Kuma wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:21 pm
my current character has modified himself to such a distressing degree well beyond "disfigurement" that by this definition he should be an outcast, but that's not the case.
Stop. Stop it~ Why do you constantly end up making your characters modify themselves/modify other people?!
On topic....
I've played two outcasts, Null the Yuan-ti smuggler and hired hitman and Gein, the pacted conman. So this is going to be based on my experienced playing these two characters.
Null, aside from being a Yuan-ti, was an assassin, infiltrator and poisoner who used people as test subjects for various poisons and killing techniques. He was a terrible person and any one of these things would get him labeled as something civilized society would want nothing to do with. Yuan-ti in general are typically sent out in small numbers to infiltrate societies to undermine them, so being a yuan-ti alone is enough to be considered an "outcast", murderous tendancies aside.
Null didn't have a "visible" outcast mark, as he constantly covered himself from head to toe so no one knew what he actually looked like. Null was also a shapeshifting disguise master, so he would pose as a literally anything (He had something like 4 alter egos and could shapeshift into 6 or 7 different creatures) or something similar when wandering around towns. Unless you had a really high spot score, you weren't going to know Null was an outcast. Or a Yuan-ti, for that matter; most people just thought he was a skinny human.
Gein is a Night Hag pacted conman who uses wordplay and deception to get what he wants. He's pacted, pro-slavery and an apathetic social manipulator. He's relatively new, so I haven't done much "evil" on him yet per se, but manipulating people for personal gain with no regard for what happens to the other person is more or less what landed him down in Andunor. And being pacted.
Unlike Null, he does have a visible mark; unsettling magic circles tattooed on both his palms. I need to brush up on his description, but having tattoos with spirarling abyssal runes and a big creepy eye in the center is probably good enough for "not welcome in civilized society".
I don't think your origin as to why you're an outcast is something you'd want to overthink too much? Come up with something reasonable and roll with it? I've never been a huge fan of coming up with super-detailed, elaborate backstories, as getting too caught up in a backstory can actually be detrimental to character growth.
What you want your "outcast mark" to be seems pretty up to interpretation. I'd imagine there are things that would be universally recognizable as "nope, we don't want that".