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Background: Wayfarer
You have slept in doorways, in haylofts, in the bottom of a boat, and in places you would rather not describe. Nobody was coming to help, so you learned to read people quickly: who gives, who takes, who is about to become a problem, and who is lying about which. You can be gone before a hand closes on your shoulder, get a lock open when the alternative is a night in the rain, and eat a real meal without letting on how long it has been since the last one. You have been shown kindness by people with nothing to spare and cruelty by people who had everything, and you have never once confused the two. By rights you should have died three or four times over. You did not. Either somebody is watching over you or nobody is, and it makes no difference: you yourself are always watching.
There is a second nation inside every city, and no map shows it. Beggars, urchins, day laborers, the woman who sweeps the temple steps, the drifters under the bridge: no crown, no captain, no borders, and yet rules older than the ones carved above the courthouse door. Share what you have. Do not sell your own. Pass it on. You are one of them, so wherever you go there is a fire, a doorway, a name to ask for, and hands willing to hide you from anyone carrying a warrant. And they see everything, because nobody guards their tongue in front of the invisible: which magistrate is bought and by whom, which faction is quietly arming, which street not to walk tonight, who vanished last month and through which door they were dragged. Nobody asks them. They will tell you. What they ask in return is never small: speak where they will not be heard, stand between a fist and a child, find the one no officer will look for. They own nothing and they say nothing, but they are everywhere, and there are more of them than of anyone else. A word from you can move through them like wind across a field of wheat, and no city that has ignored them for a century could survive a week without them.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Ability scores | DEX, WIS, CHA |
| Skills | Insight, Stealth |
| Tool | Thieves’ Tools |
| Origin feat | Lucky |
- Life under Wayfarer
- Separate entry The Overlooked (Background Hook)