My love for D&D Basic era play is well known and well documented, but my love is tempered and not complete. I have a confession. I really am not a fan of B/X or BECMI style Race as Class.
In the D&D Basic rules Dwarves and Halflings are basically fighters with level limits. Elves are multiclassed fighter/magic-users, also with level limits. While this certainly works, it also seems rather, well... limiting. I mean really, the archetypical halfling/hobbit is a thief. This was one of the reasons I think so many people went over to AD&D. I know it was true, partially, for me.
Over the years of game-play I have worked around this, but I never quite got used to it.
Now one thing I do like is the idea that different races should different class expressions. So not a "
theif" per se but a "
burgler" would be cool. Something special.
The
ACKS Player's Companion does a great job of this really. This includes such new classes as the dwarven delver, dwarven fury, dwarven machinist, elven courtier, elven enchanter, elven ranger, and the gnomish trickster. While these could, at the surface level, be viewed as mere renaming of the basic four classes, there is a little more to play with here in terms of special abilites.
As mentioned in the past, this is also the book you need when you want to create new classes.
+James Spahn's Barrel Rider Games has a number of demi-human classes in the
Class Compendium. These include various dwarven classes; Raging Slayer, Rune-Smith and the Warchanter. Some elves, Dark Elf, Greensinger, Half-Elf and the Sylvan Elf. And as to be expected, Halfling classes, Burglar, Feast Master, Huckster, Lucky Fool, and the Tavern Singer.
I think there are a lot of options for race-specific classes or archetypes.
Back in the 2nd Ed days we had "kits" for various classes and some of these were racial archetypes.
The Complete Book of Elves is a good example. There is a lot of fluff and some backgrounds, but the real meat comes in when we get into the sub-races. I was never a fan of the Drow-fetish that plagued much of post 1st ed D&D, but a sylvan elf or something stranger like a snow elf, would have been cool to play. Heck I even created my own elf race, the
Gypsy Elf, to fill this need. We don't get to any of the class kits till Chapter 10. There are some nice choices but we also get the nearly 'broken'* Bladesinger. *I say broken, but really I just don't like it all that much, and it was abused a lot in groups I was in.
The books for the
Dwarves and the
Halflings & Gnomes book are similar. What gets me though is really how much we are lacking in race-specific classes. Sure the entire idea behind "Fighting-Man" and "Magic-User" is so they can be generic enough to cover all possibilities. But I think after we got past 0e and certainly into AD&D we would be at a point where there should have been more race-specific expressions of class archetypes.
Something like what I did for the Dwarven witch, the
Xothia. Still a recognizable archetype (witch) but presented through the lens of a specific race (dwarf). Honestly I would like to see a reason, given in a similar format, for the gnome illusionist. Why are there gnome illusionists? What are they called?
The
Companion Expansion from Barrataria Games does cover gnomes and wild-wood (sylvan) elves, half-orcs, half-ogres and half-elves as race-classes. Wood elves share the same spell lists as do druids and gnomes share a list with Illusionists and bards. All for the B/X system. Maybe something
+Gavin Norman and
+Nathan Irving could look into for their updates for their respective spellcaster books.
I think in the end I would like to see more racial, or read that as cultural, applications of classes.
