I really enjoy the Final Fantasy series, especially one through six. I had an idea for open legend with a final fantasy theme.
The magic users in my game, black & white mage, will gain access to at least two different uses of their extraordinary skill; energy for black mage and creation for white mage. The black mage will gain access to one or more spells under the energy skill; fire, ice, thunder, etc. The white mage will gain access to one or more spells under the creation school; cure, protect (resistance boon targeting one of the physical attacks), shell (resistance targeting one of the energy attacks). The mages will also be able to obtain new spells (uses of their skills or boons) via purchasing books, just like in FF2, or through the use of magicite like FF6, etc. I like the idea of gaining the use of boons and uses of the specific skill via finding books using magicite to learn the specific skill. All of this is in my head, so I writing this here to hear your thoughts regarding this idea.
I would recommend against limiting your players to “classes”, it goes against a lot of what makes Open Legend special, as well as requiring a lot of work on your behalf to try and work out how to separate all the Banes and Boons.
The easiest way to do a particular setting in OL:
Explain the setting to your players
Be there during character creation
You don’t need a step 3
Have your players decide how to build their characters, and make yourself available to answer questions about what works and what doesn’t work for a character idea. Have them come up with explanations for how they came by their abilities rather than just handing then a set explanation. It’s far easier to just use the existing system, and you’ll never end up with a character that doesn’t fit the setting because you can just say “this character doesn’t quite fit, how about we change it a bit?”
Give it a go, you’ll be surprised at how well it works. Best of luck!
You’re making things more difficult than necessary. One of the great things about Open Legend is that skills don’t dictate what you can do. Just having a Creation score doesn’t mean anything on its own. It’s knowing how to cast cure that allows you to use Creation to heal someone. If you want to allow characters to learn new spells from books, then just establish in the fiction that they can. If I recall FF2 correctly, books could also be used as consumable magic items. In that case, you would want to treat them as extraordinary items.
Building on what SamWilby said, just have players tell you want they want to be. There’s no reason you can’t have your players tell you what jobs they want to play, but use that to start a converation with your players about what that means to them. For example, maybe you think of jumping when you think of dragoons, but maybe one of your players actually wants a pet wyvern instead (like DRG in FF XI).