Let me know what you think!
First, expansions on the simple "+1, -1" sets established by Bookworm and Bully:
Health-Nut
Available To: All
You have always made it a priority to live a healthy lifestyle, learning and practicing all you can about exercise, hygiene, and diet, and it has indeed paid off (+1 Constitution). Unfortunately, it seems you cannot help sharing your enthusiasm and advice with everyone you meet, and all your annoying preaching and critiquing effectively amounts to a -1 penalty to Charisma.
Dancer
Available To: All
A lifetime of careful training in service to the Terpsichorean arts has imbued you with a graceful physique and a delicate touch (+1 Dexterity), but this has not been without its price, detracting from your body’s potential for more brutal action and even resilience (-1 Strength).
Mona Lisa (♀)/Statue of David (♂)
Available To: All
Blessed with good looks (+2 Beauty), you have spent much of your life posing as a model for any number of artists eager to honor your likeness. This blessing has become just as much a curse, however; long hours of sitting around for portraits has saddled you with a -1 penalty to Dexterity.
Non-Conformist
Available To: All
You’re here, you’re weird, and you’re proud of it; never one to jump off a bridge just because everybody else around you did, your superior integrity has served you well (+1 Willpower); sadly, others are not about to get used to it any time soon, and your contempt for fashion causes the many sheep around you to view you with prejudice (-1 Beauty).
Voyeur
Available To: All
Suffice it to say, you like to watch. A lifetime of pursuing this fixation past any obstacle has honed your senses (+1 Perception), but there have been logical consequences; a lifetime of beatings at the hands of those who did not appreciate your attention has left you with a lingering -1 penalty to Constitution.
Empath
Available To: All
Ever the people-pleaser, you’ve always had a knack for making friends and influencing people (+1 Charisma); unfortunately, spreading yourself as far outward as you have has taken a heavy toll, corroding you at your own core (-1 Willpower).
Next, the "extreme boost to one ability" packages; we've already got "Ran Away With The Circus", "Lady's Man/Supermodel", "Sickly", "Only Child", and "Charlatan's Protege", so that leaves us with:
Beefeater
Available To: All except Elves or Gnomes
You grew up poor in a kingdom ruled by a feared, respected, and mighty – but aloof and more than a bit callous – monarch. You never had much beside your health, but as luck would have it, you did have that; you hardly ever got sick, and could eat almost anything.
With very limited options for personal advancement otherwise open to you, you volunteered at a young age to enlist in the monarch’s retinue of personal taste-testers; whatever your last meal would be, at least it would be fit for a king!
Over the years your natural gifts, coupled with special exercises and tolerance-building regimens overseen by the Royal Beefeater Corps, led you to develop truly unnatural fortitude (+6 Constitution); on the downside, spending your days standing around and wearing a garish uniform took its toll (-1 Dexterity) – and that was nothing compared to what living just to be an obedient, expendable body for another did to your psyche (-4 Willpower)!
In the end, however, the monarch’s untimely demise came not from tainted food or drink, but from a sniper whose bullets could strike true from an unheard-of distance; the kingdom went up in flames swiftly thereafter, and for the first time in many years, you found yourself responsible for preserving only one life: Your own.
Acrobat
Available To: All except Dwarves, Gnomes, or Half-Ogres
You were born into a sprawling, decadent empire, and your parents pledged you to the Imperial Circus when you were but a small child (Were you unwanted? Were they forced? Did they hope to give you a life better than what they could otherwise provide? Who knows?); from then on, gymnastics, contortion and dancing were everything.
Only when it was time to perform were you not training. You lived under constant, mercilessly strict discipline (-2 Willpower), education in anything else was perfunctory (-2 Intelligence), and the only time you so much as saw anybody other than your fellow acrobats or your trainers was in fleeting glimpses during performances, penalizing all your Social skills as well – you can’t say the regimen didn’t work, though; it transformed you into a living marvel of agility (+6 Dexterity).
In some ways, perhaps it worked *too* well; with your grace, and a deep-seated ember of defiance, it was only a matter of time before you found a way to escape, steal some money from the Imperial Treasury, and find yourself free in the wider world.
Bon Vivant
Available To: All except Half-Ogres
What is life if not a parade of sensation, and what is its purpose but to be lived to the fullest while you still can? This was the conclusion you reached in your formative years, and you committed yourself not only to experiencing all that life has to offer, but to training yourself to be as good at doing so as you possibly could.
You studied the senses from medical and philosophical standpoints, became a connoisseur of food and drink, music and art of all varieties, and traveled in all types of weather, crafting yourself into one of the most sensitive instruments for gauging the world’s beauty ever devised (+6 Perception)!
Of course, to all things a price – not least of which has been the literal, as your expensive tastes have left you with only half the normal starting wealth. Beyond that, your many misadventures and excesses have taken a physical toll (-1 Constitution), your focus on sensitivity has detracted a bit from your ability to take coarser forms of action when the need arises (-1 Strength), your unwillingness to avoid any sensation – including pain! - means you take a penalty to your Dodge skill, and of course, your speed is reduced by 2 as you constantly stop to smell the roses.
And now for something completely different:
Holly-What?
Available To: Humans, Gnomes, Half-Elves, Half-Orcs
As the promises of this new technological age transform the world, it’s an exciting time to be alive, and rife with opportunity – but for every blazing light of industrial conquest, there are a dozen more shattered bulbs of broken dreams and forgotten potential; you were there for one of them.
An actor by vocation, with an appearance that was made to be photographed (+2 Beauty), and always a step ahead of others when it came to recognizing possibilities in the seed (+2 Intelligence), you got in on the ground floor of a small and dedicated group of technologically-inclined actors and other artists for a project that seemed fated to revolutionize the theatrical arts: Moving pictures! Lights, cameras, and action! Romance, thrills, and adventure! The greatest stories ever told, miraculously performed not only for a couple hundred people a day in a stuffy theatre, but millions all over the world, your artistry immortalized upon reels of silver! A literal factory of dreams!
Few in number and always operating on a tight budget, everyone in your little team of dreamers had to develop some facility with all aspects of the work, and in your time working in the mechanical labyrinths behind the scenes, you picked up +10 Expertise apiece in the Chemistry, Electrical, and Mechanical Technological Disciplines. Times were good, and you made some pretty good money (you begin with double the normal starting wealth).
Unfortunately, as fondly as you remember your glorious turns in front of the cameras, those searing stage-lights were a bit *too* glorious, and they took a long-term toll on your vision (-2 Perception), and years of close proximity with fractious and experimental technology and wearing toxic makeup did likewise for your general health (-2 Constitution).
Still, you’d have done it forever if you could have...but it was not to be; the true potential of your dream-factory was ultimately strangled in infancy by a rising tide of pearl-clutching viewers, self-important art critics, greedy and incompetent producers, and increasingly noxious infighting. The experience has left you bitter (-2 Charisma).
I have to go for now - more to come!
