The Missing Class

I’m sure that over the years, most B/X DMs have been unable to resist the temptation to add additional character classes to the game, whether custom-made or adopted from 1^st Edition AD&D. I have myself, more than once, though I started to notice that oddly enough, my players rarely took me up on it, defaulting instead to the classic seven classes. With that in mind, and a new campaign to start shortly, I started to think about what I might add, going back through my notes, my archive of old magazines, trying to see what might fit.

And I struggled. Genuinely, I struggled. I’ve always thought that most of the variant AD&D classes suffered for having high Ability Score requirements, few ever qualifying for them, to the point that in my last two campaigns I dropped those requirements completely, though even with that adjustment, everyone went for the Original Seven instead. The more I stopped to think about it, the more I understood it. Those seven classes cover an awful lot of ground between them, and over the long years they’ve become truly iconic.

For that matter, the only variant class I personally would be tempted by would be the Illusionist, and in all honesty, that’s just a Magic-User with a variant spell list. (Though my version changes the Prime Requisite to Charisma for obvious reasons. Not least to give that player who rolls a high Charisma score something to celebrate.) One way or another, I’ll continue to use the Illusionist, I suspect. If for no other reason than that I have a fondness for that class, and that it tends to create some truly fun NPCs for me to run. (I suppose I could simply add the additional spells of the class to the vanilla Magic-User, but where’s the fun in that.)

Aside from that, though, there is only one character class that I think actually fills a gap in the game. Let’s quickly evaluate the Original Seven. Four human classes, Fighter, Thief, Cleric and Magic-User, and three race-based classes, in the form of Elf, Dwarf and Halfling. (Hobbit if the Tolkien Estate isn’t sitting at your table.) There’s a class missing from that list. There’s no race-based class for humans. Now I know what you are all thinking, that humans already have four classes of their own, but none of them are truly a quintessential human.

Which brings me to the Barbarian, though not the class from Unearthed Arcana, instead the class from White Dwarf #5, which frankly I have always preferred. This one is Robert E. Howard’s Barbarian, instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Barbarian, a wiry, wily fighter with a selection of relevant special skills that make him appear as though he has stepped out of the Stone Age, instead of being a simple Fighter-variant. Skills in Tracking and Sign Language, a limited weapon and armour selection, reduced hit points from the Fighter (d6 instead of d8), but levelling at the same rate as the Cleric in compensation, and an ability to climb that is similar to that of the Thief, though the Thief’s skill is superior. (I want to see a group that is composed entirely of Barbarians and Thieves…) I’ve made a few modifications to the basic idea, but basically, it’s the same class as described in that very early issue of White Dwarf.

Any number of early modules talk about Barbarians, and while I’ve only used this one in a handful of campaigns thus far, and again, nobody has actually played one, I’m definitely throwing it into my next one, with the core idea that it represents a human racial class. Those four original human classes represent civilized characters, while this one represents humanity in its basic, elemental form. Not to mention that it fills one other critical niche.

Now you can roll a random character class on a d8.