Three sets of eight jobs for The Merry Band; three standalone zines that you can mix and match.
My starting point for this project was a riff on D&D 4e's Essentials relaunch, standalone pocket sized player handbooks that you could use together or on their own. (Except, you know, hopefully better designed.) Twenty-four jobs is a lot but I didn't want to leave any of my little darlings behind; making little sandboxes felt like a fun design framework. I'll be working on this with a writing partner and releasing them one at a time. The planned thematic groupings for the zines at this moment in time are Cities, the Sea, and Wilderness.
I think of the jobs as originating from three different influential sources. The first is the most traditional, predecessors in tabletop gaming history. The second is based on their successors in the digital age, your Final Fantasys, Fire Emblems, and Darkest Dungeons. The third group is based on archetypes that made thematic sense in a fantasy thieving game but originated in other genre fiction (westerns, mysteries, etc.).
It need not be assumed your character grew up poor and became a thief to sustain themselves. You might have had your beliefs shaken by acts of unspeakable cruelty, forced to flee for your life, or you might be a member of high society who wants to knock other nobles down a few pegs.
It's my hope that I can capture some of the hijinx that people love about D&D without using its rules and trying to pretend that engine was made for anything it wasn't: a combat ruleset does not a social interaction game or heist simulator make.
Besides, who doesn't want to rob rich nobles' estates, dragons' cavernous hoards, or bloodsucking vampires' castles instead of slaughtering nameless orcs? No one I want to game with :v