Horrors: Occupational Perks

Sorry if this article is a little less comprehensible as my head is all a'fuzz due to my recent adoption of a shelter cat who decided that last night was a night for running around the house meowing and leaping on and off the bed, purring on my belly, meowing on the ground, and otherwise waking me up repeatedly. Due to sheer dedication, I did manage to sleep largely through the night though there may have been many brief waking moments that I can't remember.

So feel free to ask any clarifying questions if this article ends up a bit of a jumble.

As it's nice to have something that represents your character's unique lifestyle and experience, many different game systems have a form of class. In most cases this class is meant to represent both their occupational history and their "party role". Since in an ideal Horrors on the Home Front game, an individual's perspective and decision making are equally important to their skills (with "traps", for instance, being purposely designed so that one can out-think them but more on that later), all I need to do with my version of classes is add some flavour in a way that also adds meaning to the players' choices in protagonist history.

All that is basically fancy-talk for:

Each protagonist gets to pick three occupations to represent their career history - whether it's one that includes multiple jobs or the subtle permutations of a single job. Each occupation comes with a single perk although you don't technically have to do the job listed with the perks to select that perk so long as the perk makes sense to the job. And yes, a person can purchase further perks with experience points.

As an example, Martha is an anthropologist and thus has the Anthropologist occupation with the Cultural Understanding perk. She works with the Special Operations Executive training operatives about France and it's culture. She has the Photographer's perk which involves taking photographs to allow re-examination of prior scenes due to her years spent overseas poring over old photographs and learning the difference between an informative one and one that misses all the crucical information. As an anthropologist, she's also sometimes called upon by those hoping to develop useful and valid propaganda in France and so she has the socialite's Rumour Mill perk which allows her to disassociate herself from the rumours she generates. This doesn't mean the propaganda will be successful but it does make it more likely to spread in such a way that no one knows who started it.

Alternatively, an army recruit who is currently a Soldier (with the army perk) could have come over from being a Police Officer (with that job's perk) who had the Air Raid Warden perk due to Civil Defence training.

In other words, there's a fair bit of flexibility here to make whatever you like - from housewives to prime ministers - through combinations of around fifty occupational perks.