Cleric (Epic Quest Bio)
| Cleric | |
|---|---|
 The Cleric poster, the largest of the nine class posters in the header of the company's member software | |
| First appearance | "How to Play Epic Quest Bio" (2025) |
| Created by | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| In-universe information | |
| Occupation | "operations/legal" |
| Affiliation | Molecular Streaming Corps |
| Color | Green (RGB 0, 151, 106) |
Cleric is one of the nine character classes of Epic Quest Bio, the role-playing game through which Molecular Reality Corporation organizes its work. The help file of the company's member software sums it up as "operations/legal".[1] The founder's essay that introduced the classes in 2025 opens its paragraph on them with "Every epic quest needs its healers, and Clerics heal organizational wounds before they fester."[2] A Player Scientist may take Cleric as a major or a minor class. It is one of three classes whose names have not changed since the company's database was seeded, and the only one named for a member of the clergy.
Origins
The essay, "How to Play Epic Quest Bio", was the landing text of epicquest.bio in 2025. Its Cleric handles "the stuff that makes everyone else's eyes glaze over but would kill us if ignored" and is "the one who remembers that startups need things like 'insurance' and 'contracts' and 'not violating federal law.'" In the essay the Cleric is "part therapist, part lawyer, part accountant, part lobbyist, part patent lawyer, part parent". The paragraph closes on two sentences: "In D&D terms, you keep the party from dying of dysentery. In startup terms, you keep the organization from dying of dysfunction."[2][a]
In the company's database the Cleric is the third of the eight original classes, with the color 0, 151, 106 in RGB, a green, and the stored description "The Cleric class is vital to the mission. [Edit this description in the Command Deck]". A flat icon drawn for it, which survives among the site's unused files, shows a green ring binder marked with a gear, a dollar sign and a heart.[3] A design draft of May 2025 listed fourteen classes, each with a mentor. It gave the Cleric the titles "The Guardian of Governance, The Oracle of Operations, The Ethical Compass", put bioethics, data privacy and "IP strategy (for open source)" among its duties, and assigned it a mentor named Arbiter Justitia "Balance" Lex-Aeterna.[3]
Poster
The Cleric poster is the largest of the nine, 3,928 by 3,744 pixels and 14.4 megabytes. In the header of the member software it appears as a square no more than 40 pixels wide.[3] Blue letters edged in gold spell the class name across the middle. Above them a haloed figure in red and blue robes spreads its arms along glowing branches, and below them a tangle of roots or fungal threads, studded with red and green cells, rises from a white spire. A member who clicks the poster opens the company's chat, LabChat, with "Cleric question:" already typed.
Work of the class
Three quests on the company's list fall in the class's territory; all three have since been switched off. "Play G.C.", worth 10,000 experience points, read: "For actual lawyers only, consult with Kemmishtree on corporate law questions."[b] "Patent prosecution", worth 4,000, asked members to "Work with a sciencer to put together patents (provisional and/or full)", and "Patent production (anti-trolling)", worth 5,000, to "Come up with ideas and make public-domain-assigned patents out of them".[3]
The company's own patent, US 10,908,144, "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof", was granted on February 2, 2021. It lapsed on February 2, 2025, after its first maintenance fee, due three and a half years after the grant, went unpaid.[4] The open design of the company's desktop instrument, the MR1 Nanopore Reader, was first published under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later, and has been in the public domain under CC0 1.0 since October 21, 2026.[5][6] Section 13 of the AGPL requires anyone who runs a modified copy for users over a network to offer those users its source code, a condition that the CC0 dedication does not carry.[7]
In tabletop games
The essay names Dungeons & Dragons as the model for the class system. In that game's first rules, published in 1974, the cleric was one of three classes, beside the fighting-man and the magic-user, and its first spells included Cure Light Wounds.[8] The class was a fighting priest, and its power to repel the undead had its roots in Dracula.[9]
Related classes
The help file lists the Cleric beside the Bard, for "storytelling/marketing", a class that appears in neither the database seed nor the posters.[1] The essay sets the Cleric against two of the other classes: "While Sciencers dream of molecules and Sparkys obsess over circuits, you juggle the thousand boring things that let everyone else focus on the one exciting thing."[2] The Sciencer is now the Scientist; the Sparky kept its name.
See also
Notes
References
- ^ a b "EQBio-OS help: Gamification & Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
- ^ a b c Kemmishtree (2025). "How to Play Epic Quest Bio". epicquest.bio.
- ^ a b c d "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof". Google Patents. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.
- ^ "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)" (commit
a52fc0b). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 21, 2026. - ^ "GNU Affero General Public License, version 3". Free Software Foundation. November 19, 2007.
- ^ Gygax, Gary; Arneson, Dave (1974). Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 1: Men & Magic. Tactical Studies Rules.
- ^ Tresca, Michael J. (2010). The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games. McFarland. p. 85. ISBN 978-0786458950.