What are some interesting or unexpected careers that you've used as the backstories for your characters?

What are some interesting or unexpected careers that you've used as the backstories for your characters?

Pic vaguely related, imagine a tax collector becoming the party Fighter.

but if you swing that sword, won't the little abacus parts make you lose your place?

Not if it's enchanted to automatically track kills

why would you track kills with that? I thought you'd use it to keep track of the fees your employers owe you or something

Because you're renting it from a stingy wizard

That sword is silly as hell but I did once run a game where the God of Commerce was forced to personally take the field and I'm gonna lift this if I ever go back to that setting.

One of the oddest was probably my character who was a mundane exterminator. He would fumigate and poison rats.

The way he got into the adventuring business was after mobsters started asking him to brew poison for humans (he was a very famous pest exterminator). Then things went from bad to worse and he had to flee.

I was the party alchemist.

Its owned by the employer, it magically keeps track of how many targets you have killed

then what's the point of being a former tax collector?

grumpy punk rocker sold ciggerates on a cyberpunk street corner for 20 years, wound up rescuing people from sewer terminators with an AK-47 and starting a band after converting it into a guitar

I had a decker who, before he got into decking, was a gold farmer. It wasn't until his dad got lost in the last Matrix crash that he seriously considered getting out of the business, and getting away from the Triad gangs that ran it behind the scenes.

Wizard who used to be a gravedigger. Rowdy peasants from nearby villages kept accusing him of necromancy, to the point where he was kicked out of town for everyone else's sake. He went eh, fuck it and started looking through his granddad's old tomes and learned some magic.
Spent a few years chasing bounties and hunting necromancers before meeting with the party.

He's now a High Lord.

STABACUS

Autistic Gnome Drug Cook-Alchemist

Playing Curse of the Crimson Throne. Background requires you to have grudge against a criminal. I decided that my Alchemist was an obsessive CN genius who obsessed over his alchemy, sort of a jittery Walter White. Got hired by local criminals to improve the quality of the drugs they made, and tried to kill him instead of continuing to pay him. Gnome wasn't angry about lack of payment, he was angry they didn't let him complete his work as he was obsessed with perfect alchemy (drugs, medicine, potions, ointments etc.) and the challenge involved in creating it. He was also angry they took credit for his work as it was his intellectual work not theirs.

I know people roll their eyes at the old CN character (and usually with good reason) he actually ended up one of our groups and my favorite characters. He wasn't CN because he was Lolrandumb, it was that he only cared for his alchemy and intellectual pursuit. Made for an interesting dynamic.

Spartabacus

Oh hey, you found my sword.

While I'm sure your character was cool as hell,
TEE HEE
TEE HEE
MACARONI
MACARONI

To evade taxes.

Does a character need an interesting backstory? It usually feels like a waste, especially when the game's always in the present, not looking back at the past.

>that flavor text

what the fuck happened to Magic: the Gathering

Basically a dude who exorcises bad spirits and sends on ones that are lingering. He's hanging out with some weirdos at the moment who don't get it though, and he's sure the lizardwoman is going to die from a haunting.

Fuck now you've ruined him for me, thanks user.