Gong Farmer (5e Background)

Gong Farmer

Alexey Morozov

While big cities and the magically inclined can create fantastic systems of sewers and portals to deal with the biological waste they generate, not all small towns and remote tribes are so advanced. They instead rely on a outhouses and cesspits to warehouse their excrement, but those have no easy and fast method of self-cleaning. That’s where you come in. As a gong farmer, you crept through the night to empty such pits of disgust with buckets and shovels so that the solid waste, by far the longer lasting product of most humanoids’ diets, could be transported out of civilization to more distant dumping grounds or a hungry otyugh if you were lucky. On a good day, usually during the lean times at the end of winter when the poop was still mostly frozen, you just had to descend into a tight, underground muck hole and pry out smelly soil. On a bad day, usually following a summer feast full of rich food and plentiful wine, a corroded timber or eroded step might give way and dunk you completely under a volume of diarrhea higher than you are tall. Even after that, you were of course expected to at least patch the damaged infrastructure. You still aren’t sure you’ve completely washed away the smell from those horrible falls.

While well-compensated for your work, mostly because very few people have the constitution to do it, you were largely a social pariah and most of the people that counted your efforts would never talk to you if they could help it. The odors of your possession probably didn’t help you get invited to any parties either. In all fairness, even you eventually got sick of cleaning up other people’s messes and quit to try this adventuring thing.

Skill Proficiencies: Athletics, Stealth

Tool Proficiencies: Carpenter’s tools, Mason’s tools

Equipment: A bucket, lamp, set of common clothes, shovel, stained rag, waterproof gloves, waterproof waders, two odd items you found embedded in waste (determined by rolling on any Trinkets table(s) of your choice), and a pouch containing 12gp

Feature: Dung Detective

Your experience in hauling poop has given you the observational analysis skills of an amateur gastroenterologist. By examining a creature’s feces, you will be able to discern their diet, general activity level, any digestive bugs they might be suffering from, and if they have any hemorrhoids. You will also be able to tell how old any turd is with such inspection. If fecal matter from multiple sources or times are mixed together, the information you can glean from any individual poo will be decreased unless you go through the effort to isolate the different samples.

Alternate Feature: I’ve Smelled Worse

An essential skill for any gong farmer with a working nose to develop is the ability to ignore noxious aromata. Those that fail will just end up making more messes for themselves to clean up or quit, though you ended up quitting despite mastering the art of odor obliviousness. You are completely unaffected by bad smells and can operate in the most undesirable environments. This feature won’t save you from damage from actually harmful substances like poison gases, but at least while your lungs dissolve you won’t be suffering any psychic distress.

Suggested Characteristics

How has your time in the pits molded your output?

d8	Personality Trait
1	I’ve crawled through a river of shit, literally and metaphorically, and came out clean on the other side, only metaphorically.
2	I don’t mind doing the hardest, smelliest work if it means more gold in my pocket.
3	You can discover so much about people by examining their stools.
4	My least favorite aspect of my job was fishing the bloated corpses of critters that got trapped and drowned in waste.
5	I’m used to working and being on my own. Even off-duty, I was usually by myself.
6	I mentally keep track of the excretory habits of myself and those around me for both health and paranoid reasons.
7	I always make sure to bury my droppings, preferably around plant life they can nurture.
8	I have a crude sense of humor, but shun scatological jokes since I’ve already heard all of them.

d6	Ideal
1	Ambition. I might have started at the bottom, but I will rise to top. I don’t care what I need to do to get there. (Evil)
2	Cleanliness. Everything should be kept as clean and proper as possible, even in the messiest circumstances. (Lawful)
3	Duty. To keep society humming along, someone has to do the dirty jobs. (Lawful)
4	Flexibility. I try to go with the flow, but prefer when that flow is regular. (Neutral)
5	Hard Work. Those that do the worst jobs are the ones most deserving of society’s respect. (Any)
6	Tolerance. Everybody poops, so what’s the point of hurting each other during all the steps of life between the defecations? (Good)

d6	Bond
1	A childhood nasal infection cost me my sense of smell and opened up a new job opportunity for me.
2	One of my closest coworkers was a grouchy neo-otyugh named Oscar.
3	Is it weird that I have a favorite cesspool?
4	My favorite color is brown and I try to keep all my clothes in some shade of it.
5	I found a cut-up dead body in a privy pit. I disposed of the remains, but the face still haunts me.
6	I once saw a bear shit in the woods. We kept eye contact the whole time, so I don’t where it pulled its roll of toilet paper from.

d6	Flaw
1	I don’t trust anything that doesn’t poop. Their inner workings are so… unnatural.
2	I know I have no real skills beyond an acceptance for doing tasks no one else wants to do.
3	I’m so inured to the foulest of smells that don’t notice when I carry them on me, so I usually need help remembering to bathe.
4	I’m lactose intolerant, yet enjoy cheese too much to quit it. The constant farting is worth a good limburger.
5	I prefer a nocturnal sleep schedule and get constipated and irritable if forced to be diurnal.
6	I will go out of my way to step in and drag away any poops I see lying on a road or in the wilderness.

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