LogFAQs > #896561111

Weeeeeeeell, it's a druid in the same sense that it's closer to the early historical version of bards (as opposed to the fantasy game version of bards), in that both druids and bards sort of grew out of the same social role, which sort of fit that mold...

(see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil%C3%AD )

...but neither really fits precisely, because from what we know druids were mostly settled, while bards didn't really have any legal standing. By the time the druids sort of became what we think of as BEING druids, they'd sort of left a lot of that behind.

(I went through a Celt/Bardic phase in late high school/early college, which was mostly triggered by the King Arthur phase I went through in late middle school/early high school. Which has always led me to associate bards and druids in my head in ways that D&D really doesn't. Which is how I know this. And why I know what an ollam/ollave is.)

But either way, bard and druid are kind of off the table anyway, just by virtue of both of them already being character classes and coming with a lot of pop culture expectations regardless (and on a tangentially related note, it's really annoying that you can't refer to a female Wizard as a Sorceress in D&D because Sorcerer is a separate class with its own connotations).


After originally posting that question, though, it occurred to me that I was forgetting the Justicars and Archons in White Wolf, which are sort of that concept (ie, non-location-based legal operatives with remit to travel and carry out existing edicts and pass judgement on violators or mediate between feuding parties). Though both of those terms are also a) based on real world terms that don't necessarily have the same meaning WW uses them for, and b) sort of flipped the wrong way around (in the real world, "archon" basically means "ruler" while "justicars" would be appointed officials that would serve a ruler in an executive capacity, but in WW the Justicars were running things while the Archons were their lackeys).

It also occurred to me that the Hollywood version of marshals in the Wild West can sort of fit that mold, though that's more Western than fantasy so not necessarily appropriate in that context.


As an aside, though, also since then I managed to find an article online that mentions that Imperial era China DID have Magistrates that served as both judicial agents as well as "investigators", which actually puts the Magistrates in L5R closer to reality than I originally thought they were. Though they're still mostly grounded in a single jurisdiction rather than acting as wandering problem solvers.


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