There are some wilderness-y classes in old school D&D: the ranger, which was born as a subclass of the fighter; the druid, a subclass of the cleric; and the Unearthed Arcana Barbarian for AD&D, which to my understanding was meant to be a solo-play super-class which meant it was sort of just a fighter with a bunch of extra abilities.
BX is blissfully spared from class archetype inflation. In this game classes are not archetypes, but meta-archetypes; i.e. fighters are people who's main thing is fighting, whether they're a swashbuckler, a knight, or a viking, and so on.
And so the wilderness class should stand on its own, not just be a "fighter/cleric, but..."
Which leads me to:
The Wild Man
Wild Men (or Women, or Woodwose) are humans raised in the wilderness. It is not uncommon for Wild Men to have been reared by apes, wolves, bears, or other such creatures.
Prime Requisite: Constitution
Restrictions: Wild Men use d8 to determine their hit points. They may advance to a maximum of 9th level. Wild Men may use leather armor and shields and can wield axes, clubs, swords, spears, daggers, slings, and bows. Wild men may not establish strongholds or recruit retainers from civilized lands. Wild men make saving throws as a fighter.
Special Abilities:
- Wild men have an 80% chance to climb steep surfaces as a thief and navigate difficult terrain without penalty by swinging from vines, leaping from branch to branch, scrambling over rough ground, and the like. At fourth level this ability extends to moving silently as a thief, but only in the wilderness.
- Wild men may jump a distance equal to half their combat movement vertically or horizontally from a standing position.
- When foraging, parties with a wild man always find at least one days-worth of food even if the foraging roll fails.
- A wild man may communicate nonverbally with animals, rolling reactions as for an NPC. If the animal’s reaction is at least “uncertain,” the wild man can attempt to tame the animal and have it join as a retainer by offering it food or other gifts. The wild man can never have more than his own hit-dice in animal retainers (stolen from Jeff of Swords & Schlock because it’s too good not to use).
- Wild men fight with reckless ferocity; before attacking, the wild man may declare they fight recklessly, gaining a +2 bonus to attack and damage but granting foes +2 to their attacks until the wild man's next turn.
Discussion:
The primary focus of the class is the movement abilities—having such open-ended methods to navigate the environment gives players a new relationship to verticality and space, which hopefully makes the class feel wholly different to play than the others.
Communicating with and recruiting animals is also intended to provide new options for how players interact with wilderness locales, and also gives players the opportunity to mess around more with animals which everyone seems to love doing.
My initial vision for this class was to give bonuses to things involved in wilderness travel, namely not getting lost, foraging and hunting, and tracking monsters to their lairs. Those abilities, in addition to being somewhat boring, are more focused on travel and less on actual adventuring in wilderness locales. But I wanted to throw the foraging ability in there because it seems odd that someone native to the wilderness would have trouble getting something to eat.
The reckless attack ability is intended to be the wild man-version of a thief's backstab and also to prevent the wild man from being outclassed by the beefier cleric while not stepping on the fighter's toes of being the signature martial class.
Why wild man and not barbarian?
Barbarian is an admittedly better and more metal-sounding (so better) term, but it comes with a lot of baggage being a class that's like a figher-but-not-quite. The wild man can easily be considered a re-imagined barbarian, but it is explicitly more Tarzan than Conan.
Wild men as an artistic motif were actually huge in medieval Europe, decorating all sorts of paintings, manuscripts, coats-of-arms, and household objects.
Here are a few words from The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism by Timothy Husband, which I found quite illuminating:
Primitive, irrational, and heretical, the wild man would seem to have been a pariah in a world obsessed with religious interpretation and order. Yet it is largely these very characteristics of medieval society that explain the wild man's invention and development ... The wild man likewise served to counterpoise the accepted standards of conduct of society in general. If the average man could not articulate what he meant by "civilized" in positive terms, he could readily do so in negative terms by pointing to the wild man. As the dialectical antithesis of all man should strive for, the wild man was the abstract concept of "noncivilization" rendered as a fearful physical reality.
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