Non-standard occupations in your fantasy

[Pagliacci]

Hi there fellow fantasy writers!

When reading and writing fantasy I tend to come across some standard occupations for main characters. Monarchs, thieves, assassins, soldiers, etc.

I was wondering if anyone's writing or has recently read any fantasy featuring some characters in less standard fantasy occupations.

I love all the classic occupations but I can't help but yearn for some more variety in the jobs of our characters.

What are your thoughts?

[Quantus]

Those are what I generally think of as the Adventurer roles, so I see two wildly different routes to avoid them: the wildly Mundane and the wildly Fictional. 

For the Mundane ones make your character a more everyman profession that might be around the Adventurers, have similar if misapplied skilsets, and so get swept up in their shananigans.  So they arent the Pirate Captain, they're the accountant on a pirate Privateer's ship.  Or they arent the Monarch, but they are the monarch's woodsman or stablemaster.  I once read a story about an accountant chasing down conspiracies, which wasnt a glamorous profession but had given him a certain investigative nature and capacity for complex reasoning. 

 

 For Wildly fictional you are looking at a character that is more of a feature of the setting, and then they are mostly stuck as either the Wizard of the Party (using magic to create and solve problems), or a re-skinned, magical equivalent of one of those mundane, workaday professions (like maybe a journeyman Charmsmith or some such).

 

Or, at the other end of the spectrum, you just under-emphasize their profession as a character, and dodge the issue that way?  Whether that can fly will likely depend more on the shape of the story itself. 

[Ripheus23]

A prostitute-turned-pornographer who was arrested and forced to build a memorial that became a weapon capable of detonating the sun. I might've had an odder idea for a main character as such but I'm not remembering any examples at the moment.

[Bruticus]

I think about this pretty often and it can be a good way to generate story ideas. Just thinking of a fairly normal, mundane job and how that would work in a fantasy setting. I once started writing a short story about a mailman in a fantasy setting and it was a pretty fun story I still plan on finishing some day. I liked the idea of someone just trying to deliver a package while the equivalent of the War of the Ring raged on around them. 

[Pagliacci]

3 minutes ago, Bruticus said:

I think about this pretty often and it can be a good way to generate story ideas. Just thinking of a fairly normal, mundane job and how that would work in a fantasy setting. I once started writing a short story about a mailman in a fantasy setting and it was a pretty fun story I still plan on finishing some day. I liked the idea of someone just trying to deliver a package while the equivalent of the War of the Ring raged on around them. 

I would totally read that story.

I'm work shopping a novel featuring a Necromancer Midwife.

[Zelly]

I had an ex-assassin character who had a talent for making homemade soaps and fragrances so he ran a perfumery on the side.  It was mostly just a cover for his other activities, except that he was fairly good at it.  Bonus was that he could whip up some innocent looking but deadly soap.  Scrub a dub dub, you're dead in the tub.