Progenitor

Progenitor is a blanket term for the strongest person in the character's early life, who instigated or acted as the antecedent to the character's eventual career as a class-levelled person. Most often, this is the character's father and mother, but it might be an uncle or a mentor, depending on the generated family above. This person's profession was experienced and lightly transferred to the character prior to advanced training as a fighter, mage, thief or whatever — and that profession forms the character's "secondary skill," or in terms of knowledge, a "sage ability."

In most cases, the happenstance of this relationship is simple. Yet the determination of the character's progenitor also defines their starting capital, the social status of their birth and the possibility of other peculiar benefits and opportunities.

So far, 112 progenitors have been added to the character's generation. Like character classes, these are divided into six "source", each rated according to their "primary attribute" — strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity or charisma. Usually, a character gets only one progenitor; but there are exceptions that occur (dealt with on other tables).

Random Determination

To determine the character's progenitor, and thus those abilities or relationships they acquired while growing up, we start by subtracting 10 points from each of the character's ability stats. If the character has less than 1 point in any of these, then secondary skills from that source are unavailable. The remaining points are added together and used for weighting the roll to determine from which source the character's progenitor comes.

For example, Paul rolls his ability stats, ending with an 18 str, 12 int, 10 wis, 14 con, 8 dex and 13 chr. Subtracting 10 from each and discarding wisdom and dexterity, Paul ends with 8 str, 2 int, 4 con and 3 chr; a total of 17. He rolls a random number from 1 to 17: str (1-8); int (9-10); con (11-14) and chr (15-17). Paul gets a "17." The source for his secondary skill is found on the charisma table.

We may note, by this method we assure that characters with insufficient strength have no chance to be a gladiator or guardsmen; that those without above-average intelligence cannot be a surgeon or a scribe; and those without enough charisma have no chance at all to be a military leader or royalty. That's simply how the cards fall; not everyone can be everything. Most of the time, we end up being a farmer, a potter, a rat catcher or a teamster. The best the character can do is choose where to put his or her ability stats and hope for the best kind of luck.

Once we know the source, we can roll on that table. Each table is organised for a d100 roll, with the commonest progenitors at the top and the rarest (and with the most status) at the top. So a high roll on any of these tables is sure to produce good results. Feel free to jump ahead once the correct table has been identified:

• Strength
• Intelligence
• Wisdom
• Constitution
• Dexterity
• Charisma

Skill and Knowledge Points

In all cases below, the skills gained from the progenitor are additional to those gained by the character due to his or her class — but the points for these skills are not added to the player's total that would be gained from a normal distribution of sage studies and abilities.

For example, if the character was a mage who chose alchemy as their study, AND also happened to have an alchemist as a progenitor, then the 10 points of knowledge gained from his or her progenitor would not be added to the knowledge the mage gained by choosing alchemy as a study. In addition, if the character as heir to an alchemist gains 0-3 pts. of knowledge per level in alchemy, while the character as a mage class were to gain 1-12 pts. in that study, these numbers are NOT added together; only the 1-12 increase would count. In all cases, the character uses the greatest amount of points, or the greatest speed at gaining points, but the knowledge itself is in no way combined.