The Many Splendors of the Sword-Mage

Elves are classically pretty bishonen and self-serious, but the fact that in OSR games they fight as well as a Fighter while magic-using as well as a magic-user makes them the perfect OC-do-not-steal anime protagonist character option. This is good. Only the small-souled will object to it. As I have long maintained, race-as-class options are a positive. The swordfighter-that-can-cast-spells (aka "gish") is so conceptually perfect, so immediately appealing to the eternal 12-year-old that lives in your brain, that many shy away from it. "Too excessive," they say. "Too indulgent." And then you get contemporary D&D, where there are a dozen different ways to almost make Elric. You can be an eldritch knight or a paladin or a kensai monk or a sword bard or a hexblade or a bladesinger or a pact of the blade or Blade from Blade (ranger with dhampir lineage) with the cantrip Booming Blade—but you can't be all of them. The ever-narrowing specificity of each option fragments the underlying…