When I spoke to Christoffer Bodegård, developer of the running RPG of the year, Esoteric Ebb (which uses a modified form of D&D 5th Edition rules), I had to ask: Why a Cleric? The ubiquitous fantasy holy healers never feel like protagonist material to me—I’d much rather be a sneaky little Dick-Ass Rogue. There was a pretty straightforward answer: Clerics are OP, they can do a little bit of everything, and Man vs. God will never not make for primo literary fodder.
“They’re overpowered,” said Bodegård. “I’m sorry to say they are just overpowered.” He revealed that even the earliest version of Esoteric Ebb that he had mocked up before Disco Elysium radically changed the game’s direction still starred a Cleric and a goblin.
“That first prototype had a Cleric for a bunch of different reasons,” said Bodegård. “Most specifically, the Cleric is the best class of D&D to use if you want to go as wide as possible. The Cleric has spells. He’s very spells-focused. He has heavy armor, but can also go cloth. He heals. So he’s a healer and a spell caster and he’s also melee fighting. The Cleric is able to do all of them.”
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Even as a soft Cleric hater, I can’t deny that their jack of all trades versatility has tempted me in the past. Particularly in my beloved Neverwinter Nights: They were a damned force in 3rd Edition D&D. But there are other options for doing it all: Bards, Fighter/Mages, even a scroll-laden, Use Magic Device Rogue. As Bodegård worked, he found that the religious aspect of the class fantasy gave him a lot to push against and build on for Esoteric Ebb’s story.
“They’re also the main character because they have a god—very narrative driven,” said Bodegård. “Warlocks are also very cool, but they’re way more focused.” I’d never heard anyone make that connection between a Cleric and a Warlock, but it makes a lot of sense. The limited nature of the class fantasy also scans: Even a Chaotic Good Warlock’s gonna be a bit of a bad boy, and the experience of religion is certainly more universal and relatable than that of a Faustian pact.
“It’s thematically relevant to a bunch of the stuff I want to talk about: Masculinity, religion, God, all that stuff. It’s just perfect,” Bodegård explained. It really comes across in the final game: The Cleric’s personal relationship with his god, Urth, is mature and complex, with the god’s status as a controversial historical figure from the recent past only further complicating matters.
When I’m feeling a bit more godly in my D&D games, I’m much more likely to roll as a Paladin, the Cleric’s jock cousin who gets all the babes, but Bodegård had a real hot take on that front: “The fact is, the Paladin is just an off-brand Cleric, arguably, if you want to ignore the Oath thing—which you probably shouldn’t.” Look, it’s true, but he shouldn’t say it.
Even though you are always The Cleric in Esoteric Ebb, the game lets you rebel and embrace another D&D class instead. But even though I got to be a Dick-Ass Rogue, I was not the Dick-Ass Rogue: I found out from my conversation with Bodegård that I could have gotten the explicit epithet on my character sheet if I’d stolen enough stuff. That was only one tiny morsel from the approximately 50% of the game that I’d missed.
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