Plus de trousseau: More Skill-Based Equipment for Flashing Blades

My Flashing Blades house rules include five new skills for characters to choose. In keeping with my Te Deum pour un massacre-inspired stuff-for-skills house rule, here are items a character taking the new skills may expect to receive.

Skill	Item
Falconry	A gauntlet with a tassel, jesses, a field leash, and a swing lure
Musician	A musical instrument and 1D6 sheets of music
Naturalist	A plant press, a bottle of grain alcohol, and 1D6 glass jars with stoppers and horsehair threads
Physician	A fleam, a metal bowl, and a clay jar with 2D6 leeches
Surgeon	A trousse including scalpels, hooks, a clamp, a probe, needles and flax thread, and a bone saw

Les Trousseaux: Skill-Based Starting Equipment for Flashing Blades

I like equipping my characters.

Selecting character gear and accoutrements is way of exploring the material culture of the game-world, and collecting memorabilia - trophies, souvenirs - becomes a way of telling my character's story as the game progresses.

Inspired by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, one of the house rules I adopted for my Flashing Blades campaign years ago is that player characters receive certain items based on the character's starting background. The French Wars of Religion jeu de rôle Te Deum pour un massacre does this as well, and adds an interesting twist by adding an item for skills possessed by the character. I decided to add to my earlier house rule with one based on Te Deum . . . .

Starting characters receive the following items in accordance with their skills. Characters may also acquire these items in the process of learning new skills, at the Gamemaster's discretion.

Skill	Item
Acrobatics	A grapnel and 10 m of rope
Artillery	Artillerists’ charts and tables
Banking	A set of scales and weights and a counting board
Bargaining	1D6 bottles of good brandy
Bribery	A bag of 30 pistoles
Bureaucratics	A book of collected royal edicts
Captaincy	A white silk sash and a silver-gilt baton
Carousing	1D6 bottles of Anjou wine
Chemist	A copper alembic, a crucible, and a mortar and pestle
Cut Purse	A billon coin with a sharpened edge
Disguise	A costume
Espionage	A cipher disk
Etiquette	A pair of dancing shoes and a mouchoir
Fine Manipulation	A clockmaker's tool kit
Forgery	Copies of royal writs and official missives
Gambling	A deck of marked cards and a pair of loaded dice
Gunnery	A firesteel striker and a length of slow match
Heraldry	An armorial
History	A copy of Mémoires sur les Gaules
Horsemanship	A riding crop and a training whip
Literacy	A copy of Grammaire et syntaxe françoise, Introductiones latinae, or a similar grammar for another language
Magistracy	A copy of Coutume de Paris or Corpus Juris Civilis
Oratory	A translation of Cicero's De l'Orateur
Pilot	Two lanterns and navigators’ instuments (cross-staff, astrolabe, tables and charts)
Seamanship	A marlinspike and a kerchief
Seduction	1D6 bottles of perfume
Stealth	A pair of turnshoes and a dark hooded cloak
Strategy	An carved ivory chess set
Theology	A psalter
Tracking	A magnifying lens and 2D6 small wooden pins