Last Week: Turning the 0E D&D Level Titles Into a Job Tree and Inferring a Setting Through Backward Induction
Adept. Here we can start adding diagonal lines that break from linear leveling. Obviously an acolyte can become an adept, but what does it look like if a veteran can also become an adept? Perhaps that implies a state religion where a possible reward for military service is entry into the priesthood. An adept gains basic clerical spellcasting. This function of the job tree would already create some contrasting characters. An acolyte-adept would be very similar to a B/X cleric, while a veteran-adept would be a little tougher and have access to magic, but would be unable to turn undead.
Warrior. The natural progression from veteran to warrior would produce a familiar fighter character; but what about an apprentice-warrior? This character would have some skills and some martial talent. Advancement through the fighter column will probably just add more HD, but a more feature-rich system could add martial abilities closer to modern D&D.
Footpad. You’ll notice that while the cleric and fighter columns have some clear indications of seniority as they advance, the thief column is more of a festival of synonyms. Let’s say that a footpad leaves behind the ambiguity of the apprentice and is now actively committing crimes. Advancement through this column probably entails gradual increases to the traditional thief skills.
Seer. Seers could gain access to magic from the divination school. Leaning into the schools of magic would give some real oomph to leveling up. For a medium-seer, this is a matter of applying discipline and rigor to not just understand the voices of the dead, but also interpret their prophetic utterances. On the other hand, an apprentice-seer could explore the practical applications of trade magic.
Village Priest. The implicit institutional hierarchy in these jobs comes across most strongly in the cleric column. The acolyte joins the monastery or temple. The adept further hones that skill, with the ranks of the sheltered acolyte-adepts strengthened by the integration of more worldly veteran-adepts. Once they have mastered the adept job, they are experienced enough to run their own parishes.
Swordsman. This is another odd title that provides an interesting worldbuilding opportunity. What does it mean for someone to be a veteran and a warrior before they become a "swordsman"? I read this order to imply that training, ownership, and usage of swords is strictly controlled by the state. A veteran-warrior may fight with a spear or an axe, but only after they become a swordsman are they allowed to carry a sword.
Advancing to our third row begins to provide more disparate combinations of jobs. A veteran-warrior-swordsman could be a martial master who earned their place despite their family’s low standing. An acolyte-adept-swordsman could be someone of noble birth who was trained in the church, but always expected to return to the nobility and take up their familial sword. A veteran-adept-swordsman is a soldier who was singled out for their tactical abilities. An apprentice-warrior-swordsman is an irregular, non-military warrior who by luck, daring, or sheer skill rose to the envied rank of swordsman.
Robber. The thief column, with its profusion of synonyms, will provide more of a challenge than the other three columns. But the different branching options that could bring a PC to the robber job provide some ideas. A warrior-robber is someone who forewent the option to become a warrior-swordsman. Were they driven by money? Or dislike of the noble class that dominates the upper ranks of the fighter column? A seer-robber is using their prescient magical abilities to steal – perhaps to in turn acquire better magiks? Is it possible that taking a level of robber is a faster route to magical power than sticking to the linear magic-user column?
Conjurer. It’s worth noting that the first two levels of magic-user are essentially non-material. Someone who can speak with the dead or predict the future is powerful in a sense, but they’re not altering reality. Conjurers change things – the conjurer PC is now able to create something from nothing. Note how apprentice-seer-conjurer continues to support the idea of trade magic; predicting the future and conjuring objects are two of the most practical applications of magic.
Vicar. What a vicar is and what responsibilities they have can vary considerably depending on what real-world religious denomination one uses as a reference point, but the seniority escalation continues in a grokkable fashion. No special notes here. Someone taking the vicar job is probably just getting more cleric powers, but they’re also likely deputized or assigned some important role in the church-state apparatus. Anyone wanting to avoid such an assignment would choose not to become a vicar and instead would be a…
Hero. This is one of the most general “titles” on the entire list, so naturally we can have three different row-three jobs fed into it. What it means to be a “hero” is implied by both the path a character took to get here, and the paths they didn’t take. A village priest who forgoes the opportunity to become a vicar and instead becomes a hero perhaps saved the village at the expense of their standing in the church. The warrior-swordsman-hero could suggest a paragon of the form, someone who has defeated every other swordsman in the city; while an adept-swordsman-hero could tap into the etymological origins of the word hero, and be part divine; a demigod like Hercules. Warrior-robber-hero continues the fiction implied in the robber description above. I’m not even sure what to make of an apprentice-seer-robber-hero progression, but it sounds exciting.
Burglar. As with robber, we are challenged with a non-evocative title (by virtue of synonymity), so let’s once again look at what the burglar isn’t. Choosing not to become a hero suggests the character is not driven by justice. Not becoming a theurgist (see below) suggests they are not motivated by subversion of divine power. Burglar would be a middle path between the factions. This column has a mercantile feel to it, so we could even treat burglar as a close cousin to burgher.
Theurgist. This is one of the most curious choices on the list. Theurgy implies specifically divine magic, but it appears in the magic-user column, rather than the cleric path. D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder would square this circle with the mystic theurge, a spellcaster who could use both divine and arcane magics; but we’re not interested in the prestige class approach, which is (as discussed in the Dice Exploder podcast linked at the beginning of this series) clearly mechanics-first, flavor-and-story-second. Instead, presume that divine and arcane magic are not so neatly separated in this world (that the first-row medium job communing with the souls of the dead supports that idea). Keep in mind that the cleric column is expressly hierarchical. The theurgist could be someone tapping into divine power without participating in the state religion’s rituals. I see this as a banned profession. Trade magicians are expected to stop at the conjurer level, while someone coming to theurgist from the robber job is already outside the law.
Curate. I thought the veteran entry was puzzling, but curate’s position on the OD&D table is doubly so. What a curate is can vary depending on which religious tradition one references, but a curate is typically engaged as assistant to a priest or vicar. Why would it appear here, rather than a step or two lower on the table? Again, it can vary depending on the path the PC took to get there.
Let’s say that a village priest-vicar-curate has undergone a kind of ritualized demotion, a way of expressing their humility. A village priest-hero-curate is probably still on a normal advancement track, since they “skipped” the vicar job. Someone who becomes a curate with no prior clerical levels is probably the beneficiary of some kind of worldly leader’s investiture discretion.
Swashbuckler. D&D was always a historical mashup, and the presence of swashbuckler in the same list is a reminder that it was never a purely medieval game. A logical extension of the preceding hero category would be that swashbucklers would be like musketeers, members of an elite military company entangled with affairs of church and state. This is also a convenient point for the thief column to cross back over into the fighter column, with a robber-swashbuckler fulfilling a Robin Hood type of role.
Cutpurse. Yet another implicit seniority disconnect here. The footpad-robber-burglar path at least vaguely implies crimes of escalating complexity. What sense does cutpurse make in the upper half of the thief column? Perhaps we take it euphemistically. The powerful banking guilds that control trade magic and keep the national purse full form a counterweight to the state religion favor thieves among their merchant-leaders because they are well-suited to becoming white hats who can stop thefts.
Enchanter. The magic user column continues to raise interesting questions. If we proceed from our idea with the theurgist that we’re entering the world of outlawed magics, enchantment makes sense, given how it lends itself to deceit and fraud. Where a burglar-cutpurse has perhaps “gone straight,” a burglar-enchanter is doubling down on illegal activity.
Next Week: Finishing the 0E D&D Jobs and Summing Up the Implied World