WFRP 1e and 2e careers: The Herbalist

 The Herbalist is one of the best non-combat orientated careers in 1e in my opinion. It has lots of relevant skills but not many advances, so you can quickly move on to a more powered-up career with all of those useful skills in the bag. One of the apparent main influences on WFRP, Maelstrom, has a really iconic Herbalist career and something of that seems to survive. All that said, there are a couple of things in the 1e career that we could discuss:

Skills: Arcane Language – Druidic, Cure Disease, Heal Wounds, Herb Lore, Identify Plant, Read/Write, Secret Language – Classical, Secret Language – Guilder, 20% chance of Prepare Poisons

 

 

The skills seam reasonable and useful. The only thing that we might have a look at are the language requirements, and even perhaps the Read/Write skill. Depending upon how we conceptualize the career, we might want a rural Herbalist in the Old World to be illiterate, having learned everything via 'lore'. And the actual skills give some support to this concept: if Arcane Language - Druidic is a definite career skill, then we can think that in-setting the Herbalist is the common repository of ancient healing wisdom, which in this world happens to be reasonably efficacious. What we might consider is giving the Herbalist the Secret Signs - Druid skill, as a way of encapsulating that 'ancient lore' without enforcing literacy. The literacy skills can then be included as random extras.

One weakness is that the only way of entering is via the random roll method, and the only exit is to Druid (which is especially restricting given that Druids are limited to Human characters). Potentially we could expand this to include Initiate (Taal, Rhya, Shallya and Verena all seem viable choices), Wizard's Apprentice (perhaps thinking about this as a route towards Elementalist), Pedlar and Trader (getting more involved in the selling side) and Charlatan (more money in fake stuff...). I think we could also make Druid, Initiate and Pedlar possible entry routes.

Perhaps surprisingly, Herbalist never made it into WFRP 2e. The Liber Fantatica writers thought that it should be converted into the Tradesman 2e container career which is a reasonable choice given the options available. What this does is give our Herbalist concept character some additional skills which seem only somewhat relevant to the original concept:

So our Herbalist would lose the arcane and secret language, the 'lore' side of the character, but gain Drive, Haggle, Evaluate, and some of Animal Care, Gossip, Dealmaker and Savvy (remembering that Perception doesn't really have an equivalent skill in 1e). It is essentially a much more commerce-orientated character. I think this is defensible, but I prefer the concept of the 1e character more. So maybe:

 

Incidentally, 'Evaluate' in WFRP is an insanely over-powered skill, in a similar vein to Heal Wounds. It really does encapsulate vast amounts of disparate knowledge into one skill in a way that if it were taken seriously, would have the most incredible real world effects. Anyone who had Evaluate skill could basically trade anything for the correct price (or better, from their POV). Removing that kind of uncertainty from trade would make it a very, very different world from anything we are aware of. Still, it probably isn't actually going to matter too much from a game point of view, unless some pesky players really want to be the Old World's first hedgies...