You earn your living moving people, not cargo. While the Space Truckers haul freight and the Starship Dwellers live aboard generation ships, you operate in the chaotic veins of urban infrastructure—ground-level transit, orbital shuttles, atmospheric hoppers, and the thousand variations of "get in, sit down, and tell me where we're going."
You are a Taxi Driver, and you know your city (or station, or colony) better than the people who supposedly run it. You've memorized every shortcut, back-alley, service tunnel, and "technically legal if you don't get caught" flight path. You know which neighborhoods pay well and which ones are just looking for a free ride. You've seen the best and worst of sapient behavior in your back seat: deals made, hearts broken, crimes confessed, and the occasional passenger who forgot they were carrying something very illegal.
The Streets Are Your Office
Unlike long-haul haulers who spend Yoms in the void, your work happens in density—the crush of traffic, the pulse of shift changes, the rhythm of a city's daily cycle. You're part of the urban ecosystem, as essential as the power grid and just as invisible until something breaks down.
In Starfall, where time is currency and every Yom matters, your job is speed. Passengers don't just want to get somewhere—they need to arrive now, before the Commission hearing starts, before the Rift-gate closes its window, before their contact leaves the rendezvous. Your reputation lives or dies on reliability, discretion, and your ability to thread a hover-taxi through impossible traffic at velocities that would make safety inspectors weep.
Taxi Driver Background
Source Galaxy Guide pg. 101
You earn your living transporting people. You know the best shortcuts and scenic routes to any destination in your repertoire.
Choose two attribute boosts. One must be to Dexterity or Wisdom, and one is a free attribute boost.
You're trained in the Piloting skill, and a Lore skill related to a specific planet or settlement where you've worked. You gain the Express Driver skill feat.
Non-Combat Applications
Local Expert: Your settlement Lore isn't academic—it's operational. You know which transit authority clerks take bribes, which gang controls which block, and which streets flood during the artificial rain cycle. This makes you invaluable for navigation, social encounters, and understanding the real power structure beneath official authority.
Passenger Insight: Years of reading fares have given you an instinct for people. You can spot a runner from law enforcement, identify tourists ripe for overcharging (or protection), and recognize when someone's about to do something stupid in your cab. Your Wisdom boost supports this people-reading skill.
Vehicle Mastery: With Piloting training and Express Driver, you can handle any wheeled, tracked, or hovering conveyance. Ground cars, orbital shuttles, atmospheric craft—if it has controls and a throttle, you can drive it faster and smoother than the manual says is possible.
Societal Impact
Taxi Drivers occupy a liminal space in Starfall's urban hierarchy. You're working-class, but you interact with every social stratum. Corporate executives, undercity gang members, off-world diplomats, and desperate refugees all end up in your cab at some point.
This makes you a cultural broker—someone who translates between worlds that rarely speak directly. You know the executive who secretly visits the undercity gambling dens, the gang leader who funds orphanages, the diplomat with the addiction problem. You carry secrets, and smart people know not to underestimate someone who sees the city's real face every shift.
The Cab Confessional: There's something about being trapped in a moving vehicle that makes passengers talk. Lawyers discuss cases, criminals plan jobs, lovers plot betrayals—all within earshot of the driver they're barely aware exists. Some Taxi Drivers sell information on the side; others maintain professional discretion. Either way, you know things.
Signature Customs
The Route Board: Veteran drivers keep mental (or augmented) maps of their territory with color-coded threat assessments. Green routes are safe and profitable; red routes pay well but attract trouble; black routes are "only if you owe someone a big favor."
Passenger Protocols: Unspoken rules govern the cab. Payment up front for suspicious fares. No names unless offered. Don't ask about bloodstains. Never remember faces. Break these rules, and you won't survive long in the business.
The Sacred Meter: Your fare meter is calibrated precisely. Overcharge tourists, sure, but charge locals fairly—they're your bread and butter, and word spreads fast in tight communities.
Variants
Orbital Shuttle Jockey: Operates atmospheric-to-orbit hops, ferrying passengers between planetside and station docks. Higher pay, more licensing hassles, and constant dealing with spaceport bureaucracy.
Undercity Runner: Specializes in routes through the unofficial parts of the city—maintenance tunnels, condemned sectors, zones the maps claim don't exist. Lower fares, higher danger, absolute discretion required.
Corporate Car: Works for a fleet company with standardized routes and monitored drives. Better benefits, zero freedom, and the company AI logs every conversation in your cab.
Fixer's Wheel: You're not just a driver—you're a broker. Need fake IDs? Know a guy. Need a weapon that's untraceable? Know a place. Your cab is a mobile contact point for the black market.
Adventure Hooks
The Bloody Fare: You pick up a passenger who's clearly injured and trying to stay conscious. They hand you a data-chip and gasp "Get this to the Commission archives" before passing out. Now you're in a race against time, pursued by people who really want that data back, and you're not sure if your passenger is a whistleblower or a terrorist.
Zone Lockdown: The authorities have sealed off your entire district—no traffic in or out, official story is "security drill." But you notice patterns: specific buildings being raided, specific people being detained. Someone hires you to smuggle them out through the maintenance tunnels you know exist. Do you take the job?
The Repeat Customer: A regular fare—always the same route, always pays double, never talks—hasn't shown up in ten Yoms. You check their usual pickup point and find their apartment ransacked and a Chronologist Guild insignia left on the door. Whatever they were doing, it involved time itself.
The Taxi Driver background is for characters who've learned that the real map of any city isn't the official one—it's the web of shortcuts, relationships, and unspoken rules that keeps the streets moving. In Starfall, where every Yom counts and anonymity is survival, you're the invisible infrastructure that connects it all.
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