You know what it's for.

In the Skills section of Chargen I've included a small bonus to help round out your characters a bit more. See below and in the Chargen thread.

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Skills Bonus
Starting skill points in CG are pretty sparse, so every skill point counts. Players are unlikely to put skill points into anything that won’t directly further their character’s survivability in a frontier setting.

This is a bit counter-intuitive for a couple of reasons. First,  frontier living required people to be jacks-of-all-trades. Generalists thrived on the frontier. And no matter their specialist profession, most people would know the basics of several essential skills—such as cooking, tailoring or husbandry. Second, while frontier living was hard, and occasionally terrifying, it was also very boring for long stretches. People needed things to amuse themselves with during dark nights and long winters—music and decorative works (beadwork, carving, embroidery) were popular pastimes.

To simulate this, players may take up to three free levels in any musical (Performance) or decorative art (Profession: Artistry) skill (all in one skill or across several). Additionally, they can take one free level in any Trade, Craft, Language, Study or Profession skill unrelated to their primary profession.  For settlers, logical choices include Craft: Carpentry, Profession: Cookery or Profession: Sewing. For aristocrats, Study and Languages. And for indigenous people, wilderness-related Professions like Fishing, Woodcrafting and Tanning.
This message was last edited by the GM at 10:01, Tue 17 Aug 2021.

You're reading my mind, because I was just thinking into giving Anne a couple of points for drawing and painting. Useful for a budding ethnographer doing field sketches.

Huzzah! Could that be retroactively applied to a Skill I bought for that reason? -and is Craft: trad. clothing too broad, seeing as you have tanning and sewing set out separately there?

My reasoning was that traditional manufacture tends to see women taking charge of the process from hide through to decoration, though mechanically that would cover a lot of transferrable skills, so I could see a justification for cutting down on that.

Hi Marie! Nice to meet you :)

So I'm going to take Profession (Artistry) 2, Performance (Dancing) 1, and Study (Native Cultures). The later is as-is in the rules, but perhaps it needs narrowing down to a certain culture? Or do I take it to represent extremely generalised notions about Canadian First Nations in general, as seen from the French perspective, with bits and pieces of Huron, Iroquois, Montagnais, etc all mashed together?

(And please let me know if at some point I say something stupid, still learning!)

Given that this is probably a one-off game with limited time for skill development, I'm happy for a broad definition of skills. So Study (Native Cultures) could be used for general knowledge, and Craft (or Profession): Clothier could cover the complete process of manufacture from tanning to accoutrements.

Merci bien, et salut, Mme. de Contrecoeur!

Marie isn't super useful for ethnography herself, being slightly feral and usually to be found in the forest hissing at people, but with a little careful encouragement she might be able to put Anne in contact with her (Androscoggin, confidently Francophone) mother or (Huron) grandmother, if you'd like that as a character connection.


(and certainly and likewise, we're all learning here - whilst I do come from recently tribal ancestors with generational trauma from active linguistic and cultural repression...I'm Scottish, and we were effectively the attack dogs of the Empire. I'm trying to faithfully represent, but also portraying someone subjected to a great deal of cultural disruption who can be reasonably expected to know about as much about her intangible heritage as a very white archaeologist with a small stack of books 291 years later.)

A clarification on your Character Sheets:

Abilities that are above or below average receive modifiers. Section 1 of the CharGen thread lists the Abilities and their modifiers.

Each Skill is governed by one Ability, listed in brackets with the Skill description.

A character’s Ability modifier transfers directly over to the  Skill it governs. So the total Skill bonus is [Skill Level + Ability Modifier].

So (per the chart in Section 1 of CharGen), a character with a Might of 6 gets a -1 malus to all Skills governed by Might. A character with a Reason of 12 gets a +2 bonus to all Skills governed by Reason.

On the character sheet table this would look like this:

Any questions or unclarity on this please comment here.

Bonjour my dear sisters!

I am a simple priest of the Society of Jesus, born in Nantes, educated in Paris, and now seeking to save the souls of our Native friends, and heal all those whose bodies have need of it.

Speaking as the player, I am still revising my skills with the advice of L'hiver. I hope to post my description soon.

[Marie walks backwards into the deep shadows of the treeline, never breaking eye contact until she's just another patch of darkness and a watchful glimmer in the gloom]

Hi! It is possible to befriend Marie, I promise. Maybe start by leaving a fish on the ground a few paces away and making no sudden movements...

As for description, I think you're probably furthest along - I need to sort some whos and whens with the boss and am sincerely hoping a friend that showed interest in the game & shared backgrounds will turn up here, too.

Ah well, Saint-Pierre was a fisherman, no? And a fisher of...women as well as men, afterwards.

Fr. Joseph goes down to the river and uses the skills he acquired as a boy on the quai of Nantes to bargain for fine fresh fish, which he carefully leaves on the ground near the treeline, and stands back in silence, inwardly reciting his rosary...

As Player: I also hope your friend joins us. We could really use a few more PCs, especially with forest skills.

Thanks for getting started with introductions everybody.

By way of Prologue, I hope to begin RP shortly with with individuals or pairs doing little "slice of life" vignettes to settle into our characters and the setting. If you have any scenes that you're keen to play out let us know here (e.g. arrival in the New World; first encounters with other characters, etc). We won't take too long on these scenes; just enough time to road test our characters and buy the others time to finish chargen.

Sorry for the delay in my own introduction! I was struggling a bit for a name.

I'll be playing Pierre Sournois, a Huron warrior/scout that fought alongside French forces in a conflict against British and their indigenous allies.

I may go with this portrait, though it is apparently of Lou Diamond Phillips (a Filipino American) playing Jose Chavez y Chavez (a Spanish/Mexican-Apache man) in Young Guns. So definitely not Huron, but so is the RPOL portrait gallery.

Welcome, Pierre. I have been thinking we definitely needed a warrior/woodsman, with no disrespect to the skills of the other PCs.

I understand the difficulty of finding a suitable picture in the RPOL photo gallery. Its 17th century characters tend to look much more civilized European than New France frontier, unless they are pirates.

Salut Pierre! Nice to have some local company.

...and definitely keep submitting portraits to the gallery and intermittently bothering them about it, I've been adding Native portraits with a hope to someday run something of this kind if not Coyote and Crow on my own for months and backup from a few PC subs would be incredibly welcome. It's a fixable problem!

In reply to Marie (msg # 7):

That would be nice! I'm thinking Marie has learned some basic Huron, or Iroquois perhaps (I know, I know...) maybe from some convert, maybe from a servant? She's itching to go draw the natives in their habitat, and she's happy to bankroll an expedition or something of the sort. She'll probably start out as a bit of a hopelessly white white, but hopefully she'll start exercising some empathy as soon as it's beliveable.

While we're talking languages, is there any language we don't have covered? Anne could take that one, since she's the official team nerd. I assume Pierre speaks Huron, and Marie Algonquin?

Marie speaks Huron as her first language due to her father's ethnicity (and rules vs. realism issues on bilingualism, which I am pretending to sulk about), with a little bit of Eastern Algonquin and French...if you can get her to talk in the first place, at any rate. I don't think anyone speaks English yet? Intercepting enemy messages and all that.

Would Anne like an introduction to one of the ladies in particular, or both as they can be reached? Marie's mother might share a connection with our blackrobe, too, being a pious sort.

Oh, that's a nice planned arc. I predict a lot of cultural confusion ahead.

English! What a concept.

When you put it that way, Anne being a bookworm, she should know Latin, shouldn't she?



That would be great. Let's see...

Anne's feud is more or less halfways between Trois Rivières and Montréal, along the Saint Laurent shore. But I imagine (although let me know if this is too much, GM) that she leaves Contrecoeur to the administrators to spends as much time in Montréal as possible, frequenting whatever learned circles there are in the city. Perhaps even hosting her own salon of intellectuals? Assuming there are some in town.

Is this anywhere near your stomping grounds, Marie? Perhaps your mum was/is a maid to Anne's late mother, or to herself? She'd love a native to pester with questions all day long.


Confusion is my natural state :P

That'd certainly help if you had to read any eldritch tomes brought over that happened to be written by Renaissance European wizards Mass at any point. It would be funny if she did end up talking to an English CO in Latin, too.

Marie's mother lives in the trailing outskirts of Montréal and Marie lives...around, in a very broad area. Marie's mother isn't really maid material, not having been raised with European concepts of time and work - the French would probably consider her hopelessly lazy in such a context, and Marie would quite possibly react with dangerous hostility, not understanding wage terms and thinking the contract to be a preparation to enslavement (her father has probably been sold down to America or for a curiousity in a European exhibition by now, if he's still alive).

Joséphine might make clothing/examples for Anne, though, for sale, exhibition or personal use. She could become the last word on How Things Are Made for the entire area...if Madame would like a snazzy coat very like a chief or a dancer or someone about to be buried, well, they are all pagans, non? What is there to be precious about, if Madame will get in some extra beads and cloth in exchange?

Anne can pester her with questons whenever she's there, at least.

Also! Frère Jacques Joseph, dormez vous would you like to be Anne's confessor? Her sins are mostly of the mind.