Barber-Surgeon

*"This won’t hurt a bit. Before I start, though, you may want to bite down on this leather strop."*

## Basic

(Core) Barber-Surgeons provide painful but effective healing to the common folk of the Empire. They are not as learned as Physicians, which is why Physicians maintain a separate guild, but they know quite a lot about anatomy. While they do cut hair and shave, they are more noted for their bleedings, surgeries, and amputations. Barber-Surgeons carry a variety of razor-sharp blades, from small scalpels to enormous bone saws. They have even more sinister looking tools for the most hated of their avocations: dentistry. Many large ships have a dedicated Barber-Surgeon as part of the crew; they are also common in towns and cities.

### Secondary Profile

**Skills:** Charm, Drive or Swim, Haggle, Heal, Perception, Read/Write, Speak Language (Breton, Reikspiel, or Tilean), Trade (Apothecary)

**Talents:** Resistance to Disease or Savvy, Suave or Very Resilient, Surgery

**Trappings:** Trade Tools (Barber-Surgeon)

### **Career Exits**

Interrogator, Grave Robber, Physician, Tradesman, Vagabond

## Affiliations

Barber-surgeons are closely regulated by their guilds, that are, in turn, regulated by the local authorities. When you consider that barbersurgeons hold razors to the throats of honest citizens on a daily basis, this is easy to understand. In many places, practising as a barber-surgeon without guild authorisation counts as assault with a weapon, a crime that often carries the death penalty. This makes expulsion from the surgeons guild a very serious threatfor its members.

In most areas, the surgeon’s guild is tightly controlled by a small group of families who carefully control admission into their circle. Some are primarily interested in keeping competition down, and thus admit very few new members. Others require ordinary members to pay a very large portion of their income to the guild, and ultimately to the controlling masters. Still others require members to pass on information they hear while shaving, or the details of the injuries they are asked to treat. Guilds that gather information may pass it on to the authorities, organised crime, chaos cults, or all of the above.

The guild conditions mean that there is almost always demand for the services of unguilded barber-surgeons. They might be cheaper, or better able to keep a secret. Guilds are active in hunting down these blacklegs and turning them over to the authorities for punishment. However, in some cases they might offer to allow them to continue operating, in return for information.

Barber-surgeons must either deal with the guilds’ unreasonable demands, or make sure that the guilds never discover them.

## Little Known Facts

According to an Imperial decree of the time of Magnus the Pious, any alleged physical mutation should be examined by an accredited barber-surgeon or physician, to confirm that it is not natural, before the mutant is executed. The decree has never been repealed, but it is almost always ignored, as the unnatural nature of most mutations is obvious. Executing a mutant without an inspection is, however, still technically illegal.

Most barber-surgeons refuse to work when Morrslieb is full, saying that the razor slips far too often when the Chaos Moon looks down.