My first 5E campaign was set in a faux Polynesian/Southern Pacific setting I called Catamaran. Think one part Moana one part the movie the Deadlands; little metal, lots of time on boats, etc. In developing this setting I stumbled on an idea; limiting the number of classes present in the setting among the population. I came up with this idea while brainstorming the setting because I wanted to tie classes to the setting where possible.
Catamaran is made up of 333 islands that were the fragments of a slain Creator god, and each island had its own local god formed from a shard of the divine power of that Creator God. Some of these were the standard humanoid god, others were gods of the forge that were eternally hot stones and others obsidian eyes carried around by a human host. Each of these gods could only empower one cleric, so if you met a cleric you knew that cleric had a direct and personal relationship with their god. It made meeting clerics a unique and important event as each one had the ear of a god directly; these were not very powerful gods, but still powerful enough to command respect.
Those gods capable of motion could choose to leave their island, becoming mortal in the process and a member of the Demigod race (which was available to PCs and will be detailed in a future post). That god’s island would then have extra divine power, which is how you got druids. Druids could only exist by drawing power from an island with an absentee god, meaning each druid had an island and god they were narratively tied to, creating more links to the world, and making druids a rare commodity. They could only exist in the wake of despair, ennui, revenge, or wanderlust driving a god to leave their island. It also made druids somewhat circumspect by many in the setting as they were seen by some as freeloaders taking power that wasn’t theirs.
At the time of the campaign there were only six paladins in the setting. There had been three hundred at the dawn of creation when the Creator god created the first paladins as her agents, but each time a paladin is killed without a ritually recognized squire their paladin essence is lost. Thus over centuries the three hundred had been whittled down to six. This created a driving sense of loss in the PC paladin, that he was among the last of a dying order. The few times they met a paladin NPC it was a big deal, and they were very conflicted about killing a paladin NPC who had gone bad without him naming a squire. Recovering paladin essences became a major campaign goal and eventually involved a trip to the realm of the dead.
Wizards in Catamaran were empowered by the stars, fragments of the Creator god that escaped the fall to earth. There were twenty five such stars, each empowering one wizard until that wizard died, at which point it passed to the next most suitable host (what exactly that meant was cause for great debate). This made the wizard community very small and tight knit; there were only so many people you could trade spells with so you couldn’t go around making them all mad. New Wizards were quickly found and adopted into the community by one of the various cabals and factions, each trying to get more wizards than the others. Unfortunately one of those cabals learned how to harvest the star energy that gave the Wizardss their power, what was called their mage spark. This process required the killing of the wizard who had the spark, leading one wizard to go rogue and begin collecting sparks by murdering his rivals, in time becoming the setting’s first lich by drawing power from the extra mage sparks to extend his life. He became the setting’s big bad as he came after the PC wizard several times.
The only Barbarian that appeared in the campaign was a PC who had been ritually buried at sea as an offering to the sharks, but came back from the dead imbued with a shark spirit, thus becoming a shark totem barbarian. He got to be unique in the setting due to his class and people were terrified of him. The monk in the party was similarly unique at the beginning of the campaign, having a divine fragment his people’s god in him, but he was able to train and induct new monks later in the campaign by sharing this fragment and teaching them his Way of the Boat martial arts style on board his Bojo, or boat dojo. The rogue didn’t have anything unique about him but he did have a gun, which was pretty damn rare.
These limitations in the setting made the players feel extra special within the world and more tied to it because they were a rare type of person. If you can work it out I think these sort of numerical limits can greatly enhance the enjoyment of a setting by making it focus more on the players and shrinking the scope of the setting. It can take a lot of story planning to work around these classes not being plentiful. Not having clerics or wizards as enemy npc options did certainly sometimes get annoying, but warlocks and sorcerers usually work in a pinch. Just having the PCs know if they met a paladin it was a rare thing, or if they met a cleric that cleric knew his or her god personally made a huge difference in interactions.
In my second 5E campaign none of the players made a paladin or cleric initially, so I made the decision to run the campaign on the other side of the world from my Catamaran setting, one that did not have the local gods. Instead it had no gods, so there were no clerics and initially no paladins(I’m old school and assume paladins have to have a divine element). The players liked this idea and the capacity to be brought back from the dead was totally off the table now. There was a druid PC and thus druids in the setting. Thes druids got their power from trees of life spread across the region, each granting its power to one druid. So you were the druid of “the Tree of Iios” or such. The first few sessions this all worked well.
A few sessions later a new player joined and wanted to play a paladin, so I let him play as a paladin who gets his power directly from his oaths rather than having any sort of divine element . This worked out well and he was the only paladin any of the PCs had ever met, which made him feel special. The PCs have since learned of other paladins given powers by a badly wounded god, but are pretty sure there is something sketchy going on with that.
About a year and a half into the game the players found a badly wounded god and learned the gods of old had been attacked by the Court of Hell and most were killed. The god they found was the Reborn Flame, a god of the Hearth discussed previously in my blogs. Restoring the Reborn Flame suddenly made cleric an available class in addition to opening up subclasses that had divine spellcasting. This fundamentally changed the setting and one of the PCs became the first fleric of the Reborn Flame. They became the main agent of the only active god in the setting, thus gaining political in addition to more direct power. Other NPC clerics have appeared in time, but never superseding the PC cleric.
So what I’m saying in all this is don’t be scared to make your PCs the only members of their class, or make them one of a handful of members of their class. It makes them feel much more important than being one of hundreds and makes their magical gifts seem special and wondrous again rather than the factory standard. In a setting with six paladins, you can see your players eyes get real big when you tell them that the NPC they’re fighting smites them.