This is a great post about an idea for working class wizards in fantasy writing! It actually makes total sense and I’m going to somehow incorporate some of these ides into my next Dungeons & Dragons campaign fore sure. Here’s a list of jobs that working class wizards could do:
(via: r/CuratedTumblr)
Ben Aaronovitch is doing the police wizard in his Rivers of London series. Peter Grant is definitely from a working-class background!
Retired Wizard working as a Handyman. No matter how many spells knows, he usually just resorts to using Mending like a champ.
Pathfinder and D&D both assume the rarity of magic. A pesant is lucky if they can scrape a few gold together a week. A noble a few hundred gold, but a wizard is looking at thousands of gold a session or at least 100s of gold for the casting of a single spell. That is the economy of the world and it is based on rich adventurers bringing back treasure. Making magic more common cheapens it and drastically changes the economy of the world.
As it should!
These are just magewrights.
In the Guardians of the Flame series (Joel Rosenberg), they introduced agricultural wizards that would make it rain at certain times to keep the crops fertile, or they’d cast repellent spells to reduce the pest population.
In the Taltos novels (Steven Brust), there are wizards that are paid specifically to teleport people around, for those that can’t or don’t have the patience to do it themselves.
Several of these are spot on to Azalea Ellis’ “A Practical Guide to Sorcery.”