the local market on, and you’re now rich and everybody else is poor, it feels like you’re only one bad harvest away from an angry mob with pitchforks turning up at your door demanding redistribution.

Not all the paths require travel, though

One immediate answer is that most professions aren’t that bad, and indeed that you can be a rogue or a pedlar and still make good use of at least some of the available paths.

A rogue could quite happily max out the Paths of the Killer and Poison and just be a really sneaky, underhanded fighter, and if their village was occasionally attacked by wolves or monsters they could easily reach a position of respect. The pedlar’s Path of Words rank 1 talent is invaluable when disputes happen, so you see someone with that aptitude becoming a valued arbiter; the Path of Many Things could be used minimally to be someone who’s always got the right tool for the job, which could be useful when out hunting or something. If you live in a large-enough village, the rogue’s Path of the Face could be used up to a point to make them a really good actor.

But this is reaching. This is finding a secondary use for the talents. It still doesn’t explain why anybody would be good at the primary use, or why that would ever be encouraged or explicitly taught.

What does it mean to have a profession?

Let’s assume that every single child has an equal chance of being in any one of the eight professions. How would you know where the sorting hat had placed them?

For some professions it’s easy. Hunters will be naturally proficient at a sort of thing that every young adult has a go at, and it’s fairly easy for a potential Rider or Fighter to similarly discover that they’re really good at this one thing. If there are other Druids or Sorcerers in the village, they should similarly spot children with the appropriate aptitude.

But professions don’t just unlock a bunch of talents; they also determine how high your attributes can get. Most obviously, the strongest orcs and dwarves must be Fighters, because that’s the only way to get to Kin maximum 6 Strength, but this can also reveal itself in subtler ways. If you’ve maxed out your Empathy and you can’t sing, you’re probably a Pedlar rather than a Minstrel. If you’ve maxed out your Agility but you’re no good at shooting bows or wilderness stuff, you’re not a Hunter, you’re a Rogue.

Maybe we’ll need pedlars and rogues when the blood mist falls?

Elvenspring can live up to 300 years or so, so it’s borderline possible that someone could live through both the arrival of the blood mist and its end, in which case they remember the skills that adventurers would need. It’s certainly possible that they could pass this knowledge down: you’d expect some of the elder survivors to remember that sort of thing. They could spot signs of aptitude in children and school them in currently-useless skills, just so the children could eventually teach others in turn.

Dwarves and other even shorter-lived kin will have gone through a number of generations during the blood mist, but any of them could have written their memories down. It only takes a village or two for the knowledge that was preserved to be able to spread eventually. (Unless religious fanatics burned the library because it contained heretical lies, of course.)

And of course cults and perverted travesties of ancient customs are totally a thing in the Forbidden Lands, so it’s completely possible that one tiny village somewhere has been zealously preserving the ancient arts of rogues and/or pedlars, constantly stealing from each other and/or selling stuff to each other.

You won’t necessarily use all your talents

In our world, just because you’re tall and strong doesn’t mean that you’re going to end up playing rugby; you might prefer to be a lawyer, or a chef, or what have you. The same is true in the Forbidden Lands: just because you’ve taken a rank in your profession talent doesn’t mean you’re going to do anything with it. That might feel inefficient, but most NPCs don’t min-max.

You might not realise that you’re good at this one thing: you might never have fought with a shield, for instance, because there aren’t any in your village (or they won’t let you train with one). You might have a decent voice but you’ve never been in a decent fight. You might have a natural aptitude at poisons but nobody in your village makes them. You might be drawn to apprentice with the local magic user, but they ended up dismissing you as an enthusiastic fool with no grasp of what magic should be like, because it turned out that they were a druid and you were a sorcerer or vice-versa.

You might have realised that you could hurt people with a sword or a knife, and decided you didn’t want to. Or your father could have encouraged you to follow in his footsteps and become a woodsman, and to tell the truth you could do that, but you and your old man never got on, so almost out of spite you decided to do something, anything else instead.

And, of course, you could have realised you had a perfect aptitude for adventuring, but the opportunity never arose. Most obviously this applies to anyone who came of age when the blood mist was still around, but there must be a good few potential PCs in the post-blood-mist era, who have the bad luck to be the only likely adventurer in their village. (That sort of person would be an ideal recruit if one of your PCs gets killed, incidentally.) You can’t go out exploring all on your own (maybe you tried it with some friends but they decided the lifestyle wasn’t for them), let alone build yourself a stronghold, find magical crowns or take down Zytera.

So, like most people who used to dream of being in a band one day, you sighedd and knuckled down to something more practical instead. And in truth there’s plenty of less exciting stuff in the rulebook.

An old starting PC should have three ranks in general talents, so an old NPC who’s had a few minor adventures could easily have accrued enough XP to get another few ranks. That’s fine because only half of all the general talents are purely combat-related. There are nine talents that are unambiguously about crafting (Bowyer, Builder, Chef, Fisher etc.) and another bunch that have plenty of non-combat applications (Master of the Hunt, Sailor, Pathfinder, Wanderer; Fearless, Incorruptible, Threatening etc.).

You could make a pretty interesting completely-non-combat character with just general talents!

PCs are adventurers by inclination and opportunity, not by breeding

One reason why I’m very interested in the Forbidden Lands being so empty is that it makes the few PCs that exist so much more interesting.

In a fantasy world modelled after the European Renaissance, or something like D&D, there are people everywhere. You have to explain why the PC group stumbled across a dungeon that hadn’t previously been casually looted by established party groups a couple of levels above theirs; if they kill a monster and find a +1 sword, you need to work out, after a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, why that sort of sword isn’t so comparatively common that there are entire extractive industries and maybe even ecosystems based on the things.

In the sort of fantasy I’m interested in, the protagonists have taken up arms for their own reasons, and they’re unusual. The adventurers turn up in a small village, beg hospitality and a place by the fire, and tell stories of the wilderness they traipsed through, the terrifying monsters they faced, the injuries and horrors the monsters inflicted upon them, and how they survived regardless, and found ancient treasures that made it all worth it / bone-chilling portents that made them even more determined to finish their quest. Their audience is amazed, and then either wonders why they couldn’t be an adventurer like that, or more likely is grateful that they can sit by the fire and eat their soup and not have to worry about that sort of scary stuff.

Because, after all, the life of an adventurer is, to a first approximation, a succession of really stressful and scary events that you manage to live through (survivor bias alert!) – and my best explanation of “what makes Forbidden Lands PCs special?” is “they’re prepared to do crazy stuff that nobody else would”.

The rational response to “the blood mist appears to have gone”, after all, is to breathe a sigh of relief and cautiously work at expanding your village back into the lands that it previously relied upon when there were more people, hoping that they haven’t been taken over by wolves and/or monsters. The Forbidden Lands do not need a peasant class (answers to questions in headlines are always true; it’s the law) because PCs are very much the exception. They decide to go see what the world and the monsters look like, and poke any or all of them with a stick. That’s weird!

I think there is a common pub conversation or parlour game, preferentially played when it’s cold and wet outside and warm and dry inside, when people decide what type of adventurer they might have been had things been different. “I was pretty good with a bow when they made us practice when we were young; maybe I could be lurking in the trees, waiting for the bad guys to come by?”; “I can carry a tune, so maybe I’d be stood at the back with my trusty lute, inspiring my friends to victory in battle?”, “Nah, you’re a far better actor than a musician, and you can’t be trusted; I say you’re a thief”, “For the last time, I swear I didn’t know you were also planning to ask Julia out fifteen years ago when we were both teenagers!” etc.

You could have NPCs be having this conversation in the background when the PCs show up, or, better still, have them call the PCs over and ask them to join in. (If you’ve decided that the PCs need to be invited to dinner so they can meet some important NPCs and/or you can casually drop a few plot points into the converation, but you’re stuck for a conversation topic, this would be a great one.) This is a great opportunity for roleplaying, and for your players to examine quite what they’re doing all of this crazy stuff for.