The Inner Sphere of the Starfall Galaxy is a monument to density. Ecumenopolises stretch across entire worlds—vertical cities climbing toward orbit, where billions of souls move through transit tubes, market plazas, and factory shifts in an endless current of survival. To the untrained eye, it's chaos. To you, it's home.
You are a City Slicker, forged in the neon canyons and alloy warrens where anonymity is armor and attention is death. You learned early that the best way to survive megacities wasn't to fight the crowd—it was to become it. You know which transit lines cycle fastest, which market corners belong to which syndicates, and exactly how to dress, walk, and breathe to telegraph "I belong here" without ever saying a word.
Maybe you grew up on Vastar's grav-defying arcologies, where entire neighborhoods hang suspended in mid-air and a wrong turn means a hundred-story drop. Maybe you were raised in the rust-belt transit hubs of the Asenobi Dynasty's fief worlds, dodging labor press-gangs and corporate security sweeps. Or perhaps you scavenged the orbital slums of the Vlaan Yards, where decommissioned hulls became tenement blocks and every corridor had three names depending on who controlled it that shift.
Wherever you came from, you learned the first rule of urban survival: don't stand out.
Signature Customs
Adaptive Fashion: City Slickers are masters of costume—not disguise kits, but mood reading. You own three jackets, six scarves, and a rotating set of badges and pins that signal allegiance to whichever district, guild, or neighborhood watch you need to pass through. The goal isn't to look rich or tough; it's to look like you have somewhere to be.
The Ghost Walk: A practiced gait that matches the rhythm of foot traffic around you. Too fast, and you're suspicious. Too slow, and you're a mark. City Slickers walk like they own the block but never own anything—always just passing through.
Transit Mapping: You maintain mental (or augmented) maps of every shortcut, maintenance hatch, and "forgotten" corridor in your home city. When the crowds panic or security locks down a sector, you know five ways out that don't appear on official schematics.
City Slicker Background
Source Player Core pg. 93
You've lived long enough in a major settlement to know how to keep your head down, avoid direct eye contact, and otherwise move about your day without drawing any attention to yourself. Whether you were a detective tailing a suspect or just lived in a crime-ridden neighborhood, you've always been able to slip into a crowd to avoid causing trouble.
Choose two attribute boosts. One must be to Dexterity or Charisma, and one is a free attribute boost.
You're trained in the Deception skill, and a Lore skill about a specific settlement. You gain the Face in the Crowd skill feat.
Non-Combat Applications
Crowd Dynamics: You can predict how a plaza will flow during shift changes, festivals, or riots. This makes you invaluable for planning escapes, staging diversions, or predicting where authorities will funnel suspects during lockdowns.
Local Fixer Network: Your settlement Lore isn't just trivia—it's relationships. You know which block captains owe favors, which food cart vendors front for smugglers, and which transit authority clerks will "lose" footage for the right price.
Identity Tailoring: With your Deception training and Face in the Crowd feat, you can shift personas on the fly—not with prosthetics or holograms, but by changing your posture, accent, and the context clues you project. One moment you're a tired dock worker; the next, a mid-level corporate auditor running late for a meeting.
Societal Impact
City Slickers are the invisible infrastructure of the Inner Sphere's megacities. They move messages for resistance cells, courier packages for black markets, and guide refugees through checkpoints without ever appearing on a security roster. Governments view them with suspicion—anyone that good at disappearing is a potential saboteur, insurgent, or spy.
At the same time, megacorps and guilds quietly recruit City Slickers as "community liaisons" and "street-level consultants." After all, no algorithm can predict crowd behavior like someone who's spent a lifetime reading it. The Commission itself employs a shadow network of Slickers to monitor unrest, identify brewing riots before they ignite, and ensure vital transit nodes stay functional during crises.
In the lawless sprawl districts—those neighborhoods too poor, too broken, or too far from core infrastructure to merit official attention—City Slickers become de facto civic leaders. They organize food distribution during Dei shortages, arbitrate disputes between gangs, and run underground schools in condemned arcology levels.
Adventure Hooks
The Vanishing Act: A contact from your old neighborhood sends an encoded message: entire blocks of people are disappearing during routine security sweeps. The official story is "voluntary relocation to resource colonies," but you recognize the cordons—they're designed for abduction, not evacuation.
Transit Sabotage: Two rival factions are fighting for control of a critical maglev line that connects three industrial districts. Both sides want to hire you, because you mapped every maintenance hatch and sensor blind spot when you were fifteen. If the line goes down, millions starve.
The Crowd Prophet: You've started noticing patterns in crowd behavior that shouldn't exist—synchronized movements, mass hallucinations, entire plazas moving in lockstep like a single organism. Someone (or something) is using the crowds as a broadcast medium, and you're one of the few who can see the signal.
Variants
Arcology Diver: Specializes in vertical megastructures—knows how to navigate gravity-transition zones, identifies structural weak points, and can free-climb between levels using maintenance rigging.
Orbital Drift Rat: Grew up on overcrowded stations where "up" and "down" are suggestions. Expert at zero-G crowd maneuvering and reading the politics of pressurized compartments.
Undercity Navigator: Thrives in the forgotten sub-levels beneath official city grids—sewers, decommissioned transit, old Rift-era bunkers. You know the routes no one else remembers.
The City Slicker background is for characters who survived not by fighting the system, but by learning to move through it like water through stone—unseen, essential, and impossible to stop.
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