If a character has spent a significant amount of time in an occupation, he/she will gain skills that are useful to that occupation. For example, a character who has spent five years as a gladiator should know how to fight! The player should decide what the character has done in his/her life, and then develop background skills as follows:
| Length of
occupation
|
Number of skills required | Must allocate at least this number of cps to: | Background bonus | ||
| Primary skills | Secondary skills | Each primary skill | Each secondary skill | ||
| A few months | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 cps |
| About a year | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 cps |
| A few years | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 6 cps |
| More than 10 years | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 10 cps |
| More than 20 years | 3 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 15 cps |
Any occupation before the age of 6 does not count.
For particularly hazardous or intensive occupations, increase the background bonus by one level. For example, a character who has spent 6 years as an assassin would need to spend 4 cps on each of 2 primary skills and 3 cps on each of 4 secondary skills relevant to an assassin, and would gain a background bonus of 10 cps in return.
For particularly sedentary or risk-free occupations, reduce the background bonus by one level. For example, a character who has spent 15 years as a farm labourer would need to spend 3 cps in each of 2 primary skills and 2 cps in each of 3 secondary skills relevant to a farm labourer, and would gain a background bonus of 6 cps in return.
The player can choose which skills the character learned during his time in the profession, from a list of skills that the referee considers are relevant to the occupation. Each skill chosen must be different (i.e. a character cannot take the same skill as both a primary and secondary skill).
Examples of relevant skills are for some example occupations are listed below. The referee will adjudicate on other occupations.
A single character may have spent different periods of time in different occupations. If the occupations are significantly different, the character should receive a separate background bonus for each occupation. If the occupations are virtually identical, the character should receive one background bonus only.
If a character has two or more background bonuses, some skills may be common to both backgrounds. In these cases, the character needs to spend the combined number of cps on the skill. For example, a character who spent a few years as a gladiator (hazardous profession) takes Combat skill as a primary skill for that period and would normally need to allocate 4 cps to it; if the character also spent more than 10 years as a mercenary afterwards and took Combat as a secondary skill during that period (normally needing 3 cps allocated to it), he/she would have to allocate at least 7 cps (4 + 3) to his/her Combat skill in total.