Every character has a story. Character race describes your natural gifts and your roots from early childhood, while character class describes your skills, talents, and pure fighting ability—but neither of these truly describe what you do with your talents and gifts. That’s where character narrative comes into play.

A narrative is a description of your career, position, or calling in life, a third pillar of character identity that helps you to tell your character’s story. Your choice of character narrative makes you different from other heroes who share your race and class. If you are a human barbarian, are you a beastmaster with a loyal animal friend? A mammoth hunter, skilled in slaying fierce beasts? Or an ice reaver, greedy for blood and plunder? If you’re an elf wizard, are you a far-seeing dreamwalker, a guardian of the Twelve Stones of Power, or a mysterious bearer of the Black Book?

Your choice of narrative provides your character with a modest set of advantages or benefits that help to make you good at things characters with your story should be good at, such as bonus feats or bonuses to interact with NPCs who hold individuals of your station in high regard. Your narrative may also provide perquisites of power or station, such as the ability to make arrests or pass judgment in your home city, or a pirate galley and willing crew ready to join you at your beck and call. But, more importantly, your narrative provides you with built-in adventure hooks and tools for developing the story of your character across his or her career. Your narrative provides you with friends, family, rivals, enemies, ambitions, questions, and fears—and you can count on your GM using those tools to make the Primeval Thule campaign the story of you.

You can choose only one character narrative for your character, and you can’t change your character narrative without the GM’s permission. Each character narrative is available to characters from a wide range of race and class—for example, the savage hunter narrative may make the most sense for a barbarian or ranger, but there’s no reason you couldn’t build a savage hunter concept around a rogue who relies on stealth and sneak attack to make quick kills, or even a cleric who worships Inar, god of the hunt.

Narrative Rules

Here are the basics for choosing a character narrative.

• You can choose your character narrative at 1st level.
• Narrative overlaps the same space as character themes (4th edition D&D) or traits (Pathfinder) and provides a Thule-specific origin for your PC.
• You can only have one character narrative.
• Your narrative may serve as a prerequisite for certain feats, prestige classes, or paragon paths.
• You can select a new narrative with your GM’s permission. This is an important and long-lasting change in your character’s fortunes or station, and you have to be able to explain how your character’s adventures and experiences justify a new narrative.

Sample Narrative: Ice Reaver

The windswept glaciers, the frozen mountains, the vast cold plains beneath the shadow of the encroaching ice—these hard lands are home to the fiercest peoples of Thule. The barbarians of the cold lands live off the great herds of caribou that roam the tundra or the teeming seals and fish of the frozen coasts, but when the herds or pods move on, these hardy warriors soon turn their attention to different prey: The civilized peoples of the warmer lands. Riding giant elk or rowing dragon-prowed galleys, the reavers of the north strike with terrible speed and savagery, pillaging and plundering their way across Thule’s remote marches. From Nar to Quodeth, the reaver tribes are names of terror and dread.

As one of these northern raiders, you are at home in the frozen lands. Your world is simple: The strong survive, and the weak perish. You regard the city-folk of the south as soft, and distrust their decadent ways even when you choose to sell your axe or spear as a mercenary. After all, fighting for pay or wandering in search of your fortune are almost as honorable as taking what you want from the spoils of war.

Most ice reavers are human, simply because humans make up the great majority of the raiding peoples of Thule’s northern wastes. Humans descended from the people of frozen Nimoth make up most of these tribes; they stubbornly cling to their homelands even as the snows grow deeper year by year. A few tribes in the western highlands of Thule are humans of Quodethi descent. Centuries ago these were the hardy frontiersmen of Quodethi civilization, but over the generations they became more and more isolated, adopting the barbaric ways of their neighbors. Finally, a small number of dwarf clans with no citadel of their own share these bitter lands with the human tribes, and follow a similar lifestyle.

Ice reavers are most often barbarians, fighters, or rangers. However, the tradition of warrior skalds is strong among these northern tribes, so this narrative is also a good fit for a bard.

Ice Reaver Tribes

Bearslayer: You are a dwarf of a dispossessed clan. Your people were driven out of their native citadel years ago. With the loss of their home, they abandoned their rightful clan name and took up a name of exile, calling themselves simply Bearslayers after the beasts whose home they now shared. You intend that someday you will be strong enough and respected enough to lead your people back to their stolen citadel and reclaim it.

Elk Horn Rider: You are a warrior of the Elk Horn tribe, known throughout Thule as riders of the foul-tempered giant elk. Your people are close kin to the Quodethi, and of all the ice peoples, the most likely to engage in peaceful trade with the peoples of the south. For you, raiding is not a matter of survival or pure bloodthirst—it is a matter of pride, a way to avenge insults and defend your tribe’s own hunting grounds. Change is coming to the Elk Horn people: the day is coming when your tribe must abandon their ancestral lands and carve out a new home from the lands of the south. Are you the great chief the wise men see rising in the smokes of the future?

Khatranir Warrior: You are among the last of a vanished tribe. Once your people called the heights of the glacier Kha, the Ice Mountain, home. They raided far and wide, crossing mountains like other peoples roamed plains and blooding their t’uchuk ice-axes in lands hundreds of miles distant. None were stronger, hardier, or more widely feared than the Khatran Tribe. But while you were away on a long journey to the warm lands, something terrible happened. When you returned your people were dead, entombed in the depths of Kha by some dire frost curse. You do not know who cursed the Khatran or why, but someday you will avenge your people.

Ullathi Sea Reaver: The sea is the mother to your people. The Ullath live on the shores of the icy seas, sealing and fishing throughout the winter months—but when the spring comes and the ice breaks up, they take to their longships and spend the warm months boldly harrying the coastlands of Thule. While raiding is a way of life for the Ullath, your people are also explorers and sea-traders, and have a driving wanderlust to see new places and find new things. There are many ways to become a hero to be sung of down through the years, and you are determined to find your fame someday.

Ice Reaver Benefits

Ice reavers gain the following benefits. These are specific to the Pathfinder RPG, but similar benefits are provided for 4th Edition D&D and 13th Age characters. (We’re still playtesting all of these.)

Skill Bonuses (1st level): You gain a bonus to Intimidate checks and a bonus to Climb, Ride, or Profession (Sailor) checks, depending on your tribe. Ice reavers are renowned for their violent ways, and you are familiar with the hard terrain of your home.

Bonus Feat (1st level): You can choose a bonus feat, chosen from a small set of appropriate feats.

Renowned Raider (6th level): You gain a bonus on checks to interact with mercenaries, raiders, or pirates—your name is known throughout the fighting peoples of Thule, and your reputation precedes you.

Reaver Chief (10th level): Once during each character level, you can call a band of raiders from your homeland to go marauding with you, or a ship and crew to go a-viking. You must summon your reavers in your homeland, and it usually takes several days to gather them. The reavers aid you to the best of their ability for one adventure. This is a small horde of low-level warriors, and it’s best used to deal with other small hordes of low-level foes.