d12 Starter Jobs for Baronial Mercenaries

 

This post for the lovely Squamous, who asked for 'giant rats in a dungeon' style starter quests for baby mercenaries. I've taken this to mean adventurers, as mercenaries and adventurers are slightly different social niches in the Barony, admittedly with plenty of crossover. 

A note on levelling in Barony: I consider D template to represent a fully developed and talented professional, not a reality-warping, fate-bound hero. There are a lot of talented and experienced professionals in the world. You're not that special. You probably get your A template after something like boot camp or a bachelor's degree or an apprenticeship. 

Paying Jobs for A Templates

1. Church Fixer. The Church is constantly looking for deniable people to fill contracts - they pay reliably, often have work, will provide you with logistical support and a safe house after the fact, and are societally acceptable, even lauded. Many (even most?) adventurers get their start doing contract work for the clergy. Note that, for reasons unclear, people who go into the adventuring life have roughly five times the average chance of coming up in the proscriptions. 
2. Service in the Provinces. The petty nobility are always looking for people. You make your start in the kill teams, and if you're worth taking on could end up employed in the noble house troops. Most kill team captains have a second role as recruiters and talent scouts, so if you're good and reliable you can expect to be noticed. 
3. Mercenary Work. Actual bands of actual mercenaries are often recruiting, especially during times of inter Kingdom warfare. Mercenaries do not suffer much attrition in peacetime, but during the wars they will suddenly need large influxes of fresh blood for the foot companies. If you're big and tough they might train you as heavy infantry. If you're quick and tough (and a bit insane), you could become one of the Arditi. 
4. A tour of the Eastern City. Essentially mercenary work but tightly centrally organised and codified into 'tours', with fixed pay, responsibilities, and perks. The fight against encroachment from the Forest of Worms is endless, and the Eastern City always needs fresh people. This is a very stable form of adventurer work, but it is also very dangerous. Large worm attacks semi-regularly break through and massacre whole sections of the city. You can expect good pay and lots of professional mentorship on an Eastern tour. 
5. Merchant's Hand. The vast majority of merchant commerce in the Barony is conducted by sea, but there are small regional caravan importers who move goods from the coasts and rivers into land-locked townships and cities. As a Merchant's Hand you will be primarily a guard, but also a porter, stevedore, accountant, and often a confidant and advisor inside the operation. Particularly lucrative land-trade routes are concentrated in the Northern Barony, controlling the importation of luxury good from the mountains, and in the South, where most of the nomad clans lack harbour infrastructure to facilitate sea trade.
6. Close Protection. Personal bodyguard work is ubiquitous in the Barony. As a baby adventurer this will probably look like getting hired on as part of a staff of security professionals - people who are wealthy enough to afford bodyguards are generally looking for more experienced fighters to accompany them in person. There may be light intelligence and recon work involved, in addition to fighting and food-tasting. Close protection work is publicly considered one of the most reliable and effective ways of acquiring useable combat and tactics training. 
7. Adventuring/Undergrounding. Duh! This is the classic; what everyone thinks about when they picture an adventurer. It involves finding ingress into the underworld, venturing within, and wresting ancient treasures from the claws and teeth of the terrors that dwell there. It is extremely, extremely dangerous, but groups often do emerge with fortunes equivalent to the risks. It is not at all uncommon for a group of youths to hit lucky, and retire for life after a single delve. As such, 'undergrounding' is an evergreen sirensong for young men and women who believe themselves possessing of mettle.
8. Paper Men. A particular brand of merchant/adventurer who travels into the deep South with paper, to trade with the mentats for sugar. Southern Sugar is such an absurdly expensive trade good that you can make good money as a Paper Man very quickly, but you also paint a huge target on your back for thieves along the route. Small and terrible wars are fought by desperate people along the coasts and the interior roads, and various gangs and criminal groups do their best to extort and control the trade. It is, famously, safer to make a modest living selling gear to the hopefuls making the trip. 
9. Field Research. The academics of the capital are often need adventurers to accompany them on research trips - this can be into the earth, to the extreme edges of the world, off into dream, or anywhere that catches the questing, restless minds of those great seats of learning. Undergraduates generally do not have the funding to hire more experienced mercenaries, and many adventuring parties born from the field research of a successful graduate thesis. 
10. Dream Partisan. The Dreamlands hold many competing factions, and many dangers. Sensitive young adventurers might travel there regularly and acquire information, favours, and prestige in that realm, which can in turn be sold on or used as bartering chips in the waking world. Groups of dreamers are stereotyped as desperate addicts in Baronial society, but their services are in constant demand by the powers that be.
11. Whaling. The Western islanders are famously slow to trust, but they do occasionally take on outsiders who are able to prove themselves competent and reliable. Whaling can make you a fortune quickly, and monster-slaying is itself a route to a comfortable life in islander society. Many Baronials 'go native' on the Lantern Berth and never return to the mainland. 
12. Drifter. Not what you might think - a 'drifter' in Baronial parlance is someone who finds themselves in the strange, hazy, gravitational orbit of the White City, and who slowly finds themselves moving northwards with vague plans of acquiring citizenship there. Drifting is not a job; it's more like a pilgrimage. Drifters are a bit like dreamers. They take what work they can to feed themselves, and they head further north. Most of them travel by ship, but there are those who take the mountain passes instead, often for lack of money to pay the fare. Drifters often coalesce into small, armed bands, and are famously prone to banditry and murder on the roads. They are not hated per se, but they are distrusted in most Baronial settlements. Some of them receive tuition in the city and its customs from the citizens that man the way-stations along the route, and they are famous for playing halting rounds of 'the game' with one another as they walk, hoping to be fluent by the time they reach their destination. Drifters who do arrive nearly universally end up in the White City military, trading years of service for the citizenship that they so covet.