Characters
RimWorld is a game based on the story of its characters, either player-managed colonists or AI-controlled wanderers and raiders.
Each character has two sets of attributes, a basic set of skills and a two-part backstory (childhood and adulthood) that affect the starting skills and (in)abilities of the characters.
Skills
Characters can have variable proficiency in the following skills:
- Construction
- Growing
- Research
- Mining
- Shooting
- Hand to Hand
- Social
The base score in each skill is 3 with a minimum of 0 and no upper limit. Each point grants different bonuses to skills:
- Working skills get a 10% increased speed
- Shooting gives a 0.20% reduced chance to miss per meter
- Hand to Hand gives a ~2.1% improved chances to hit
- Social gives 10% more impact on relations, 25% better probability of recruiting, and a ~0.5% bonus on selling and buying commodities through negociation
A character can have a usable skill with a score of 0 or a unusable skill (because of his backstory) with a score greater than 0.
Backstories
Childhood
Medieval lordling
"[Character] was a minor noble in an old kingdom on a medieval world. He grew up in a manor made of stone, served by bowing lowerclassmen.
Such a life teaches no technical skills and instils a lifelong aversion to manual labor - but [Character] learned early the ways of social manipulation."
- Construction: -1
- Growing: -1
- Mining: -1
- Social: +4
Medieval slave
"[Character] grew up pulling carts and digging holes on a medieval world. Simple manual labor is his/her oldest companion - along with the master's leash.
He/She didn't learn to read until age nine."
- Construction: +2
- Growing: +2
- Research: -3
- Mining: +2
Midworld nerd
"[Character] had a good birth, reasonable parents, and went to a decent school on a mostly well-governed midworld.
He/She was a consummate nerd, interested in technology and uninterested in people."
- Research: +4
- Social: -3
Urbworld urchin
"The urbworlds - ancient and deep industrial cityscapes bursting with humanity and poison.
[Character] grew up in the dark, unwanted reaches of such a place. He/She had to fight for every scrap of food."
- Shooting: +2
- Hand to Hand: +4
Vatgrown soldier
"[Character] wasn't made as a person, but as an instrument of destruction.
Growing in a bioweapons facility and taught combat during his/her accelerated growth, [Character] still has a proclivity for combat of all kinds and an aversion to human contact."
- Shooting: +4
- Hand to Hand: +4
- Social: -4
- Warden disabled
- Doctoring disabled
Adulthood
* Unavailable during character creation.
Assassin*
"[Character] was a professional assassin. He/She was cold, calculating, and made a good profit. In this business, an utter lack of empathy was an asset."
- Construction: -2
- Growing: -2
- Mining: -2
- Shooting: +10
- Hand to Hand: +10
- Researching disabled
- Cleaning disabled
- Hauling disabled
- Plant cutting disabled
- Mining disabled
- Growing disabled
- Constructing disabled
- Warden disabled
- Doctoring disabled
Colony settler
"[Character] was a settler on a new colony world.
Such a life requires a jack-of-all trades at basic hands-on tasks."
- Construction: +4
- Growing: +4
- Mining: +4
Con Artist*
"[Character] never created a thing in his/her life. He/She did, however, prove to be natural at getting others to give him/her what they had created."
- Social: +10
- Soldiering disabled
Courtesean*
"[Character] was used for his/her body by hundreds of customers in brothels on several planets. He/She gained some mental marks and a special kind of street smarts."
- Hand to Hand: +3
- Social: +8
- Cleaning disabled
- Hauling disabled
- Plant cutting disabled
- Mining disabled
- Growing disabled
- Constructing disabled
Deep space miner
"[Character] did the sweaty, grimy work of pulling metal out of asteroids on a deep space rig. He/She used his/her hands-on industrial skills daily - and wasn't bad in a bar fight either."
- Construction: +3
- Mining: +7
- Hand to Hand: +2
Illegal shipwright*
"There is a law that say that you're not allowed to put terawatt-range grasers on a cargo scow. Especially if you hide them under what looks like a communications dish for better ambush potential. [Character] discovered that there was great profit to be made, however, from those who are uninterested in these laws."
- Construction: +7
Medieval farm oaf
"Tilling, hoeing, guiding ox carts, pushing wheelbarrows. Digging ditches, planting seeds, predicting the harvest.
Medieval-level farmers aren't educated in the usual sense, but they know a lot about growing plants without technology. That said, such a life leaves one essentially incapable of participating in intellectual, technology-driven activities."
- Growing: +8
- Mining: +3
- Research disabled
Medieval lord
"[Character] was a lord on a preindustrial planet. He/She went to parties, managed the underlings, and even learned some swordplay.
His/Her soft hands did not hold a work tool during that entire time. He/She considers manual labor to be beneath him/her."
- Construction: -5
- Growing: -5
- Mining: -5
- Shooting: +5
- Hand to Hand: +5
- Social: +7
- Cleaning disabled
- Hauling disabled
- Plant cutting disabled
- Mining disabled
- Growing disabled
- Constructing disabled
Military commissar
"[Character] was an internal spymaster in an Imperial army battalion. He/She made sure that the men were loyal, and did not fall back unless ordered. This made him/her unpopular, but he/she gained great skill at detecting the slightest dishonesty."
- Shooting: +3
"Interstellar warfare is won by technology, so imperial navies are always on the peak of modern research. Even better, they have first access to Transcendent artifacts because they find them in space.
[Character] worked in a navy lab."
- Research: +8
Pit Brawler*
"[Character] was 15 when he/she got in his/her first fight. He/She won, but more important was the enjoyment of his/her audience. Pit fighting turned out to be a lucrative career for those who could survive it. And it was even mostly legal."
- Hand to Hand: +8
- Researching disabled
- Doctoring disabled
Space Marine*
"[Character] was a warrior in an Imperial navy. His/Her job was to be punched into enemy warships, gun down the crew, and capture the ship intact. And he/she was good at it."
- Shooting: +7
- Hand to Hand: +5
Space pirate*
"Piracy appears everywhere that governments are weak and society spread thin. [Character] was part of this age-old part of human existence, extorting and smashing peaceful trade ships for profit."
- Shooting: +4
- Hand to Hand: +4
Urbworld entrepreneur
"In the urbworlds, most suffer. But someone has to run the corporations.
[Character] learned the skills of the trade - greasing palms and technical analysis. He/She is a sociointellectual machine."
- Research: +3
- Social: +6
Traits
Most traits currently have no perceptible effect on the game and are there just to give more consistency to characters and to allow more complex player-conceived stories based on those characters.
They include :
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Don't hesitate to add one to the list if it's missing!