First off, hi and thanks for the invite!
I think despite trashing barbarians earlier I might try an ape instinct barbarian here, playing the role of circus strong(wo)man. It would work much better for free archetype (I'd likely take wrestler at level 2)
Free archetype has kind of become almost de facto standard variant rule for 2e, I think 3 of the 4 2e games I'm active in use it. Just so everyone is on the same page,
https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1333 .
From that link:
quote:
Depending on the needs of the group and the theme of the game, you might restrict the free feats to those of a single archetype each character in the group has (for a shared backstory), those of archetypes fitting a certain theme (such as only ones from magical archetypes in a game set in a magic school), or entirely unrestricted if you just want a higher-powered game.
So if you wanted to restrict it to a limited subset of 'circus appropriate' archetypes I could see that working well. Or just open it up to anything. It does raise the power level a bit (every character gets an extra class feat every 2 levels) but hasn't been overwhelming in my experience.