Culture based Item Packs

A quick way to provide starting gear to your character

Everytime I start a new campaign with new and excited players their energy gets fended off all the time at the same point. After creating most of their character, they reach the section in which they get to pick their equipment and have to gear up. They often come to me looking for directions regarding how to determine their wealth, and how they can spend their few Dinars, and soon realize they don’t really have a lot they can do with them. And they don’t have so much they can choose for bringing out the colors of the setting they have just read pages and pages off.

Thats how I thought about Item Packs. Item packs are for me a way to 1) speed up the equipment selection stage; 2) give player characters equipment specific to the initial setup we are playing in; 3) don’t impact their wealth as much as with the normal creation

I wanna touch a bit more on point 3) before proceeding with the gear packs. The monetary resources offered by the rules are only in rare cases enough to support the buying of all the basic equipment an already established characters would need or presumably have in its possession. The formula ( Resources + Ranks ) times Cult Modifers is useful to establish someones starting riches ( or to determine how much they earn after some weeks or a month doing standard cultist routine work), but any Draft is quickly burned right at the start, leaving (in my experience) all players to play a character that ends up without a single coin in their pouches. They look more like vagabond adventurers looking for money, rather then cultists with an established position in this world

(It is fair to say that it is a player’s own decision to spend all its starting money on some equipment, but it is most of the time the right choice. The only exception are African cuklts which have such a high monetary modifier to allow them to get everything they need, and keep something else for the future)

The gear provided by the Rank is awesome, obviously, but almost never includes basic survival gear or object of common daily usage. For this reason, I have thought of a way to provide characters with something more mondane, and take what already is common in many other games (such as OSRs) and conveniently pack them already altogheter to remove useless page browsing time. Additionally, they can be a useful way to characterize the gear in possess of casual wanderer/clanners/inhabitants of a given culture

RULES
An Item pack is a short list of items any character starts with. They are for free, and a character only has one. There are 7 item packs, one for each culture. Depending on the geographic region where the game is set, the character will start with that item pack. If they are of a different culture than the one the game is set in, they may choose to take that item pack instead.

BORCA: Scarf mask, long coat, heavy blanket, pair of fingerless gloves, cheap metal flask, a box of matches, dry food for two days, rolled bundle of chronicler’s draft (+20)

FRANKA: Breathing cloth, insect net, pair of decent swamp boots, knife, two vial of anti-insect scent perfume, a backpack, three torches, dry food for two days

POLLEN: Fur cloak with hoodie, heavy blanket, a bone or metal spiritual talisman, fur gloves, simple snow boots, a backpack, 10 m rope, breathing cloth, one Bion burn cusp

BALKHAN: Fur cloak, heavy blanket, knife, family jewels, cheap metal flask with spirit, a Balkhani Harp (Artifact), 10 m rope, dry food for two days

HYBRISPANIA: Bandana, knife, backpack, whistle, two bandages, three torches, dry food for two days, d6 5.56x45mm ammos, pouch of dinars (+10)

PURGARE: Heavy brown cape, family jewels, breathing cloth, a backpack, vial of oil, a bandage, cheap metal flask, three torches, dry food for two days

AFRICA: Light color cape, jewels, bone or metal ancestor’s talisman, backpack, 10m rope, d6 mixed ammos, dry food for two days

Mixed Ammo (d6 type): 1 - .357 2 - Lead 3 - 9 mm 4 or 5 - 5.56x45 6 - .50GL