The Campaign: Baden-Powell's Dream Made Flesh

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Assassins, Druids, and Monks are classes with implicit hierachies and organizations. Their progress through the levels reflects this. But what about the other classes in the Player's Handbook?

Illusionists don't have any such organization, and neither do Paladins; those classes reflect different fantastic archetypes. Thieves have a loose one, as befitting its sources, while Fighters and Magic-Users have none at all.

But there are a pair of classes that do. We'll leave the big one for tomorrow, and instead today talk about the Ranger.

The Special Tree Service

The Ranger has its roots in literature, legend, and mythology well predating Tolkien's work. What makes his specific take notable is that it is, at its heart, a warrior lodge or knightly order that exists as a remnant of a fallen nation and kingdom aiming to hold the line until what was broken can be reforged.

Take a look at the Ability Score requirements again (pg. 24); this reflects the higher bar that an aspirant must meet not only superior mental and physical standards, but adhere to a superior moral one also. This is less Tolkien and more Baden-Powell (the father of the Scouting movement), who wanted to reshape boys into such men of superior quality.

The implied organization stems from restrictions on retainers, wealth, and collaboration with others of the class. This is impractical, if not impossible, to enforce unless there is an organization in place. A martial profession, with such restrictions, a tight focus on a regular array of enemies, and later training in highly-effective guerilla warfare techniques, is why I regard the Ranger as a Special Forces unit as much as it is "Aragorn: The Class".

This is why I regard the Ranger as possessed of an implicit organization, but it is a small and elite martial society. The ties to Druidry and the influence of Magic-Users in this warrior lodge are further elements of an implicit warrior society- one meant to bridge Nature (Druidry) and Civilization (Magic-Users) in service of Good.

Being The Man of Trout

The Ranger class, in terms of an organization, should be considered a single institution with links to the Druids (and, by extension, to the Bardic College and thus to Bards) and the more-or-less friendly Magic-Users who associate with (or rule) civilized domains dominated by Men and Nature-friendly demihumans.

Thus, while there is no explicit limit to the upper ranks, a Ranger Lord should be in the Faction Play scene as soon as possible because having someone that capable leading a group of fantastic Special Forces operatives. They should also be absent in a Grand Campaign where the classes that train their spell-casting capacities are not available.

The presence of the Ranger in a campaign, therefore, isn't the source of something but the result of something else coming together. If a campaign doesn't have Druids and Magic-Users, Rangers have to be absent also because the institutional relations and structures won't be present to make such a warrior elite possible. This also means that those two classes have leverage over the Rangers, and as those two classes are going to be in a state of tension (Nature vs. Civilization again) the Rangers exist in a cultural and political liminal space to match their operational capacity in literal ones and must negotiate that terrain as deftly as the literal wilderness to maintain the ties that let them do their jobs.

It is likely to be rare, therefore, for a Ranger Lord to be a truly great sovereign in his own right--your Aragorns are going to be the exception, not the rule--but rather be a Faction leader that can and does play Kingmaker and whose efforts can make or break the ambitions of others. Being able to veto someone else is not to be dismissed. They may not gather in great hosts, but the hosts they can rally as individuals working on a distributed basis (ala Special Forces) can more than make up for their inability to march together in numbers akin to such and due to their expertise they have the acumen to make those numbers punch well above their weight while escaping retaliation.

Combine that with the allies they are certain to rally to their cause, and soon those well-mannered scouts show their worth.

And you will learn to heed the Ranger Lord when he comes calling.