Hey folks. Our group will be doing the starting mission for The Horned One soon. We’ll have 4 players plus me, the GM. I don’t see the Specialists called out in the mission, so I’m guessing we use 2 Specialists (plus maybe a Medic) and the rest are Soldiers or Rookies. Am I reading that right?
If so, should all players make Specialists at the start, even though some won’t go on the mission?
Thanks!
For the starting mission you are meant to all play specialists. There’s some previous discussion of it here:
https://community.bladesinthedark.com/t/squad-in-the-starting-mission/1197/4
Thanks so much Kris! Really helped clarify. 
No worries! Glad to be of some help.
There’s a fairly active discord community if you use that - I used it a few times when I was running Band of Blades last year. Very useful discussions (though often difficult to keep up with the flow of conversation since there are loads of members!).
Thank you!
A bit late on the conversation initiated by @MankyRoot, but in fact it’s not the case.
You can perfectly by RAW play Rookies in the starting mission. Each player should create one Specialist, but doesn’t have to use it. In the “The fist scene” section for each Chosen, there is this sentence:
After they make characters, have your fellow players each pick a character
to play for this assault mission—Rookies are acceptable—
So it’s possible, but to say the truth, I have never seen anybody playing a Rookie instead of the Specialists they have just create.
Yeah, I think there’s a difference to be made between what is permissible and what is optimal.