Charnel Thespian

You perform for audiences that don’t always breathe.

Somewhere between mortician and mime, you learned your craft in crypts, plague wards, gallows yards, and half-abandoned chapels. You dress the dead for their last appearances, give shape to grief through performance, and sometimes—if the Director wills it—step beyond the mortal script entirely.

Whether you remember every step of that journey or not, the role is burned into you: tragedy in greasepaint, comedy in a charnel house.

Skill Proficiencies: Performance, Religion – You’ve trained in stagecraft and funerary rites, performing for both the living and the dead.

Tool Proficiencies: Disguise kit, one type of artisan’s tools of your choice – You’re practiced in theatrical makeup and costuming, as well as the craft of building props, masks, or scripts.

Languages: One language of your choice – You’ve picked up the tongue of a culture whose dead or mourners you’ve served on the charnel stage.

Equipment:

You start with:

• A set of charnel stage clothes: funeral-appropriate but theatrical—black, white, and whatever accent color you like.

• A well-worn mask (Pierrot-style or other commedia archetype) that you’ve used in countless performances, some of them for the dead.

• A small, morbid stage prop (such as a palm-sized skull, a blood-stained handkerchief, a miniature coffin, or a bone-handled fan).

• A bundle of play pages and memorial scripts, some written in your own hand, some in a script you don’t remember writing.

• A disguise kit.

• A belt pouch containing 10 gp (or the equivalent in tarnished coins, theatre tokens, and funeral offerings).

Suggested Characteristics

d8	Personality Trait
1	I treat every room like a stage, even if my audience is just one corpse and a bored priest.
2	I am eerily calm around blood, bodies, and ghosts, but flustered by everyday small talk.
3	I gesture dramatically, then realize halfway through that no one else knows the choreography.
4	I write little notes and cue cards instead of speaking when words feel too heavy.
5	I keep my costume immaculate, even when everything else is falling apart.
6	I laugh at gallows humor more than is strictly decent.
7	I instinctively arrange fallen comrades into more dignified poses.
8	I hum funeral hymns and lullabies under my breath when I’m nervous.

d6	Ideal
1	Dignity. Everyone deserves a proper final act, no matter how ugly their life.
2	Art. Grief, horror, joy—if it moves the heart, it belongs onstage.
3	Mercy. I make the end a little easier to bear, for the living and the dead.
4	Truth. Death strips away lies; I’d rather face the ugly truth than a comforting fiction.
5	Fate. We’re all characters in a story; I just try to hit my marks.
6	Defiance. Death isn’t the end so long as someone remembers—or reenacts—the story.

d6	Bond
1	I owe my life (and afterlife) to the theatre that first took me in among its coffins.
2	A particular play, poem, or role defined my old life; I keep chasing it.
3	There’s one grave I always visit when I can. I talk to it as if they can hear.
4	My mask belonged to someone who died badly; I will give them the ending they deserved.
5	I once promised a dying person I’d see something done. That promise still guides me.
6	The troupe—living or dead—that I perform with is the only family I recognize as real.

d6	Flaw
1	I sometimes treat real people like characters, pushing them toward “better scenes” even when it hurts them.
2	I will walk into dangerous places just because the drama of it is irresistible.
3	I can’t refuse a request from the grieving, no matter how unwise.
4	I cling to the dead harder than to the living; they can’t abandon me again.
5	I catastrophize: every quiet moment feels like the calm before a tragedy.
6	I will happily unsettle or frighten people if it means they’ll remember me—and the performance.