#civilian-student (一般人·學生)

Contents

Authority. The set rules of this document are a variant rule (Variant). As with every variant rule in this volume, it is premised on GM permission — each set is a separate unit of permission — and fc cannot override co Canon. This set follows, exactly as they are, the 5 components of makeup and the document format fixed by the Set Overview. The cards and numbers of the starting drifted goods are narrow Canon (canon limited to this volume), the Scent and fragments are Fiction-Only, and the Table Hooks are a Scene Tool.

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#Scent — The One Who Was Nothing

#Opening Fragment — Have You Eaten

When he came up out of the underground passage, the city was gone.

It was the road he always walked, having finished his dawn part-time shift and hating to wait for the first bus. Climbing the stairs, he should have seen the bus stop, and beyond it the sign of a convenience store. But at the top of the stairs was a paddy ridge sunk in fog. The young man looked back three times, and all three times — the stairs he had come down were gone.

He took out his phone. Out of range. Only time flowed on, faithfully. Battery sixty-two.

"...A dream. It has to be a dream."

He sat on the paddy ridge until the sun rose. The sun rose. The dream did not break. Toward the far side where smoke was rising, the young man walked.

The first to see him at the village edge were the children. Setting down the pole they had been knocking persimmons with, they stared up at the man in clothes they had never seen. They did not run. Children believe faster than grown-ups.

"Mister, where'd you come from?"

"...Seoul."

"Seuru?"

Just then the smallest child tripped on a stone and fell. His knee was scraped and showed blood, and he drew in the breath that comes just before crying. The young man crouched down and rummaged through his bag before he thought. It was something he had always done — exactly that much, no more, the way he had for a little customer who fell in front of the convenience store.

"I'll make it not hurt. Just a moment."

He wiped it with a wet wipe and put on a bandage. It was a bandage with a yellow chick drawn on it. The child who had been holding back his tears looked down at the chick on his own knee, and the other children pressed their heads together and gathered round. "A picture got stuck on." "A picture got stuck on the hurt place."

When the grown-ups came, the young man was tearing open a bag of snacks, still surrounded by children. The hands gripping hoes had gone stiff. The man at the very front asked.

"Of where are you."

"That is... even if I told you, you would not understand."

"What were you, that you did."

"At a shop that sells things, at night... I rang up the sales, tidied up..." Even as he spoke, the young man knew how much of nothing that was. "Just, a student. On a little break."

The man's brow narrowed. A spy, or a madman — it was the face of one doing that reckoning. Just then a bent-backed old woman pushed through the people and came out. The old woman looked in turn at the young man's clothes, at the chick on the child's knee, at the hands of the children sharing the snacks.

"It is a Kamikakushi," the old woman said. "One the spirits hid away and gave back."

And then she asked the young man. "Have you eaten."

At those words tears suddenly poured from the young man's eyes. He himself was the most surprised. For the first time in crossing four hundred years — because it was a thing he had understood to the very end.

#Scent — Having No Special Skill Is the Special Skill

The fragment above is a record of a different drifting from this volume's sample party — the people of the night bus (sample characters). The Kamikakushi is not one event but one phenomenon. The gate opened many times, in many places, and each time it was not soldiers or doctors alone who fell through. If there were statistics, it would rather be this side that is the majority — office workers, students, part-timers. People who are nothing.

The other five sets come across bearing an answer to give to the question "what kind of hands were you." The civilian is empty-handed before that question. And yet a strange thing happens — what makes the barrier-keeper draw back his spear is the nurse's hand-work, but what makes the village make a place at the table is the empty-handed side. The Self-Defense Officer's shoulders are fearsome, the scholar's words are suspect. But the ordinary hands that crouch before a fallen child are, to the people of this age, the face easiest to understand. At the village edge the children see first — exactly as the table of Handling Arrival writes.

So this set is the thinnest of the six sets, and that thinness is its body. Written in one line, the set is this. One who is nothing. And so one who can become anything. If there is a PL who sat at the table with only the canonical modern person and no set, that character is already this set's neighbor — this document is also a mirror for such a table.

And here the spine of this volume rings most strangely. This book is not a book that makes the modern person strong. It is a book that gives the drama of a future being consumed. The other sets live the drama of a former occupation (前職) wearing away to nothing. The civilian does not even have a former occupation to wear away — what they consume is only the things in the backpack, and the memory of the days they were "just a student." The other five sets wear down into ordinary people. The civilian starts there.

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#Set Data — The Five Components

The frame of Set Overview Law 1, exactly as it is. The five components — there is no item beyond them.

#Component 1 — Starting-Ability Adjustment: The Smallest Replacement

Of the canonical modern person's four starting automatic abilities — Stratagem acquisition, Medicine entry, Negotiation entry, Perception entry — this set changes only a single one.

Medicine entry → Disguise entry. Grade preserved (entry→entry), no ability-score increase, Licensed (3) cap — all exactly as in Set Overview Component 1.

The reason there is only one replacement is simple — because the canonical modern person's starting-ability list is itself the list of ordinary modern education. Stratagem is the reckoning and analysis that school and visual media planted, Negotiation is the memory of haggling and interviews, and Perception is the feeler of one who survived in the city. The civilian is closest to the prototype of that list. Only, the CPR learned in health class does not remain in the hands — what remains instead is the craft tempered by the school uniform, the interview suit, and the customer-service smile. A body that knows which line to stand in to go unnoticed. That is Disguise. What this ability becomes in this age is seen in §Friction with the Era.

#Component 2 — Set Technique: Living Wisdom and Read for the Room

If the techniques of the other sets are narrow and deep, the civilian's techniques are broad and shallow. 1 each at tier 1 and tier 3 — from tier 5 on they merge into the technique list of the canonical modern person.

[aptitude] Living Wisdom (生活の知恵) — tier 1 (chosen instead of canon "Foresight")
Effect: A bundle of broad, shallow life skills. Constant effects:
 - Hands of Housekeeping: +2 to non-combat checks in the "household chores" category of
  cooking, laundry, mending, reckoning, cleaning, packing, and the like.
 - Sense for Going Rates: 1 time per scene, you may ask the GM for "an estimate of this age's
  price" of goods and wages. The answer is a starting point for haggling, not the right answer.
 - Thrift: 1 time per interlude, ignore 1 of the [Depletion] decrease attached to the party's
  food and life consumables (cannot be used on firearm ammunition, medicine, electronics, or fuel).
Caution: All of "Foresight"'s historical-knowledge, Medicine, and yoma-negotiation bonuses are
 forfeited. Energy Transfer and the ability-score special are kept, being the skeleton of the
 occupation (Set Overview Law 2 — the canon-protection principle).

In place of one who knows the future, one who knows how to live today. The soldier's marksmanship runs out at sixty rounds and the doctor's antibiotics run out in three uses, but the hands that set rice to cook, that mend clothes, that balance the reckoning are not depleted — the one set technique in this volume that stands, from the start, on the side that does not wear down.

[aptitude] Read for the Room (機微) — tier 3 (chosen instead of the canon tier 3 choice)
Effect: Social scenes only (marketplace, banquet, barrier, negotiation, interrogation). Constant effects:
 - Sense the Crisis: a breath before the malice in that place turns into action, the GM tells you —
  the drawn blade behind a smiling face, the poisoned cup at the banquet, the rigged haggle. +2 to
  the first check reacting to that warning.
 - Read the Mood: 1 time per scene, ignore the situational penalty taken for a slip in rank or etiquette.
  The slip is not made un-happened — there is only the gap to lower one's head before the blade is drawn.
Caution: It does not get involved in surprise attacks or ambushes on the battlefield — that is the
 domain of the general technique "Danger Sense." Read for the Room is the craft of reading the air
 before the blade.

Half a beat before the troublesome customer's voice rises, the moment the air in the staff room changes — the civilian has learned that sense with no tuition. At the banquet seat of this age, that sense earns its worth in lives.

Both techniques are a choice instead of, not an addition. And exactly as declared in Set Overview Law 2 — this set adds no bonus to attack checks in any form.

#Component 3 — Starting Drifted Goods: One Backpack, One Weekday's Worth

The one-backpack principle. The civilian's backpack holds no mission gear and no house-call bag — it holds only one weekday's worth of the everyday. To the two fixed items, roll the d10 table inside the bag twice (you may roll or choose. If they overlap, roll again).

• smartphone [Depletion 4·Clock] — the civilian is the representative user of the electronics cards. The out-of-range screen, the photo album, the flashlight, and all the rules tangled up with the lens — the full card is over there.
• wallet — the card below. The emotional prop of this set, on which not even [Depletion] is attached.
• everyday goods in the bag — 2 from the d10 table below.

#Everyday Goods in the Bag (d10)

The table above is abridged — the category is all equipment and supplies, the effect is in the range of common sense (GM's discretion), and the degradation is the default. The full cards for items that need an effect field (power bank, painkillers, and so on) are carried in Electronics and Equipment and Supplies, and those take precedence. The starting remaining count can be adjusted with the §Operation Dial of the Depletion System.

#Component 4 — Conflict Hook

Two made concrete from the civilian's viewpoint, out of the canonical modern person's list of Three Ways and Six Hearts conflicts. They are not a new axis of conflict — they are a lens.

• "Why was it me" — a concretization of "the meaning of war." The battlefield of this age erases people every day. The Self-Defense Officer has a mission, the medical worker has patients — the occupation makes the reason they survived. The civilian has no such reason. They crossed over with no qualification, and they survive with no qualification. On the night they see, at the first battlefield, a nameless ashigaru fall in their place, this question strikes the Three Ways and Six Hearts head-on. If there are people who vanished alongside them — of the same school, of the same street — the question grows a layer heavier still. Where did they fall. Are they alive.
• "I just want to go home" — the purest bearer of "whether to return or to stay." The Self-Defense Officer has a return report and the scholar has a laboratory — even the return is attended by the occupation's justification. There is no justification in the civilian's motive to return. I want to see my mother. The bed in my room. Friday evening. Because there is no justification it is purest, and because it is pure it is strongest. At a table running a return campaign (GM Guide), the emotional center of that story is almost always this set's PC — because they are the only one who can answer "and what will you do once you go back" with "just, live the way I always did."

#Component 5 — Adaptation Variation: The Blank Page's Fast Path

The canon rules of the Adaptation mechanic are all as they are. The color this set paints is two lines — only, those two lines, in this set alone of the six, start as a blank page.

• Fast path — blank delegation. The fast path is not determined at character creation. The first official occupation borrowed by Adaptation is, in that instant, fixed as the fast path — from the first technique borrowed from that occupation, the same-occupation exemption applies (the canon, from the 2nd — Set Overview Component 5). Once fixed, it cannot be changed. The nurse to the healer-monk, the Self-Defense Officer to the samurai — the fast path of the other sets is a road set by the former occupation. The civilian's fast path is set by the person they met in this age. Whose hands did they watch the longest — that is the answer.
• Blocked path — agreement on the opposite pole. The instant the fast path is fixed, the PL and GM agree to set as the blocked path one official occupation whose hands are farthest from those of that occupation — if they chose the hands that save, the hands that kill; if they chose the hands that hide, the hands that lead. To borrow from that occupation, no exemption rule is applied, and the Energy penalty remains to the end. The saying that one can become anything is a saying that ends the moment one becomes something. Once the blank page begins to be stained with one color — it will, in the end, never reach the farthest color.

And a line of warning. The blank page stains fast — it stains fast with resignation, too. The canonical modern person's Three Ways and Six Hearts switching triggers are 2, and in this set, which of the six has no armor of occupational conviction, that bell rings most often. When the voice of a PC saying "this age was always like this" grows comfortable too quickly, the GM should ask once whether that adaptation is growth or wear. The rule does not change — only one more watching eye is needed.

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#Friction with the Era — A Place-Finding for One With No Standing

This age reckons people by their calling. The person of a warrior house, the person of a temple, the person of the paddy, the person of the guild (座). The civilian is on none of those ledgers — they have no house, no master, and above all no guarantor. What the barrier asks, what the inn asks, what the guild asks is always the same. "Who guarantees you." The civilian's first answer is silence, and so their first standing is outside the four ranks of warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant — outcaste.

To start as an outcaste is not a sentence of despair but the marking of a starting line. On the road there is the road's own custom — outcastes do not ask of one another. Not asking is the mercy. When, under some eave, a ronin makes half a hand's-breadth of room and a wandering performer shares a single bowl of soup, they do not ask of one's origin. To one taken by the Kamikakushi there is no etiquette more grateful than this — the civilian's first community is, with high probability, people from outside the world's fences.

And the ladder begins there. A season of farmhand service, a season as a peddler's porter, a year of help at a teahouse. "Living Wisdom" earns the worth of a wage, "Read for the Room" lets them dodge the blade of the old-timers' turf, and Disguise — a body that knows which line to stand in to go unnoticed — makes them, before long, seem "that house's hired hand." This is the craft that, of the six sets, neither soldier nor scholar can imitate. The craft of vanishing. The Self-Defense Officer, stand in whatever marketplace, looks like a Self-Defense Officer. The civilian, in three months, looks like a person of that neighborhood.

Friction is not a penalty but the material of a scene — the story of seeking a guarantor, the story of receiving a first wage, the story of answering, for the first time, the question of what one was, that one did, with "I do the work of this house." The road to earning that one line of answer is this set's first campaign.

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#Growth Curve — The Worth of the Saying That One Can Become Anything

First, draw the line of data. This set opens neither a former occupation nor a dual build. The choice-instead principle of the canonical growth system — an Adaptation-using occupation cannot use a dual build — is as it is, and the occupation field of the sheet says modern person to the very end. What is written below is not data but narrative — exactly in the wording of Set Overview Law 3, that the end of accelerated Adaptation looks like "in effect a new occupation" is a matter of the story, not a matter of the rule.

• tier 1 to 3 — the enduring hands. The period of buying a day with Living Wisdom and buying a life with Read for the Room. The [Depletion] in the backpack falls silent one by one, and the first winter passes under the eave of an outcaste. The civilian of this period is the weakest PC in this volume — and also the PC with the least to lose.
• around tier 5 — the first staining. The first Adaptation slot, the first borrowing, the fixing of the fast path. While the other sets live the shadow of a former occupation — while the Self-Defense Officer's gun heads toward silence (Self-Defense Officer), while the medical worker's medicine box empties — the civilian alone chooses an occupation in this age. It is the one set of the six that adapts not toward the past but toward the future. The GM should handle this first borrowing not as a check on the sheet but as a scene — whose hands did they learn by stealing glances over the shoulder, and did that person know it.
• tier 7 to 9 — the period of being given a name. The borrowed techniques form a single outline, and the villagers begin to call them by a calling. One who learned the hands of a healer-monk becomes "teacher," one who learned a merchant's reckoning becomes "manager." The terminus of accelerated Adaptation is — though on the ledger a modern person to the end — in effect a new occupation. Only, that "occupation" is written not on the character sheet but in the mouths of the villagers. That is the one former occupation this volume permits, and perhaps the best former occupation.
• at the end of it — naturalization (歸化). The backpack is empty, and the hands know the work of this age. At the end of Depletion the Kamikakushi returns to the canon, the Depletion System wrote — the civilian is the fastest proof of that sentence. For as little future as there was to lose, the road to becoming a person of this age is short too. Whether to read that as victory or as loss is the table's share.

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#Table Hooks (Scene Tool)

Of a size a GM can pick up and use on the spot, three.

• "The Same Uniform" — a peddler's word that he saw, in the marketplace of a neighboring domain, a child wearing the same school uniform. A real classmate, or a single uniform sold off, or the bait of a yoma that remembers the scent of time — whichever the answer, the question of "Why was it me" unravels onto the road. What the PC seeks at the end of the search is not a person but the proof that they are not alone.
• "The Worth of a Single Sheet of Paper" — the appraiser of the Sakai Guild has caught sight of the bills in the wallet. "This printing — sell it, won't you. I will give you your asking price." A precision no woodblock of this age could imitate — the guild wants the paper as a sample, the scholar as research material, the forger as a master. The problem is one. It is the last physical proof, remaining to the PC, of the world they lived in.
• "The Wisdom of the Well" — a bellyache is going around the village they stayed in. "Boil your water before you drink, and wash your hands" — one line of the civilian's common sense saves the village, and the rumor swells and reaches the ear of the lord. On the day a summons comes down for "the wise one who governs the plague," the PC chooses — to play the extraordinary, or to confess to the ordinary. Either way, one medicine-peddler of the marketplace begins to keep watch on the one who threatens his own livelihood.

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Only the one empty-handed before the question "what kind of hands were you" — receives the question "what kind of hands will you become."