The Luminary: A New Class for Old-School Games

I've been playing a lot of Dragon Quest games recently. It's been a really fun time. The NES/Famicom versions of Dragon Quest I - III are certainly creaky in places, however, the wonderful character designs, superb music, and rock-solid gameplay has got me kinda addicted. I'm looking forward to playing through more of the series.

The player avatar, or hero, in the Dragon Quest series fills a unique role in the party in Dragon Quest III onwards. The hero is fighter-type class supplemented with magic spells and, in later games and the SNES remakes of earlier titles, has unique sword abilities.

The hero isn't as strong a melee damage dealer as warrior, nor as sturdy. They are outclassed in healing magic by priests, offensive magic by wizards, and are worse all-around mages than sages. Basically, the hero is a jack of all trades, master of none class with a few unique spells/sword abilities.

This happens to be my favorite type of character to play. 

Back when I started playing pen and paper RPGs in the early 2000s my favorite characters to play were combination fighter/wizard classes: Duskblade, Hexblade, Bard, Fighter-Wizard-Eldritch Knight-Spellsword-Abjurant Champion multiclass nonsense, etc. I've been playing mostly B/X and OSR style games for a while now and I haven't quite found a class that does the sword-wizard archetype the way I'd like it. (Shout-out to a local referee's BECMI version of the Ranger class for coming really dang close!)

So, inspired by the Dragon Quest hero class, I thought I'd take a crack at it and have created the "Luminary" class. There are a few design goals I had with this class:

• The class shouldn't be better at fighting than a Fighter. This seems obvious but a lot of  hybrid fighter classes that get made for OSE sort of invalidate the Fighter as an appealing option in my experience. As such, I gave the Luminary the fighting capabilities of the Cleric class (same attack matrix, d6 hit dice).
• The class shouldn't be better at magic than any of the other primary spellcasting classes. I gave the Luminary a very limited spell list, taken from the cleric, magic-user, and druid classes, that maxes out at 4th level spells. This gives them versatility (no class takes spells from the big three lists like the Luminary does) without the high-end of those classes. I also excluded some of the iconic magic-user spells from consideration (e.g., fire ball, lightning bolt) so as not to overshadow the other martial-arcane classes (Arcane Bard, Elf, Half-elf).
• The class should have a unique draw. I designed several "sword spells" that give a boost to a sword strike. They are all inspired by iconic sword abilities in the games. It's something that's been done in later versions of D&D but not something I've seen in B/X (OSE).
• The class should have a unique disadvantage. I limited the weapons available to the Luminary to daggers and swords. This isn't quite accurate to the games as the hero has more weapon versatility. However, the magic sword the hero gets toward the end of the games are iconic and it's always a big moment when one obtains them. The restriction feels in spirit with the games while not being strictly accurate to the games. The disadvantage, of course, is that in ranged combat the Luminary is limited to daggers, (very few!) spells, and stuff like burning oil.
• Finally, the class should be evocative of the hero class from the Dragon Quest games. Folks who have played some of those games should be able to say stuff like, "Yeah, I see it."

All in all, I think the class is fairly well-balanced against the other classes in OSE. And I think it'd be fun to play (isn't that always the real goal?) and possibly an attractive option to players.

Without further ado, here's the Luminary Class.