One of the things that genre does is define a field within which the artist or writer can work. This can lead to work that is formulaic and bad, but it can also be a productive restraint, often (although not always) when the artist has things to say about the genre itself (deconstruction).
I was recently chatting about the core classes of dnd with a few people in Phlox's discord server, namely the fighting man, thief, and magic user. They are by now archetypal, crucial genre pillars to what a role playing game like dnd is. Since they are completely crucial, a given writer's take on the classics does a lot of work defining their ideas about the genre as a whole.
That was the idea anyway. In an effort to overcome crippling jetlag, I decided to put some of these ideas into practice and write up a sort of baseline, ultracore class list for the setting that most of my writing and games take place in. It is presented here. I plan to make it look nice in the coming days with some art, and also include notes on the world it takes place in, and some fragments of fiction to get the vibe across.
My thanks to Vivanter, Loch, Cyberspace, and Hawkbeetlette for their fun/productive discussion around this in recent days.
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