Theme:FFAC-1 Jobs

JOBS

Jobs are not simply a neat way to describe your character’s personal abilities in ACT: CLASS. They are a part of you, something that you learn and define yourself as, a pattern by which you shape and interact with your personal magical reserves. Everyone in the world has a Job; by far the most common are Jobs like Merchant or White Mage or Black Mage or Machinist, and few common folk ever really progress to the heights required for “mastery”. Few people ever really acquire the skills, the training, the experience, and the personal resources needed for such a task; most are content to eke out livings with basic skills and basic magic. The vast majority of the world could be considered very low-level examples of these Jobs - enough to get by in the day-to-day, but hardly adventurers.

Legend has it that, during the Chaos War, the Second Divines created Jobs in order to give power to their soldiers against the Great Enemy more rapidly. It’s said that the Job Crystals were made for this purpose - repositories of the first patterns that would become the Jobs by which Humes interact with the world. As the story goes, the Job Crystals allowed the Humes to rapidly gain power simply by fighting, turning Chaos’s greatest advantage - its overwhelming numerical power - against it handily. Every one Hume, the legend goes, was worth a thousand Chaos soldiers.

In the modern era, such mythology is treated as exactly that: mythology. It is understood that Jobs are magical constructs of equal parts muscle memory, magic, and psychology; it is understood that they are means to interact with the world’s magical resources in a set pattern and rapidly grow via conflict and experience; it is understood that they have limits, and that while those limits may be pushed, they are almost always predictable. It is known that new Jobs have been created, like the Judge, the Paravir, the Gunner, the Cannoneer, and other slightly more modern patterns, by a mixture of magic, determination, and new methods of training. The exact science of what “creates” a Job is still unknown and highly theoretical.

Most people do not have subjobs.