Since I do not have a hard and fast alignment system in place (there will be "law affiliated", "chaos affiliated", and "nonaffiliated", with no tracking of how "evil" or "good" the player is), class splitting would be pretty important. Let's see...this is what I had planned for the classes:
- Barbarian: common for chaos and unaffiliated, non-existant for order
- Bard: Planning to take a page from Unearthed Arcana and make this a prestige class
- Cleric: non-existant! The whole idea is that the "mage" characters will be the spellcasters in the campaign. I will fill in prestige classes that allow the player to take on the more traditional roles that clerics fall into (healer, the surgeon above, undead hunter, etc.)
- Druid: also non-existant, as this would take away from the order vs. chaos theme. If order created the universe, then the order mage and druid would overlap too much
- Fighter: a staple for both sides and unaffiliated (though most common in the order areas)
- Monk: I thought about making this an order prestige class, but I will probably leave in (but heavily changed to fit the order vs. chaos instead of good vs. evil). Chaos has a couple of extra classes over the order guys, so this would even things up a bit
- Paladin: non-existant. There will prestige classes of "order knight" and "chaos knight" (similar to the prestige equivalent of the paladin prestige class in Unearthed Arcana)
- Ranger: both sides and nonaffiliated will have these guys (hey, order guys will train scouts as skirmish units in the war against chaos). I might alter them a bit to fit each side, but they will be there (I am planning to take away their spellcasting as per The Complete Warrior's Handbook, since there are no druids in this campaign)
- Rogue: chaos and nonaffiliated definitely, but order non-existant (well, they may exist in an order-driven society, but they will hardly find acceptance, so those would be nonaffiliated)
- Sorcerer: thrown in as the nonaffiliated spellcasting class. The whole idea of magic in the campaign is that the person is born with that special spark that allows them to tap into order and/or chaos. If they either do not receive proper training (or choose not to train) with either order or chaos, then they would be the sorcerers. I am planning to tweak their spells (to give a mix of both order and chaos abilities, since they will tap into both, but not be as good at it as the individual spellcasting classes). I will also have special multiclassing rules in place that will allow a sorcerer to "trade in" levels of sorcerer towards order mage or chaos mage if they choose (i.e. they finally pick a side and receive the proper training; once they do that they will lose their sorcerer spellcasting, but the skills they learned help them advance faster). As a part of the campaign, these guys will be hunted down and converted/killed (order societies) or be subject to continual recruitment attempts (chaos, though how "nice" the attempts are depends on who the sorcerer has the fortune/misfortune of running into)
- Wizard: these are the order mages and chaos mages now
Does this sound like a good list? I've thought about giving the fighters following chaos or nonaffiliated a bonus to AC (+1 or +2 dodge bonus when wearing medium or lighter armor) but taking away their heavy armor proficiency. This would fit, since the order guys would end up being the ones to design heavier armor (the other guys could always take the feat on their own if they got access to heavier armors).