Barbarians

Growing up in the howling wilderness, you’ve had no chance to pursue anything remotely intellectual, let alone learn your letters! It’s amazing you ever thought of leaving your hovel and going somewhere else, you’re so ignorant. But now you have. You find that you’re a lot tougher and stronger than these cityfolk, and you know how to get around in rough terrain. You’ve learned archery in order to fill your cookpot, and weaponry is second nature to anyone who’s had to fight with the local orc-tribe over food once a month. You’re deeply afraid of magic, and it’ll be awhile before you get over that and develop any facility with it. You’ve no deep problem with the idea of gods, but you don’t know much about them.

The barbarian is selectable by players as their class. It has the following modifications to stat distribution:

Class selection does not affect stat maximums

• None

• Skill Climbing
• Skill Woodsman
• Basic Skills , except Literacy
• Fighter Skills

• Barbarian's starting equipment

Starts with a very low amount of skills, and the only class starts without Literacy which makes interacting with a number of objects impossible. The lack of Literacy is relatively easy to fix since libraries in towns have Scrolls of Literacy for sale, the only scrolls you can read without Literacy (since it's the only way to gain the valuable Literacy skill! As a bonus you have both Climbing and Woodsman to start which are rather helpful for moving through the wilderness.

While they start with huge bonuses to physical stats and penalties to spellcasting stats, there's no reason you can't start out as a barbarian and eventually work up to being a potent spellcaster eventually. The massive Intelligence penalty they start with does make it harder to read skill scrolls successfully until you've found Potions of Intelligence to permanently boost it. Wands or Staves are helpful until you've learned how to cast spells naturally, or learned Literacy to be able to read spell scrolls.

Barbarians run around half naked all the time, so if you don't like your appearance looking like Conan the Barbarian you'll likely want to play another class.

• None