What if your char saw a barbarian in combat. Went to him afterwards and ask - how did you DO THAT?
Perhaps the "I use my anger/furry" would make the char interested in that way of life...
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Gamma radiation
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I claimed that I has a PC who went to university to study as an alchemist but could only afford it on an athletic(babarian) scholarship. Back in 3E, you could do a 1st level multiclass PC with 2 zero level "training" or apprentice levels. I would have used them if I could but in Society play I had to pick one class a level so I went with Bbn for the extra HP and so I could take W-Fo at first level. One could say he played ball in the Fall and hit the books hard in the spring. Or you could hit the books hard in the Fall so your GPA does not plummet in the spring when playing a different sport.
man what is there like an Acadamae of Barbarianism in Cheliax or something that I missed in the Inner Sea World Guide
Is there like some place where fledgling barbarians are totally sweating it out right before they go in for their Advanced +10 Movement 405 level final?
Oh my god...I...passsssed! D+!!!
I hate sticking my neck out.
I've never regarded Barbarian as a class, even though it's been formalized as such. Barbarian is, in some cases, a mindset. In others, it's a character flaw, or an onset of madness, or a general inability to take all this cr...stuff anymore. It's a deviation from the norm, except in those cases where it has been incorporated into the social element. It's like they say in the books, not every who picks up a spear in defense of his village is a fighter. Well, not everybody whose called a barbarian Rages. Yes, capital R. It's not about being angry; it's about becoming ANGER. So, Gamma Radiation could work. I guess.
In my carefully thought-out opinion you don't need a reason to become a Barbarian, you need a reason not to.
All you really have to do is think about why they get the benefits that they get. There's actually a logical progression to the class.
Becoming a Barbarian when you started out something else is easy; it's called snapping. Something happens...you snap. Somebody dies...you snap. The world becomes a giant pesthole where every second somebody wants you dead...you snap. Sometimes you snap back - realign, reacquire your sensibilities. Sometimes you don't. And sometimes you're left with that quiet little voice in the back of your mind that says, "it's okay. I will always be here, waiting. Until you need me." And when you need it, BOOM! A level of Barbarian.
That's my 2 cents.
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Becoming a Barbarian when you started out something else is easy; it's called snapping. Something happens...you snap. Somebody dies...you snap. The world becomes a giant pesthole where every second somebody wants you dead...you snap.You're in the wilderness for 4 months with a guy who doesn't know how to tune his violin.
I never saw the barbarian as something a multiclass character aspires to do or to become, but as something they HAVE to become in order to survive, discarding (for the moment) their original way of thinking for sheer self-preservation.
Which works out better than taking that same scenario and multi-classing as a fighter where you would be trained in martial combat. Instead you would simply find the biggest thing you could find and hit someone with it as hard as you could until they die.
Like if you were a wizard stuck out in a place where you can't get spell components and you hadn't taken Eschew Materials yet. It's all about survival.
Ever read "Lord of the Flies"? Those little wankers became something like Barbarians, or at least barbaric.
I could see any situation where you were stranded or lost, especially alone, could earn you levels in the Barbarian Class. You could even do so intentionally, just walk into the wilderness. Or maybe go live with your Shoanti cousin for a year, maybe take a wife. Or maybe a Shoanti woman thinks that a cute little wizard would make an interesting husband; and a wife takes YOU!
Rage doesn't have to be anger. Maybe your rage powers are things that you can do when you're "In the Zone".
The dwarven troll-slayer from warhammer could work as an example of someone multi-classing into barbarian.
They were happily going about their dwarfy business - caravan guard, merchant, clanlord, whatever - when some terrible event happened that they feel responsible for. They cannot live with the shame so they shave their hair into a mohican and go off in search of certain death by throwing themselves in a wild frenzy into fights with the biggest monsters they can find.
Hey presto, instant barbarian.
I look at it as a barbarian is a warrior who fights by instinct as opposed to training.
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As mentioned above, your character gets stuck in a situation where his 'civilized man's tools' aren't getting the job done, and has to get down and dirty with his savage side. Perhaps he's shipwrecked, perhaps he's captured and made to fight in a cage, perhaps he's just lost in a foreign land where brute strength and the will to use it is respected more than his training in history and the arts and his gentleman's understanding of which fork is proper to use with with which course.
There's also the possibility that the character always had a simmering rage that they'd repressed, and perhaps even feared, and it's only encountering people able to channel and use that fury, instead of hiding from it and fearing the loss of control, that inspires him to explore that side of himself. What he spent his 'pre-Barbarian-levels' life considering a flaw or a source of shame or dishonor, he now recognizes as a potential strength, a resource to be tapped and controlled, instead of locked away.
The 'rage' could also be something external or recent. Many action movies have a character who is otherwise a normal dude, but something terrible happens (his village is overrun by a warlord seeking the riddle of steel, his family are killed by a car-bomb meant for him, his daughter is kidnapped and sold into slavery, etc.) and then 'getting in touch with their rage' and going on a vengeance-fueled killing spree. The character might have never had a reason to 'get their rage on' until this point, but now, the chains are off.
In a fantasy world, there are even more dramatic reasons for 'sudden rage syndrome,' such as exposure to magical energies (like the aforementioned rage spell), or temporary possession by an angry spirit (perhaps even an ancestor, awakening your 'inner rage' to deal with some insult to the family honor?), or some sort of brain-chemistry-affecting toxin or disease. In Golarion, with a Runelord of Wrath prone to leaving behind spiritually-tained arcane artifacts and locations and creatures, such as Sinspawn and Runewells, it's even more possible that an otherwise calm and centered individual could get all wrathed up by an encounter with some 'spiritually toxic' bit of fallout from an ages-old conflict between Runelords.
ever read the drizzt books? he did it
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this is sort of a tangential answer at best, but you could use the barbarian mechanics and call it some kind of battle trance or something, that you could learn (like the 'heart of stone' mode in the name of the wind, or whatever). Then there could be something like a fighting academy that produces these trance fighters.
I love the idea of a lawful group of people who use intense training to enter a focused battle trance that acts like rage mechanically, but has nothing to do with chaos or loss of control or 'barbarians.'
They'd concentrate and put themselves 'into the zone' and fight with a cold mechanical precision, like a highly trained professional athlete, and not a shield-chewing woad-daubed berserker.
I love the idea of a lawful group of people who use intense training to enter a focused battle trance that acts like rage mechanically, but has nothing to do with chaos or loss of control or 'barbarians.'
They'd concentrate and put themselves 'into the zone' and fight with a cold mechanical precision, like a highly trained professional athlete, and not a shield-chewing woad-daubed berserker.
The psychological term is Flow - at least in the real world side of things
I think the name brings a lot of baggage that the actual class doesn't have. The "Barbarian" is more of a "Berserker". Simply a warrior that uses his anger/hatred to fuel combat.
Take the appropriately named anime "Berserk". Guts, the main character, begins as a soldier. He just fought without purpose, swinging around his massive sword. After a certain event, though, he is changed. Hatred becomes the only thing that drives him. He becomes an even more terrifying opponent, but he doesn't become a "wild man" or something.
ever read the drizzt books? he did itBy spending years living in the forbidding cold of Icewind Dale and picking up some tricks from Wulfgar, a barbarian native. Not exactly the "I trained into Barbarian last weekend" deal. It does help that he was a ranger to start.
No, Drizzt took barb levels when he was still in the Underdark. His life was so solitary that he began losing contact with his "humanity" (you know what I mean :P). That's when he did the barb dip.
For me, if a character was displaying angry tendencies over a period of time, I'd think that would be very appropriate lead-in to taking barb levels.
Failing that, some kind of traumatic event.