During lockdown, like so many others, I tried to get a DnD game going with a few friends. Before our plans inevitably collapsed, I was sent a character sheet for a communist Paladin sworn to the Oath of the Common Man. While there’s no quick way to introduce China Miéville’s oeuvre, this homebrew DnD class returns to me now as a good outline of his disposition and concerns. Beyond his own affinity for TTRPGs, Miéville, like any good paladin, holds “neurotically faithful and unchanging fidelity” to his obsessions, of which theology, Weird Fiction, and Marxism are obvious fixtures.
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