At Their Feet

You have always paid particular attention to feet: bare or adorned, pampered or callused, resting beneath a table or carrying someone across half of Erosia. What began as attraction became familiarity. You learned to recognize the differences between a dancer’s feet and a laborer’s, the wear left by a long journey, the quality of a cobbler’s work and the subtle ways injury, exhaustion and habit change a person’s stride.

Work with your GM to determine how your fascination shaped your life. Perhaps you apprenticed to a cobbler, fitted footwear for wealthy clients, tended travelers in a bathhouse or served someone for whom washing and adorning the feet was an intimate ritual. Perhaps you collected rare slippers, stockings and foot jewelry, followed dancers from city to city, or simply became very good at noticing the tracks everyone else walked past.

Skill Proficiencies: Investigation, Survival

Tool Proficiencies: Cobbler’s tools

Languages: One of your choice

Equipment: A well-maintained pair of boots or shoes, cobbler’s tools, a treasured piece of footwear or foot adornment from someone significant to you, a small cloth and vial of scented oil for cleaning and care, a set of common clothes, and a pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Read the Step

Years spent studying feet, footwear and gait have taught you to recognize details others overlook. When examining footprints, footwear or a person’s manner of walking, you can usually determine useful mundane details such as the general type of footwear involved, whether the traveler was hurried, heavily burdened, injured or unusually fatigued, and whether multiple tracks were likely made by the same individual.

You can also recognize the characteristic gait of someone you know well, even when their face or clothing is concealed, provided you can clearly observe them walking.