'A katana with a long single-edged curved blade. A unique weapon wielded by the samurai from the Land of Reeds. The blade, with its undulating design, boasts extraordinary sharpness, and its slash attacks cause blood loss.' The Tarnished's choice of starting class at the start of the canon is the canon's quiet acknowledgement that the Lands Between is not the only land. There are Lands Beyond. The Vagabond is a knight banished from an unnamed motherland after a lengthy vagabond journey; the Astrologer reads fate in the stars, forebear of the Academy's glintstone sorcerers; the Confessor is a church assassin sent from the churches outside the Lands Between, a loyal servant of the Two Fingers; the Hero is from the same badlands as Hoarah Loux; the Samurai is from the Land of Reeds, a far eastern country that owns the canon's only katanas and that has a separate religious order than the Erdtree. Each starting kit is a vestige of a culture whose people the Erdtree's grace once chose to bless.

'Staff of the astrologers. A glintstone is embedded in the tip, enabling it to be used as a catalyst for sorceries. Sorceries must be memorized first at a site of lost grace, and a staff must be equipped to cast them.' The Wretch is the canon's most pointed class, naked, club-armed, untrained. It is what a Tarnished is when the lineage's culture has eroded all the way down. Beneath every Tarnished is a Wretch. Every starting class above Wretch is the residue of a land's last good year before the exile took them. The Tarnished's first item, the Tarnished Furled Finger, the cooperative summoning offering with which one leaves a gold sign in another player's world, is shared across all classes. The class is what they were. The Furled Finger is what they are now: a hand still hearing a voice that may no longer be speaking.