Now that you have your Resources, character generation continues with the usual Sanction flow (Sanction, p 13).

Roll once for Purpose, Struggle and Influence, or draw three cards (three different suits, 1 – 10). If taking the rolling option, make certain that you do not get the same result as another player, especially for Purpose but preferably not at all!

Purpose represents what you do in the restaurant now. Struggle explains something about how you came to be here. Influence identifies something that shaped the way you think about food, hospitality or the work itself.

Lifepath

Abilites come from each result. Purpose and Struggle offer three possibilities; Influence offers two. From these eight, total, select three for your starting character. The selections of Abilities, below, are skewed somewhat in terms of the usual Sanction Ability vocabulary, given the need for restaurant-focussed skills, most notably under Purpose.

Note: This was a really challenging Lifepath to put together. I reserve the right to come back and tinker with it. Often.

What do you do here?

There is deliberate overlap in the Abilities, while the Purpose itself aligns with stations and roles within the restaurant. Cooking belongs to several kitchen roles because the distinction comes from the character’s other choices and Lifepath rather than turning Dying on the Pass into a catalogue of specialist culinary skills.

That said, there is a distinction to be made in specialty. Someone with Cooking can handle themselves and the varied stations in a kitche. But, someone with Cooking (Soup chef) can handle the preparation, modification, rescue, presentation and storage of soups with greater efficacy.

Cooking variants:

• Butcher – Butchers meats, poultry, and sometimes fish and breading.
• Entrée preparer – Hot appetizers and often the soups, vegetables, pastas and starches.
• Fish chef – Fish dishes, and often fish butchering, and their sauces.
• Fry chef – Fried items, from shallow to deep.
• Grill chef – Grilled foods, from griddling to salamander.
• Pantry chef – Cold foods: salads, cold appetizers, pâtés and other charcuterie items.
• Pastry chef – Baked goods and plated desserts, including pastries, cakes, and breads. May manage a separate team and department.
• Roast chef – Roasted and braised meats, and their sauces.
• Roundsman – Fills in as needed on stations in the kitchen, a.k.a. the swing cook.
• Sauté chef – Sautéed items and their sauce. 
• Soup chef – Soups in all their many variations.
• Vegetable chef – Vegetables, great and small.

d10	Purpose	Possible Abilities
1	Head Chef — The menu, the standards and ultimately the blame stop with you.	Cooking (type), Leadership, Organisation
2	Sous Chef — You translate ambition into actual service and hold the kitchen together when the chef cannot.	Cooking (type), Bureaucracy, Motivation
3	Chef de Partie — You own a section and, for several frantic hours, perhaps nothing else exists.	Cooking (type), Tactics, Night Working*
4	Pastry Chef — Exact quantities, exact temperatures, exact timing—and customers still ask whether you can just make something without gluten.	Cooking (Pastry chef), Mathematics, Decorate
5	Kitchen Porter — Washing, carrying, cleaning, fetching, clearing and reminding others that the whole operation stops without you.	Labouring, Fortitude, Sleight-of-Hand
6	Front of House Manager — Reservations, complaints, staff, customers and the illusion that everything is under control.	Diplomacy, Preparedness, Stage Magic
7	Server — You read the room, remember everything and absorb the emotional consequences of decisions made elsewhere.	Observation, Persuade, Papercraft
8	Wine & Drinks — You understand what people drink, what they think they like and how much they might pay for discovering otherwise.	Connoisseur, Appraisal, Perform (Poetry)
9	Buyer & Supplier Liaison — Someone has to find the ingredients, negotiate the price and make certain they arrive before service.	Bargaining, Commerce, Logistics
10	Owner / General Manager — Cash flow, wages, bookings, suppliers and the dawning realisation that being full does not necessarily mean making money.	Accounting, Computer Use, Negotiation

Night Working represents an appreciation for the shift in economy, focus, ambition, resources and other elements that shift when outside the 9-to-5.

What brought you here?

d10	Struggle	Possible Abilities
1	Hard Home — Childhood taught you to judge moods quickly, make do and look after yourself.	Deception, Petty Theft, Art (Sketching)
2	Burned Out — Your old career wanted every hour you possessed. You walked before there was nothing left.	Construction, Electrician, Sports (Endurance)
3	No Safety Net — No inheritance, helpful relatives or emergency fund. If something goes wrong, you solve it yourself.	Gambling, Devices*, Intimidation
4	No Fixed Address — You have slept on sofas, floors, in hostels or somewhere officially described as temporary.	Signs*, Scavenging, Blather
5	Started in Fast Food — Timers, repetition, difficult customers and relentless pace taught you more than anyone wants to admit.	Cooking (type), Rework*, Frustrate
6	Stained Record — A minor offence became a sentence that lasted far longer than the punishment itself. This place offered another start.	Discipline, Concealment, Puzzling
7	Second Job — This is not even your only job. Rent, children, dependants or debt do not care how tired you are.	Craft (type), Mechanic, Barter
8	Someone Depends on You — Caring for another person has shaped your priorities and limited almost every choice you make.	First Aid, Flattery, Pharma*
9	New Town, New Life — You arrived knowing almost nobody and needing work quickly. The restaurant became the first place that felt familiar.	Perform (Instrument), Driving, Street Smart
10	Starting Again — Something you built—career, relationship, business or ambition—ended badly. This is what came next.	Interview, Meditation, Hand Crafting

Devices relates to a willingness to tinker to get something to work. Taking something apart, cleaning, reassembling, reorienting, replacing elements with foil or wire, and maybe once in a while doing something mildly unsafe or illegal (“That was locked before? Really?“)

Pharma equates to a familiarity with the gamut of over-the-counter drugs from the varied prescriptions you have had to manage, including variations in brands and generics.

Rework embodies an eye for detail and mimicry, recreating, reenacting or simply repeating a task from memory having witnessed it with sufficient time to take on the nuances; though you would struggle to innovate.

Signs expresses an awareness of specific signals, formations, scratches, or other viewable manifestations of non-verbal communication.

What shaped you?

d10	Influence	Possible Abilities
1	Parent or Grandparent — Food meant family long before it meant work.	Cooking (type), Nostalgia
2	Celebrity Chef — Books, television and impossible standards convinced you that food could matter.	Cooking (type), Performance (Storytelling)
3	Magazine or Food Writer — You learned to think about why something works rather than simply whether you like it.	Criticism, Gourmand
4	Travel — Another place showed you that familiar ingredients, customs and expectations were only one possibility.	Culture, Linguistics
5	Family Cookbook — Stained pages, handwritten amendments and measurements like “enough” constitute your culinary inheritance.	Cooking (type), Writing (Cookery)
6	Architecture & Design — Space matters: movement, light, sound, proportion and how people feel without understanding why.	Architecture, Style
7	Science — Heat, proteins, emulsions, fermentation and chemistry make more sense to you than culinary mysticism.	Forensics, Science (Food)
8	Teacher or Mentor — Someone took you seriously before you knew enough to deserve it.	Research, Reassurance
9	Grower, Market or Farm — Ingredients were living things before somebody put them in a box.	Farming, Natural History
10	One Perfect Meal — Once, somewhere, somebody served you something that changed what you thought food could be. You have been chasing that moment since.	Gossip, Survival (Urban)

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How do you or your character display Composure at the gaming table? I look forward to reading about it in your RPGaDay post.

#RPGaDAY2026