Trades and Vocations

Although the average adventurer might say that they seek their fortune, it is more often glory that moves them to face terrible perils, stand up against monsters, and uncover lost mysteries. This is convenient, as adventuring can be a costly endeavour, and most monsters seem to leave their coin purses at home. More than one aspiring adventurer has learned that to pursue their passion, they must first undertake a far more dangerous quest.
Getting a day job.

• Ella Applebottom, An Adventurer’s Guide to Getting Started (2008 A.T.)

Swords, healing elixirs, magical spells, and the costs of travel all take coin to purchase and maintain, and even a town filled with adventurers needs skilled craftspeople, merchants and labourers. Having a diverse skill set can also help adventurers decode uncovered writings, track the movements of a quarry, and find the secret compartment at the bottom of a treasure chest. The most common ways to earn that money (and diversify that resume) are as follows.

Labourer

The labourers of the Lakes Region farm the food, mine the ore, watch the herd, chop the lumber, sail the ships, and perform the different and varied tasks required to make a society work from a services and raw materials standpoint. Most of these tasks are thankless, work-intensive, and take great physical effort. Still, those community members who dedicate themselves to these vocations make honest pay for honest work, and have been known to be able to perform great feats of physical strength, or to be able to push through exhaustion to complete some time-sensitive job – both abilities that some adventurers have been known to cherish.

Craftsman

The craftspeople of the Lakes Region serve much as the counterparts to the labourers; they cook the food, smith the steel, spin the wool, build the furniture, outfit the fleet, and perform the different and varied tasks that take raw materials and make them useful. Adventurers on the march will often find much to appreciate in a well-made meal, to say nothing of all the finished goods that they use outside of arms and armour. Skilled craftsmen have an artisan’s eye for spotting the unusual, and some can search more quickly for items of interest – while others have learned to kludge together damaged equipment to get just a little more service out of broken goods.

Alchemist

While not every town on the road will have an alchemist, most every road will have a town on it that has one. Alchemists combine minerals, oils and acids and create mixtures that grease, glue, burn, freeze, explode, and provide a variety of sundry effects needed only occasionally by the majority of the population. To an adventurer, an alchemist’s workshop is a treasure trove of useful goods that meet the unusual needs of that demographic, especially since skilled alchemists can create suspensions that hold magical effects as potions and oils. While anyone can use the goods an alchemist creates, skilled alchemists can apply the products of their craft more swiftly – and while it usually takes an alchemist hours or even days to brew up a mixture, the most skilled can make something ready now, but with a short shelf life.

Armour Smith

If armour is doing its job, it is stopping you from getting injured by getting hit instead. Taking all of that damage, you might need an armour smith to patch it up, or to provide you with some fresh armour! Armour smiths work primarily in cloth, steel and leather to create shields and armour, as well as to repair damaged pieces of armour, and most communities have a smith who at least knows the basics. True masters of the art can use exotic metals and materials to create armour with unusual or even mystical properties. Some can refit armour in the middle of a fight – and rarer still, others can ensure that armour that has been badly damaged still provides some measure of protection.

Herbalist

While most communities have someone within them who claims to have a knowing of herbs, many such ‘experts’ offer poultices plucked seemingly at random from the roadside, salves that cause as many rashes as they cure, and elixirs that do nothing at all – if you’re lucky! True herbalists are a little more rare, but can capably make medicines, poisons, and tonics that provide vim and vigour out of select herbs and the glands of animals and insects. In addition to creating elixirs that can hold magic as a potion, master herbalists can also carefully but quickly apply the product of their labour to those in need, or mix a concoction that would take days to create in a fraction of the time.

Mechanic

Prone to tinkering and experimenting, mechanics are more commonly found in larger communities that have greater need for locks and traps. Masters of mechanisms, mechanics can build anything from simple snares to elaborate siege engines, and it’s often handy to have one around to call upon if you accidentally lock yourself out of your home. Capable of unfastening locks, mechanics also tend to have a light touch when setting or disarming traps, a capability that makes their services much in demand by adventurers exploring old ruins. With a learned sixth sense for evading danger, some mechanics can get out of the way of traps before being skewered by them, while others can ensure that a door or lid that’s supposed to stay shut does so even against the monsters hammering on the outside.

Merchant

Whether they be travelling peddlers or general goods shopkeepers, the merchants of the Lakes Region help to keep trade moving. Most towns, if they are not large enough to maintain a shopkeeper of their own, are happy to see one come to town, offering goods that the settlement cannot create for themselves (or which would be impractical for the purpose). Although merchants may become wealthy selling goods to customers indeed, most merchants must then turn their liquid funds into new goods, and the cycle begins anew. Capable merchants develop a sense for where goods worth having are located that borders on the supernatural – master merchants become resistant to spells meant to sway their judgment and cadge discounts.

Physician

Most towns will have a learned or wise member of their community that has studied the healing arts of the physician. Even communities with reliable access to magical healing benefit from having a physician around, as the physician’s diagnostic eye can spot illnesses before they fully take hold, use their chirurgeon’s skills to mend even grievous wounds, and to examine the dead – to determine the cause of the fatal injury, as well as what may have led to it. Skilled physicians can use their knowledge of medicine to administer remedies with practised ease, and to delay the onset of poisons and illnesses, to better position themselves to provide a more lasting cure.

Weapon Smith

If an armed society is a polite society, then weapon smiths are merchants of manners. Most towns will have someone capable of creating at least rudimentary weapons, to drive off predators and keep the local militia well stocked in anticipation of need. Master weapon smiths create weapons of legend, able to swing harder and cut deeper, but while many flock to large cities, it is just as likely to find one in a remote community, sought out by those seeking such a legend. Adept weapon smiths learn the ins and outs of their own weapons in use, and are harder to disarm owing to that greater familiarity; master weapon smiths can temporarily coat a weapon with a prepared solution, to make it better able to injure creatures with specific vulnerabilities.

The Clergy

While not tradespeople in the traditional sense, invested clerics may provide the services of their faith in service to their cause, with the funds going to their local church. Giving blessings, offering services, working small miracles, and providing ecclesiastic advice earns reasonable donations from an appreciative populace, an effect increased when there is a church or temple in clear need of maintenance. While the money brought in by a cleric belongs to their parent organization, it is a churlish church indeed that fails to provide for the faithful that serve them in this way.

Authored by: Andrew Dunlop
Fantasy Alive Lore Team 2026
Copyright © Endless Adventures Ontario