Players guide to the Labourer
In my very first game with The Old World Roleplaying Game, one of my players - unfamiliar with Warhammer in general - rolled the Labourer career, and she looked disappointed - almost shocked. The rest of the group had chosen to be a wizard, and rolled a road warden and a wildwood ranger, and I guess “labourer” just sounded like a bad choice. She chose another career, and I don’t blame her - the Labourer career badly needs a PR advisor. The Players Guide has a peculiar way of selling it, calling them “poor, uneducated, and superstitious wretches”. So clearly there is a need for this guide.
Now, the trouble with the Labourer in The Old World RPG - and to a slightly lesser extent in WFRP - is that while it fits the classical tone of roleplaying in this setting, the games have so many shiny and cool careers that it can easily seem like punishment to be handed a lowly labourer. How is it supposed to compete with troll slayers, nobles and wizards. In The Old World RPGs grim and glorious world in particular, starting out as someone one step from starvation is counterintuitive. To be honest, I feel OWRPG should have several career tables, each focusing on careers that give a particular tone to the game. Perhaps I’ll create one in a future article here at Glorious Portents. But lets get to the point.
We will start by looking at what the Labourer career represents in The Old World roleplaying game - immediately you may be thinking of a construction worker, or a stevedore. And indeed these professions do fall under Labourers. But farmhands, lumberjacks and fishermen are also specifically called out in the rulebook, and from their lores and equipment it is clear they can also be cooks, shopkeepers, night soil men, delivery men, and so on. Being a servant or working in a bar also qualifies. It is a very broad career, and if you can imagine a low-paying job that would have existed in the renaissance, chances are it can be represented here.
It is specified that labourers often get militia training. Now the rulebook calls them bewildered and poorly equipped, but they also say that they do kill knights - so if you like sticking it to the man, the Labourer just might be the career for you.
Mechanically, Labourers have a very good career talent that is easily applicable to a wide variety of situations and which is excellent both in and out of combat. That talent is all about helping other characters, which means that you will be relevant even when the spotlight is on another character. If you want to be popular with the other players and always relevant to the action, the Labourer may be the best career in the book.
Any origin can be a labourer (the thought of a haughty better-than-thou High Elf Labourer is hilarious), so roll for it or pick one you like.
Beyond that, the Labourer career is so broad that you should probably have some idea about what you want the character to do mechanically or what sort of labourer you want to be in the world before you start making choices. Even if you roll most things randomly, you’re going to have to make some choices, and you should do so either from a solid plan around the game mechanics, from the idea of a particular kind of laborer you want to represent - or preferably both. If you have no ideas, you’ve come to the right place, there will be several example builds later in this guide.
What you do want to keep in mind is the career talent Doing my part - it is really good, so you would be remiss not to make the most of it. It has two effects: You are better at doing the Help action than other characters, and you can remove the Staggered and Prone conditions from an ally in short range when you use the Recover action to remove them from yourself.
For the first and most important effect, you will want to have good skills that are easily used to help others. Now, the most easily applied skill for almost any situation is Leadership - unfortunately the Labourer doesn’t get any bonuses there, but it might be worth putting some points there anyway. Charm can also be useful, and may sometimes be more easily applied as a Labourer with some GMs, as Leadership can sometimes require you to use social dominance… which you are unlikely to have. If you have a lot of strength and toughness though, physical dominance can probably make up for it in some situations. Check with your GM.
But any skill can be used to help if you have imagination to come up with how you’re doing it. Brawn (to apply physical strength), Awareness (to point out details) and Recall (to come up with better ways of doing things) are perhaps the easiest to justify across a wide range of options. Melee, Toil, Dexterity, Survival and Stealth are also easily justified as helping skills for their specific applications. Of these, Brawn should be on the to-get list of any labourer, and it is easy to start out okay in Melee, Toil, Survival and Stealth as well. Helping is generally unopposed, so you usually just need to generate a single success to trigger the bonus die from Doing my part, so you don’t need to specialise too much - having a broad range of okay skills may actually be better for this.
For the second effect of Doing my part, you will want to stay close to your allies in combat. That’s a good idea in any case, but it does mean you should be able to stay on the front lines if necessary, and be able to get there. Luckily, a Labourer has both Toughness and Agility as favored attributes, which means they can have really good defenses - though they really should find a sponsor to buy armor for them.
You can roll if you want (and you should, because you can pick if you don’t like the results), but we are going to want several attributes high that aren’t our favored ones - and picking them means we save more XP in the long run than we get as a bonus for rolling.
If you want to min-max this, decide if you want to be a melee or ranged combat character, and increase either Weapon Skill or Ballistic Skill accordingly. Note that if you go ranged, you could use Brawn (from your favored Strength) to attack in melee, and Athletics is probably better to oppose attacks than Defence for you (as you can’t afford a shield and Agility is a favored attribute). That means you don’t really need Weapon Skill.
Then increase Fellowship, to make you better at using the Help action with Leadership and/or Charm. The final increase can be for anything you want, I would probably pick one of the three favored attributes (even though it’s not optimal XP-wise) because they are all amazing - Strength helps you in combat, lets you carry more weapons and improves the fairly easily applied Brawn skill, Toughness increases your resilience, which is great, and improves the life-saving Endurance skill, and Agility improves the supremely important Athletics skill as well as the fairly good Stealth skill. (You’ll note I didn’t mention Toil and Survival - it’s not bad to get bonuses to them, but I don’t consider them very important here - Toil would be thematic for a labourer, but mechanically it is mainly used for certain trade lores that you don’t have, and a bit hard to apply during important action scenes.)
What about Initiative and Reason? They don’t really seem that important to a Labourer, but if you can think of good ways to use Awareness, Dexterity, Willpower or Reason to help others, by all means. Awareness and Reason aren’t bad for that with a reasonable GM, Willpower is useful if you run into something scary and Dexterity might be useful if you want to use the Cooking trade lore, so they aren’t useless.
It’s all going to depend on where you’re taking the character, and we’ll deal with that in the example builds below, but lets throw in some general advice first:
For skills, you get +1 to four out of Melee, Brawn, Toil, Endurance, Athletics and Stealth. Athletics helps you defend yourself, as well as being generally useful, and is an auto-pick here. You probably want either Melee or Brawn as well - Brawn probably being the better choice for you, but either is good. Endurance is generally good, especially as it lets you resist festering wounds, which you will be testing for every single in-game day that you took any damage. For your final pick, Stealth is probably a good choice - when it is useful it is really useful, and with your career talent you can help others be stealthy as well. Toil, as mentioned before, is thematically appropriate but unlikely to be very useful to you - unless another character is a smith Artisan that you want to help out in crafting.
Your choice of Lores is either a City or Provincial cultural lore, and either the Farming or Cooking trade lores or the Waterways environment lore. Considering lumberjacks are mentioned as labourers I’m very surprised not to see Woodcraft here - might be an oversight? Talk to your GM if you want to be a lumberjack or charcoal burner and think it would make more sense to have Woodcraft than Waterways - they might agree with you.
For the cultural lore, pick whatever makes the most sense for your character. Given the games default setting, City(Talagaad) may be the hands down best choice, but City(Talabheim), Province(Talabecland) and Province(Hochland) are all solid choices as well. Pick province if you’re a rural type, or a city if you’re the city type. If you want to be from somewhere else, such as a Reiklander refugee fleeing the witch hunters, feel free to pick whatever is thematically the most appropriate - the game benefit of having a relevant cultural lore is minor enough that the roleplaying opportunities of having a slightly less relevant one is clearly worth it. If the campaign is set elsewhere, you obviously need to take that into account.
For your trade-or-environment lore, from a game mechanics point of view it is hard to see how Farming is especially useful - though being able to secure a camp against predators, vermin or poachers isn’t bad. Cooking is more interesting, letting you make food and recognize poisonous ingredients, and always being able to start fires. Waterways (or Woodcraft if your GM allows it) is probably the most generally useful to an adventurer, as it allows you to ignore some water-based difficult terrain, as well as steer boats, avoid bad weather and river patrols, fish, swim, pick up gossip from riverfolk, notice water-based monsters and… well, loads of stuff. If you’re just min-maxing, go for waterways. But the others aren’t so bad they can’t be picked for a roleplaying reason. If you go with farming, have a conversation with your GM about ways you might use it. If waterways can be used to talk to riverfolk, farming should give you bonus dice when talking to rural types at the very least, perhaps even let you get them to trust you without a roll. And cooking should make it easier to infiltrate kitchens, should that ever come up.
For trappings, you first have to choose between an axe or a dagger. Take the axe, it is a very good weapon and the dagger… well, if you need a dagger you can just buy one. The dagger would be for roleplay reasons only. Next up, workers' leathers or travelling clothes - both are actually good, workers' leathers help against physical hazards, while travelling clothes help against environmental ones. Pick whichever you find more thematic. Finally, either trade tools for your trade lore if you took one (meaning cooking or farming), or a hunting kit. Again, it seems a bit strange that you can’t take Woodcraft with this career. However, the hunting kit also contains a fishing rod and bait, so the idea is probably that you do some fishing if you took the Waterways lore. Fair enough.
Your assets give you the choice between Farm and grazing herd, Market stall or Hand cart.
The Farm and grazing herd belongs to your liege lord who takes all the profit. Having a liege lord does connect you to the world though, and that could be interesting if you and your GM agree you want to do something with it. This asset also gives you a defined home, which could come in useful. If you pick this, you should probably take the Farming trade lore.
Market stall sets you up as some sort of shopkeeper or peddler, selling cheap stuff like buckets. (Buckets is the example the rulebook gives.) This requires some thought to be useful, and doesn’t seem to fit entirely well with the Labourer career, but if you took the Cooking lore perhaps you’re selling snacks… “Get your rat-on-a-stick here, only two pfennigs and that’s cutting my own throat!”. There may be an interesting character there.
Hand cart is the most likely of these to be useful in-game, as it lets you move things around, though you should probably have an idea about what you use it for in your job to make it cool. Maybe you drag it around full of scrap that you try to sell? Perhaps you’re a night soil man and the cart is really filthy (and therefore the perfect place to hide things you don’t want anyone to find)?
You get contacts from The Great and the Good (probably meant to be your employers) or The Common Folk (your peers), which is cool. I would probably roll up one of each, to have some variety. Now, the relationships from the Great and the Good can actually make some fantastic character concepts for a labourer, so you may want to roll this before making many other choices. For instance, you might stand to inherit a dominion if you can prove worthy of the favor of a certain noble - how does that make sense for a labourer, are you secretly of noble blood, or do they just want to leave you something to keep it from their children? Does that give you any enemies? Or you might be someones “last friend at court, and they need your help to get back into high society” - fantastic, that probably means you’re a servant at court, and the help you can give is finding rumours. But if you get these, you will want to build your character concept around it - so maybe roll your contacts first to see if you get any ideas.
If you already have a concept, rolling twice on The Common Folk is safer - or, if you do want The Great and the Good, be prepared to either rework your character concept or work with your GM to tweak the contact to fit your concept. Perhaps you wanted to be a night soil man, and you get the “shared a drink” result with the Baroness of Hermsdorf. That is a real stretch in any universe. But being her trusted secret agent (the next result on the list) actually does make sense, as you can basically go almost anywhere without anyone wanting to take notice.
I’m going to recommend you improve some skills here. Random talents or assets may be cool ways of getting ideas for a character concept, but if you don’t have a concept by now, you’re probably going to go back and rework your entire character - which you can do, but there are probably better ways of getting ideas. Improving skills is awesome, remember that you want skills that let you be better at the Help action. Getting Charm (or Leadership, or both) from 2 to 3 is a massive boost to your ability to Help in nearly any situation. If you want to use ranged weapons, Shooting or Throwing is probably going to be your other choice. Almost any skill can be good for you though.
If you have XP, you should probably increase an attribute if you can - but there are some talents that may be worth it, especially if they fit your character concept. Of course, to get XP you will have had to roll your origin, characteristics and/or career randomly - happily it is fairly likely that you’re reading this guide because you already rolled Labourer randomly (because otherwise you would probably have picked something cool-sounding like Shadow Warrior, Knight or Rat Catcher).
If you somehow have fellowship 4+ and 3XP, Allies in Arms is going to be good as it improves the Help action that you’re already likely to take quite often.
For 2xp, Deep Formation is thematic if your character has had militia training, as you give your allies bonuses to defend against charges just by holding a spear in the same zone as them. (And as we mentioned before, your career talent means you want to be in the same zone as them in the first place.)
If you’re a servant who likes to listen to what their masters are saying behind closed doors, 2xp can get you Exceptional Hearing if you ended up with Initiative 4+.
Short size can be quite helpful if you’re using Agility to defend yourself, and only costs 2xp. It does have drawbacks though, so make sure you know what you’re doing.
If you’re going for that “Reiklander refugee fleeing witch hunters” vibe, 2xp for Touched by the Winds is a perfect choice.
Your Doing my part career talent means that the Help and Recover actions are going to be your bread and butter in combat. You want to stay in the same zone as your most important fighters, but as a Brass tier character you can’t count on having any armor - unless you have rich friends who get it for you, or you can scavenge something. Eventually you will probably get at least light armor.
Wanting to use the Help and Recover actions mean that your weapon choice only really matters if you’re suddenly caught alone, or there’s some reason why an attack would matter more than helping or recovering. That said, here are some good options:
Staff. The staff gives you a bonus to Athletics when crossing difficult terrain, which is actually relevant in combat - as long as your GM actually uses difficult terrain, which he is likely to do. It will be especially useful if you are supporting someone with a relevant environment lore (which lets them ignore difficult terrain) that you yourself don’t have. Staying on your feet is great.
Foot spear. Lets you attack without getting into close range, helps you defend yourself from charges and is a fantastic choice if you get the Deep Formation talent.
Axe. A generally good weapon as many enemies have armor, and you start with it for free.
Knuckle irons. Lets you attack using Brawn, which is a much better skill for you to specialize in than Melee. Check with your GM if he plans to houserule that unarmed attacks against armed enemies is dangerous in some way - rules as written it isn’t, but it wouldn’t be an unreasonable house rule.
Pickaxe. Thematically great if you’re a miner, good damage, and the bonus to Toil could conceivably come up for you.
Sling. If there are no enemies close, you may not be able to do much helping, and your strength is likely to be good - so using this to deal with enemies at range could be a good idea.
Short bow. The bonus to hit at short range may come up, and ability to hit at longer ranges is as good as the sling if your Strength isn’t great. Good for halflings as their strength is unlikely to be great.
War bow. Good for halflings who want to hit at further ranges.
Throwing spears, Throwing axes, Weighted net. I’m not really a fan of the throwing weapons in OWRPG as you can so easily run out of them (with the exception of throwing knives, but they are silver tier), but a labourer is likely going to only attack some of the time - reducing that disadvantage. Furthermore, the labourer is likely to have the strength to carry several weapons, to get good damage out of throwing weapons, and to get the S4+ bonus range. Having a mix of Throwing spears (for range) and Throwing axes (for damage) and a Weighted net (for utility) can make some sense for a labourer.
The helping action allows you to make a test, usually unopposed, and for each success you get, the character you are helping gets an extra dice to their test (up to their maximum extra dice, which is equal to their number of characteristic dice). Your Doing my part increases the number of extra dice they get by 1, as long as you score at least one success.
It may seem that helping in combat is less effective than simply doing more attacks, but in The Old World RPG that may not always be true. The fact that a failed attack has negative consequences (getting staggered), and that you have to beat resilience to do damage, means that using Help to set up powerful attacks from a main combatant can be more powerful than several characters attacking. This is especially true when fighting enemies with high protection and resilience.
Do note that the Help action is also safe from generating complications - see the table on page 108 of the players guide: Complications are only generated on Marginal successes, but the table also states clearly that “These outcomes (...) aren’t used on Tests where the number of successes rolled are important in some other way, such as Help Tests, (...)”.
Consider the following ways to Help your allies in combat. The rules specifically say you can use Help to call out a weak spot to aid an attack, intercept a blow to bolster an ally’s defence, or raise your team’s confidence with morale-boosting sermons, but you are quite clearly meant to come up with other ways of helping as well.
Melee: You could easily feint against an opponent to make it easier for your ally to attack them.
Defence: By interposeing your weapon or shield between an enemy and an ally, you can help them oppose attacks from that enemy.
Shooting and Throwing: You could try to argue that your skill with these weapons give you the ability to give pointers to others about to make a shooting or throwing attack, or perhaps that you are shooting at an enemy more to distract them than to hurt them, thereby making them easier to attack - but your GM may not buy it. The advice in particular may sound more like a Leadership test. Talk to your GM and see if they like this idea.
Brawn: Brawn is used for unarmed attacks, and the obvious choice here is grabbing the enemy and saying “I’ll hold him for you”. The GM may say that this is an Improvise action to immobilize the enemy instead though, but I would probably allow it but let the enemy oppose the help action with athletics, brawn, endurance or melee. Check with your GM what they think. You can also use Brawn to push an opponent prone - it won’t count as Helping and therefore not trigger Doing my part, but it would give any allies you have in melee the high ground AND force the enemy to use the recover action to get up. Not a bad deal if Brawn is your best skill.
Toil: I can’t for the life of me think of a way to argue that toil could be used duringcombat in any way. If you had time to prepare for the fight, maybe you could argue that the fortifications you built and ditches you dug count as Helping those who make use of them? It’s a stretch, as the ditches are probably just difficult terrain, and a low wall of logs is just cover and concealment. So probably not.
Endurance: Endurance is more about not getting hurt than helping others. Nothing to see here.
Survival: If there are environmental hazards in the combat that need to be overcome, such as wind or rain obstructing shots or there being certain kinds of difficult terrain, using survival to point out the best ways of overcoming these obstacles seems reasonable. Could also be used to help prepare bandages and the like to Help on checks to cure wounds.
Awareness: Use this to spot and point out openings, weaknesses, chinks in the armor and the like. Could also be used to help spot good ways through difficult terrain, good hiding spots, etc. Generally useful and a reasonable GM will let you use this quite often.
Dexterity: Dexterity doesn’t seem to have have that many combat uses, but you could probably help someone reload their gun or help someone bandage a wound using it.
Stealth: Stealth is best used in combat by hiding yourself, but you could also use it to Help someone else hide.
Athletics: Athletics is best used in combat to move around or to dodge, but you could probably use it to push someone out of the way of a blow to Help them oppose an attack. As the GM, I would warn you that I would make this an exception to Help actions not causing complications, if you get a marginal success here I would judge that you push them prone.
Willpower: Like Endurance, this is more of a personal thing and I can’t see how you’d use this to help someone in combat.
Recall: You could help others attack by thinking up and communicating tactics and the like, but your GM wouldn’t be unreasonable if he called that leadership. More likely, Recall can be used to help someone treat a wound or the like.
Leadership: If you have social standing (not likely for a labourer) or great presence of some kind, this is easily used to shout orders like “hack him down NOW for Taals’ sake!” Easily used to help all kinds of actions in combat.
Charm: Your GM may object here because charm is supposed to be slower and subtler, and therefore not really suitable for combat. But it is the skill that you’re supposed to use for reassurance. That means you may sometimes get away with whispering gentle encouragement rather than orders, perhaps especially if calming down someone who was just hurt in order to help someone else bind their wounds.
You can only use Doing my part to remove the Staggered conditions from others if you were staggered yourself, and ditto Prone. If one of your allies fall prone and you are attacked and hit while staggered, consider falling prone yourself instead of giving ground, in order to use the recover action to get you both standing and un-staggered with your next action. (Remember that the Recover action removes both Staggered and Prone, you don’t need to act twice.)
If you’re not attacked, having some useful way of becoming staggered can also be beneficial to you. Consider the Wild attack talent - it will mean you are more often staggered, which is a risk, but if you combine that with using the recover action to remove staggered from yourself and an ally every other round, you may be getting more bang for your Doing my part buck.
Labourers, like any character in a roleplaying game, are the most fun if they are protagonists who are tied to the world in interesting ways. For this reason, you should first make sure you have a firm grip of your character's motivations and methods, to make sure you know where they are going. Work with your GM to make sure this fits with the campaign she has planned.
As a labourer, typical motivations could be to improve the living conditions of yourself and your peers, to get revenge on nobles and other people in power, to acquire wealth and basically stop being a labourer, or to simply have a good life - though that last one is unlikely to land you in the trouble which is needed for a good story. Other motivations are certainly possible, use your imagination.
For methods, violence, crime, hard and loyal work, risk-taking and social manipulation could all be possibilities.
We’ll now look at some historical and fictional labourers you could draw on for more inspiration, and then some example builds.
Most poor labourers from history didn’t leave much in the way of recorded biographies, but here are some options:
Mary Bowser – Former enslaved woman in the U.S. who worked as a servant in the Confederate White House, secretly gathering intelligence for the Union. Slavery is (happily) not a common theme in OWRPG, but you could easily play a servant of some evil noble who helps gather intelligence for his enemies. Work with your GM.
Margaret Catchpole – A 19th-century servant and farm labourer convicted of horse theft; transported to Australia where she worked as a servant and midwife.
Prillar-Guri (Probably mythical) – Norwegian milkmaid and folk heroine who, by playing her horn, helped warn locals and aid in the victory of the peasant army at the Battle of Kringen (1612).
Wat Tyler – Leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt (1381), originally a tiler or roof worker; became a symbol of defiance by common labourers.
Hans Böhm (“The Drummer of Niklashausen”) – A shepherd who claimed to receive visions from the Virgin Mary, calling on peasants to revolt against lords and clergy.
Peer Gynt (Henrik Ibsen) – a brash but poor peasant youth who dreams beyond his means, travels the world and ends up in in many surrealistic scenes.
Sam Gamgee (The Lord of the Rings) – A gardener with deep loyalty and quiet strength; ideal model for a servant on the glorious side of OWRPG.
Alfred P. Doolittle (My Fair Lady) – A dustman with charm, wit, and no illusions about his social position.
Baldrick (Blackadder) – Wretched dogsbody with more enthusiasm than skill, often used as comic relief.
Iorek Byrnison (His Dark Materials, early) – When first met, he’s a disgraced, impoverished laborer for humans despite his proud heritage (an example of a proud being reduced to menial work). You’re obviously not going to play a bear in OWRPG, but talk to your GM about how you might be more than you seem - consider the Secret Bloodline talent for this, if you have enough XP because of rolling everything randomly.
Tom Joad (The Grapes of Wrath) – A migrant farm worker struggling against crushing poverty.
The exact reason you ended up working as a spy against your employers must be established, and I recommend you make it personal. Did they do something against your family, perhaps they keep some of them prisoner even now? Do they know you dislike them, but suppose you too weak to rebel, or have you managed to keep them in the dark?
You need to be careful about being discovered, but you may want to ask the GM if you can take Secret Identity as your asset instead of the common ones for Labourers, as that can let you operate a bit more freely when outside your masters’ house.
You should work with the other players as well for this. If you start with a connection to the enemy, perhaps they should too, in some other way. The GM might want to tailor the Grim Portent to this.
Even if the GM and the other players do not like the idea of building the campaign around it, you can still be a spy within a household. Establish this as working as a spy for one of your contacts, perhaps Baroness von Kassel or the elven ambassador. Then make up some interesting thing about your masters in cooperation with the GM. Even as a side plot, this is interesting enough to build a character around. Make sure you still establish your motivation to be a spy - though in this case perhaps you’re being pressured into it.
To build your spy, consider taking Cooking as your trade lore, as it makes a lot of sense for a servant. For characteristics and skills, try to get some points into Initiative/Awareness, Agility/Stealth and Fellowship/Charm for the theme. Strength/Brawn, Toughness/Endurance and Agility/Athletics remain as important as for any build.
A well respected farmer, a leader among the farmsteads of a particular rural valley. This build sets you up as a local leader, someone people will listen to during hard times. That doesn’t mean you have people who work for you, but other farmers will come to you for advice now and then. Work with your GM to establish some of your more important neighbours as minor contacts.
This build is especially appropriate if you roll up a Dwarf with the Longbeard talent, but can work with any origin. Make sure you increase Fellowship and Leadership as much as you can, and pick Farming and Farm with livestock as your trade lore and asset. Beyond that, Strength/Brawn, Toughness/Endurance and Agility/Athletics are both important and thematic, and you may want to put at least one point into Toil to be thematic. Anything will fit after that.
If you’ve read the warhammer fantasy novels featuring the Hooks and the Fish, or played a certain WFRP campaign where the Dockers and Teamsters are fighting, you know that labourers in Warhammer tend to be members of violent street gangs. Being a borderline criminal like that can be a cool character concept.
Work with your GM to work out the details of your guild-gang, decide what tattoos you have to show loyalty, and build a cut-throat labourer. Make sure you’re not one-dimensional though, having family members you care about and a hobby will round your character out nicely.
You’ll of course be working the docks, so pick Waterways as your lore. Maybe you do some fishing on the side. Make Strength/Brawn your best skill, and pick up Knuckledusters as your main weapon to complete the look. Toughness/Endurance and Agility/Athletics are also very suitable, as is Toil and Stealth. Fellowship/Leadership is also very thematic for intimidation purposes.
You’re sworn to carry their burdens, as a certain housekarl is wont to say. You’re the Lydia to the dragonborn, Sam to Frodo, Sancho to Don Quixote, Jeeves to Wooster, Vido to Zavant or James to Miss Sophie.
For this to work, you have to be the foil or support to someone more heroic and preferably sometimes foolish enough to get into trouble that you can help them get out of, and who will make amusing demands of you. This should be another player character.
Look at what characters the other players have rolled up. If any of them have rolled up a gold tier character such as a Courtier, Knight or Noble, that would be perfect. Several silver tier professions such as Merchant, Arcane Wizard, Knight-Exile or Scholar can also do just fine. Approach that player, and pitch your idea. Work with them to find out what sort of comedy you can make between you, and make sure you have enough ideas for it to last a while. A running gag that can be evoked with a line, such as “I’m sworn to carry your burdens” or “The same procedure as every year, James.” is perfect.
Comedy in Warhammer is awesome, but make sure you don’t take it too far - talk to your GM about what you are doing, and make sure there is room for seriousness as well. Also, make sure your dynamic duo can still work well with the other characters at the table. A couple of jokes each session is enough.
As Sam and Frodo exemplify, you don’t HAVE TO make this humorous, instead you could try to tell a dramatic story about loyalty and dedication. In that case, try to agree on how the master character relies on their servant, and establish a dynamic you will be playing out. Drama is often harder to pull off well than comedy, but it can be rewarding if you manage to do it well.
Your origins can be used to enforce the connection between you and your master, or to create something a bit absurd that is at the root of the comedy, though it should make some sense in the game world. For something to enforce the connection, a bretonnian peasant would be very suitable as a servant to a Knight-Exile, and a Halfling cook is a perfect companion for an Imperial noble. As an absurd novelty, a long-suffering Dwarf who has sworn service to an Elf Knight after they saved his family, or a poor High Elf who actually considers herself socially superior to her wealthy Halfling merchant master could be good options.
Any set of characteristics and skills could work here, but try to make choices that work well with your masters skillset. If your master is a great leader, you may want to avoid leadership, but if your master has no social skills it would be great for you to have them and end up speaking on their behalf - if they take the Vouch for Them talent, this will end up being both useful and thematic. Of course, there may be more humor in it if they don’t.
If the master character has low strength, and you’re a high strength character with a hand cart, you could make it a point to be almost a caddy, with the running gag being the master saying things like “Please hand me my longbow.” and being completely useless when you’re not around to hand them their equipment.
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