Editing Norrathians: Character Creation (section)

===Level and Multiclassing===

All characters will start at level 1.  Multiclassing is allowed, however, once your character gains his or her first level in a class, the following 3 levels must be of the same class.  Only after gaining 4 levels in a class will your character be ready to start learning a new path.  If for some reason, your character tries to (or is forced to) switch to advancing in a different class after gaining less than 4 levels in her current class, she loses those levels.  

All levels may be gained in any class, restricted only by your character’s ability to gain acceptance in the guilds which train members of the desired class.  Your starting class is dependant on your race, because in order to join one of the larger guilds, your character must be welcome within their ranks.  However, if you want to play against type and play a character who starts off as a class not normally available to that race, it will be considered as long as it can be justified.

This justification is accomplished by altering some of the setting’s lore.  You can’t alter the main cities of the game (for instance, by creating a magician’s guild in Rivervale), but you can create other sources of class training.  This will require quite a bit of work on your part, because you will need to create a location and NPCs which will allow your character to train in a normally disallowed class.  Even after all this work, there will be a limit to the number of levels that can be trained thus.

For example, Shannon wants to play an erudite warrior.  Obviously her character won’t have been training as a warrior in Erudin; there are no formal warrior trainers in the city, and she has far better opportunities available to her here.  So, Shannon decides that her character will be from another place.  She then creates a tiny village out on the Grand Plateau that’s so insignificant that only a few people even know that someone’s named it.  Here Shannon’s character grew up as the adopted daughter of a human family of farmers.  The mother in this family was once a prominent member of the Steel Warriors in Qeynos, and decides that her adopted daughter is going to be capable of handling herself in a fight.  So, she spends her childhood being trained as a warrior, and eventually leaves to see the world as an adventurer.

Shannon’s character could take the racial tradition inherited alliance to make it easier for the Steel Warriors of Qeynos to accept her, so that once she is level 10 and her mother can no longer teach her anything new, she can travel to Qeynos to continue her training.
This is all that is required to request GM approval.  However, if this idea is acceptable, Shannon still needs to flesh out the village by making a map, writing up some NPCs to populate it, and describing some history about the place.  It needs to be fully usable as a game world location, because her character will be returning there, perhaps with her allies, in the future.  And, this is all in addition to the 4x4 information required for the character.