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5e Homebrew

Ancestry, Culture, and Cultural Setting

* Modified: *

Standard 5e Race has been replaced thematically and mechanically with the combination of Ancestry, Culture, and Cultural Setting. This new system attempts to open up more options for character creation while also exploring the Sci-Fi/Fantasy theme, “What if ‘Race’ as a concept didn’t exist? What would a world and its diverse peoples be like?”

Ancestry (Bloodline)

Ancestries flow from the realms/planes where one’s blood ancestors originated: The Prime Material, Feywild, Beastlands, Perennial Realm, Elemental Planes, Outer Planes, and/or Far Realms. Choose One or Two Ancestries. Each Ancestry may have three or more choices of Feats to reflect abilities gained through that bloodline. Only one Ancestral Feat may be chosen per character at character creation, regardless of having more than one significant Ancestry. If the character has additional Feats from another source, consider using the Ancestral Feat choices as a guideline.

  • Ancestries do not have an innate Ability Score bonus. This is replaced by a point-buy mechanic in assigning Ability Scores, choice of Culture, and some Feat choices.
  • Ancestries do not have innate Darkvision or pre-defined special abilities or proficiencies. This is replaced with the choice of an Ancestral Feat and Cultural Setting.
  • (Example physical forms) are what the chosen Ancestry encompasses from standard 5e Races in terms of physical form, but is not limited to these forms. If someone wants to play a standard 5e Race, it will be approximated by choosing the associated Ancestry. The character does not gain any of the standard benefits of that Race, instead gaining the benefits of this alternate system.
  • (Creature Type) is what the Ancestry will be regarded as for mechanics that use Type. Some spells and abilities, for example, only affect certain Types of creatures.
  • All Ancestries are Medium- or Small-sized creatures (though their relatives may be much larger or smaller).

Suggested Ancestries

Choose one or two of those listed below to represent your character’s dominant bloodline(s). Then choose one Feat listed in one of the chosen Ancestries; this reflects what your character has inherited from their ancestors by blood.

Human

  • Example physical forms: All the variety of our world
  • Creature Type: Humanoid
  • Potential Feats: Tough, Durable, or Resilient.

The human form emerged in the Prime Material from the combined influence of—and as a reflection of—all the realms. For this reason they are more prevalent in the world, but are not strictly dominant. There are many mixtures of Human ancestry with other bloodlines, and are particularly well-suited to adapting to the diversity of the Prime Material.

Feyborn

  • Example physical forms: Elf, Halfling, Gnome, Feral Tiefling, Firbolg, Satyr (Feyborn/Beast Kin), Dryad (Feyborn/Plant Kin)
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Fey
  • Potential Feats: Magic Initiate, Fey Touched, Fade Away, or Bountiful Luck.

Peoples with Feyborn blood have an ancestral connection with otherworldly Fey. They may have been born in the Feywild (encompassing both the “light” Feywild and “dark” Shadowfell in this homebrew world), or on the Prime Material to parents with Feyborn ancestry. Feyborn come in many humanoid forms, and greatly vary in size; they have no “average” height per se, and can range from 2’ to 7’ tall. The Feyborn encompass all subraces of Elves, Halflings, Gnomes, Firbolgs, and Feral (Fey-like) Tieflings in other settings, or have a unique appearance not described elsewhere — the Feywild, if anything, is restless in its creation of new forms.

Feyborn are occasionally Called back to the Feywild by the Ruling Powers. The Call may come at any time and is rarely expected. Some Feyborn go decades without being Called; some are called back once a Year or even once per Season. The length of the stay depends on the Ruling Power who Calls and what business they have with the Feyborn. Those Feyborn who were born on the Prime Material often see their first Calling as a rite of passage.

Elemental Kin

  • Example physical forms: Dwarf (Elemental Kin/Human), Goliath, Genasi
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Elemental
  • Potential Feats: Durable, Elemental Adapt (modified - reroll 1s once for damage, minimum of 2 damage per die), Flames of Phlegethos (adapted for the chosen Elemental affinity), or Powerful Build + Damage Reduction 2.

Elemental Kin are manifestations of the Elemental Planes who have adapted to the Prime Material over hundreds of generations. In appearance, Elemental Kin are humanoid and range from 4.5’ to 8’ tall. Many are powerfully built well beyond the frame and proportions of most humans. Pure Elemental Kin are completely hairless, but may maintain the appearance of hair through elemental projection (for example, having “hair” or a “beard” of flame). Those who have mixed ancestry can grow varying amounts of body hair. The Elemental Kin encompass and replace Dwarves, Goliaths, and Genasi from other settings.

Beast Kin

  • Example physical forms: Tabaxi, Kenku, Triton, Lizardfolk, Shifter
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Beast
  • Potential Feats: Mobile, Athlete, Charger, Infernal Constitution, Observant, Skulker, Squat Nimbleness, Tough, Natural Weapon, Danger Sense or some other as appropriate. Work with the DM to find, adapt, or create an appropriate Feat consistent with your physical form. Such Feats can mimic existing Racial features such as extended movement (speed/climbing/swimming/flying), teeth/claws, or similar.

The ancestors of the Beast Kin hail from the Beastlands, a parallel plane to the Prime where live the Beastlords and their offspring. Beast Kin have as many forms as there are animals - land, sea, or air. Beast Kin with shared ancestry in Human, Feyborn, or Elemental Kin may have more subtle animal features.

Plant Kin

  • Example physical forms: Shambling Mound, Myconid, Blight, Treant
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Plant
  • Potential Feats: Work with the DM to find or create an appropriate Feat consistent with your physical form. One could adapt Dragon Hide to be Tough Bark, for example, or Poisoner as a natural defense rather than relying on equipment.

The flora equivalent of Beast Kin from the Perennial Realm and have as many forms as there are plants (including fungi) - land, sea, or air. Plantkin with shared ancestry in Feyborn may resemble Dryads.

Dragonborn

  • Example physical forms: Dragonborn (RAW)
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Dragon
  • Potential Feats: Dragon Hide (plus damage resistance to 1 type), Breath Weapon (+1d6 above standard), or Dragon Fear (uses/day per Dragonborn Breath Weapon progression).

Dragonborn are the result of dragon blood being introduced to other ancestries while a dragon is in humanoid form. In most bloodlines, the draconic traits lay dormant. Those who manifest draconic traits and talents rarely live past puberty. Those that do, however, are said to have the potential to become more powerful than either parent. If you choose Dragonborn as an Ancestry, choose one other to represent your other bloodline.

Scion

  • Example physical forms: Tiefling, Aasimar
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Planar (encompassing Celestial and Fiend)
  • Potential Feats: Infernal Constitution, Magic Initiate, or Metamagic Adept.

Scions have ancestry from the Outer Planes. This is inclusive of, but not limited to, beings such as typical Aasimar or Tieflings — one’s ancestors may be from any of the Outer Planes, not only the Celestial or Infernal realms. They may be the mortal children of gods or descendants of powerful planar creatures. Scions often share another Ancestry, though that bloodline may not manifest as strongly as the Planar parentage.

Aberrants (Aberrant Feyborn)

  • Example physical forms: Orc, Goblin, Kobold, Gith, Yuan-Ti (Aberrant/Beast Kin)
  • Creature Type: Humanoid, Aberration
  • Potential Feats: Telepathic, Shadow Touched, or Eldritch Adept.

The ancestors of the Aberrants were Feyborn who studied and made pacts with creatures from the Far Realms. Over time, these dealings changed the Aberrants into something quite different from other Feyborn. Many have telepathic abilities or other unusual powers not fully understood by traditional Feyborn. While not inherently evil, there is something unsettling about most Aberrant Feyborn to other creatures native to the Prime Material. There is an instinctual sense that Aberrants are at least partially an Outsider, and do not fully conform to the realities of the Prime Material or even other Planes of Existence. The Aberrant Feyborn are often (consciously or unconsciously) treated with suspicion by most humanoid peoples because of this.

Because they have been changed so greatly through their ancestral association with the Far Realms and its beings, Aberrant Feyborn are almost never Called to the Feywild as other Feyborn are.

Mixed Ancestry

  • Choose one Feat from one of your character’s Ancestries. If one from two different Ancestries is desired, opt for trading the 10 point-buy Ability Score points on a Feat and choose appropriately.

Culture

Choose Two to represent the major cultural norms of among whom your character was raised; for example, Warrior-Craftsman or Artistic-Scholarly. These need not reflect your character’s current personal values, but represent the values of your upbringing. Cultural bonuses reflect the demands to conform to the culture of your character’s upbringing, whether or not they accepted those demands then or now. Work with the DM if you have another broad Culture type/value you’d like to use.

  • Warrior: +1 Str, Dex, or Con
  • Diplomatic: +1 Int, Wis, or Cha
  • Artistic: +1 Dex, Int, or Cha
  • Religious: +1 Int, Wis, or Cha
  • Merchant: +1 Con, Wis, or Cha
  • Scholarly: +1 Int, Wis, or Cha
  • Craftsman: +1 Str, Dex, or Int
  • Skulduggery: +1 Dex, Int, or Wis

Cultural Setting/Environment

A Culture may (and usually does) encompass more than one Cultural Setting. Choose One to represent the primary environment of where your character was raised. Like Culture, it need not reflect where your character currently lives, but where they spent the majority of their formative years:

  • Surface, Urban: Skill Proficiency, 2 Language Proficiencies
  • Surface, Rural: Skill Proficiency, 2 Tool Proficiencies
  • Surface, Wilderness: Skill Proficiency, base Speed increases by 5’
  • Subterranean, Urban: Darkvision*, 2 Language Proficiencies
  • Subterranean, Rural: Darkvision*, 2 Tool Proficiencies
  • Subterranean, Wilderness: Darkvision*, base Speed increases by 5’

Darkvision: While subterranean human populations have not yet developed innate Darkvision, they have adapted through magical means. If your character is of solely Human Ancestry from a subterranean setting, they can use the Darkvision Spell 1x per Long Rest.

Examples for Converting Existing Races

These examples are not exhaustive, and are intended as potential ways to interpret existing 5e Races in terms of the Ancestry, Culture, and Cultural Setting rules that replace them.

  • High Elf: Feyborn, Warrior-Scholarly Culture, Surface Urban Cultural Setting
  • Wood Elf: Feyborn, Artistic-Scholarly Culture, Surface Wilderness Cultural Setting
  • Drow Elf: Feyborn, Religious-Skulduggery Culture, Subterranean Urban Cultural Setting
  • Lightfood Halfling: Feyborn/Human, Artistic-Diplomatic Culture, Surface Rural Cultural Setting
  • Stout Halfling: Feyborn/Elemental Kin, Merchant-Diplomatic Culture, Surface Rural Cultural Setting
  • Hill Dwarf: Elemental Kin or Elemental Kin/Human, Craftsman-Merchant Culture, Surface Rural Cultural Setting
  • Mountain Dwarf: Elemental Kin or Elemental Kin/Human, Craftsman-Warrior Culture, Subterranean Urban Cultural Setting
  • Firbolg: Feyborn/Elemental Kin, Diplomatic-Artistic Culture, Surface Wilderness Cultural Setting
  • Satyr: Feyborn/Beast Kin, Artistic-Skulduggery Culture, Surface Wilderness Cultural Setting
  • Etc.

Thoughts on Game Design

Meta-Narrative

Fifth Edition D&D (5E) incorporates “meta-narrative” as an intrinsic part of its design to help generalize what can be complex ideas and rule sets. Both Race and Class (and, to a degree, published Adventures) are structured by stories (implied or explicit) on how the world works and how individuals exemplify their natures and destinies.

Race

From the earliest editions onward, Race in D&D has sprouted from the seed of Tolkien’s world. In that world, various species of non-human humanoids live in relative isolation from one another and have distinctive cultural characteristics that mingle with their physical and spiritual makeup. While there are various tribes of elves, hobbits, dwarves, and orcs, each Race as a whole are generally monolithic in their presentation. Only humans are truly diverse, showing a range of choice and autonomy in their destinies. This is a reflection of Tolkien’s aim to tell a Christian epic for Britain, where the choice of Man can lead one to good or evil, and the non-human races are almost caricatures of certain ideals. The idea that races other-than-human have similar if not the same characteristics throughout the individuals that make up the species can be seen as a flavor of “racial essentialism”; that is, that all members of a race have an innate essence to their form, culture, and purpose. Racial essentialism can be called a core feature of playing Dungeons and Dragons as every character can be described by, or shorthanded to, a Race-Class combination.

While racial essentialism makes for easy character generation — some traits, both mechanical and narrative, are predefined — it proves problematic in at least two ways. One is the real-world analog to Race: That people of a certain race in our world are all — by their very nature — of a similar physical, emotional, and spiritual temperament. Such a view might allow for variation and outliers, but holds that people of the same race are generally possessed of the same abilities, no matter their individual lives and the paths they have taken. While studying race relations is not new to the 20th and 21st centuries, we have in recent years seen a keen eye turned toward it academically, scientifically, and culturally. The case of George Floyd and awareness of the BLM movement of 2020 and the anti-Asian sentiments connected to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought this issue to a head in popular dialog. Conflating individuals with large swaths of people of related appearance and/or cultural connections is problematic, and often dangerous. On the other hand, ignoring the rich history of ancestral and cultural connections we inherit that do connect us to larger groups and histories is also a plague. This is particularly poignant in America, where the “rebel individual” is part of cultural identity itself, to the level of a cultural mytheme. This mytheme says that individuals are who they make themselves despite where they came from, and rests in the legends surrounding the formation of the USA.

While this reflection can go in many directions (and is worthy of such), my main issue is how one might adjust D&D to avoid the pitfalls of real-life racial essentialism while still retaining the “feel” of playing Dungeons and Dragons where Race is a central concept and game mechanic. One of the signatures of Science Fiction and Fantasy is to propose “What Ifs”; in particular, “What if you had a world that was like this?” that take an aspect of our world to critique or as a way to explore new possibilities. To that end, I propose replacing Race with cues from contemporary dialog, and deconstructing Race into Ancestry, Culture, and Cultural Setting as way to construct those aspects of a character that are “flattened” by essential racial characteristics. I feel that this can be done in a way that seamlessly blends with the mechanical design of 5e while avoiding some of the pitfalls discussed above. Recently, Wizards of the Coast themselves made an attempt to address the problems with Race in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, with somewhat bland results. The attempt and prominence in the opening pages of the book showed an awareness of the problem, however, and that is a step in the direction the game is heading. Overall, I think this is a good thing for the game itself: As a game of imagination, it supports mechanics that allow for more creativity.

Ancestry (in the sense of ”genetics”, as I am using it here) recognizes that there are characteristics we inherit from our bloodlines, but these are only one part of what shapes an individual. When thinking about a fantasy setting or creatures from myth and folklore (which often have an “essential” feel, certain beings are like this), there are some extraordinary abilities that don’t have an analog in our human world. Some creatures may be able to magically disappear at will as easily as a human walks across a room. Some may be able to resist the effects of the elements due to being born in another plane of existence. Some may inherit features of a human-animal hybrid form, like a centaur. We need to account for these thematically and mechanically without locking into a single cultural bias, or box-in individual personalities and abilities because of bloodline. These kinds of traits can be rolled into Ancestry and make bloodlines feel significant, but not limiting, to roleplay and the imagination. At the same time, you can respect the physical form of a bloodline and give them the option to demonstrate those abilities.

In addition to Ancestry, Culture and Cultural Setting (or ”natural environment”) also play a role in shaping a character. Did they grow up in a warrior culture that required everyone to compete in athletics from childhood onward? Maybe a culture that is largely mercantile would train abilities to be more aware of interpersonal interaction, or a scholarly culture to examine the logic of any event they encounter. Rather than Race strictly determining Ability bonuses (which can be accomplished through Ancestral Feats in these rules), Abilities are also influenced by what kind of culture one was raised in. In addition, the development of certain skills maybe a necessity for certain kinds of Cultural Setting or natural environment. Those that have spent the majority of their lives living underground will likely have a different day-to-day skillset from those living on the surface; those skills for living in Urban areas will likely be different than those living in Rural areas or the Wilderness. As with Ancestry, this helps to shape a character without unnecessarily constraining them. Do all black-skinned Elves need to come from an evil matriarchal priestess society? Heck no. How about a character with Feyborn Ancestry with the form of a classic Drow, who comes from a Subterranean Rural setting with an Artistic and Merchant culture rather than an Urban Religious one rife with Skulduggery? This in no way limits the possibility for existence of classic Drow in one’s world, it just opens up mechanical options to support imagining outside that box without relying on the trope, “My character is an outsider/outcast.” In 5e and previous editions, one would create a “Subrace” of Elves to do this. Now a Sub-race is no longer needed as we redefine this character in terms of a bloodline, culture, and cultural setting.

This combination of Ancestry, Culture, and Cultural Setting opens up possibilities that do not exist in the current flavors of 5e. While it is true that 5e has the sensibilities not to limit Class by Race (as it was in earlier editions), there are still Racial predilections based on the meta-narratives of Race. For example, Halflings make excellent Rogues (Thieves) based on their Ability bonuses, racial tendency to wander, and Luck bonuses. If I want to make a Halfling Barbarian raider that has spent most of their lives underground, I certainly can, but it is not supported by the meta-narrative—there are no bonuses to strength, the easily enraged Halfling is almost the opposite of the cultural meta-narrative. They don’t have Darkvision so are at a disadvantage in their own environment. One could create a new “Race” of underground halfling raiders, and this approach is the standard: Make a new “Subrace”, and maintain racial essentialism. With the Ancestry, Culture and Cultural Setting rules, one can easily make a hardened Barbarian Feyborn hailing from a Warrior-Skulduggery Culture in a rural underground Cultural Setting. They are able to see in the dark, and have great strength that might belie their stature. This can be done through a structured and balanced approach that uses Feats, ability bonuses, and proficiencies in ways that are similar to the construction of current 5e Races. No longer does the meta-narrative attached to Race limit one from making the kind of character one would like to play, neither narratively nor mechanically.

Conflict is a core element of storytelling, and is a core feature of D&D. As a player in this homebrew world, the experience is to imagine and roleplay in a world where “Race” doesn’t exist in the sense that it does in our world. There is still a sense of “Other” and there is still bigotry and predjudice, but it comes in forms other than racism, such as clashes between cultural values or environment (Urban vs. Rural, for example). “Monsters” still exist, but not in an essentialist sense — who and what constitutes a “monster” is defined by cultural or personal values, not a stat block that defaults to the perspective of a “Majority” of humankind.

UPDATE 2021-08-01

Recently a friend and fellow D&D gamer brought up Pathfinder 2nd Edition (PF 2E) in a discussion about Race and Class in D&D. While I knew of Pathfinder, I hadn’t explored it much beyond the video game adaptations and what I knew of D&D 3.5, and have never played it at the table. While the PF 2E Class design is perfectly in line with what I see as the future of D&D, its answer to Race through “Ancestry and Heritage” is still vulnerable to the criticisms of Race and racial essentialism I’ve made above. In fact, it appears to be little more than renaming Race “Ancestry” and Subrace “Heritage”. I still believe something like the Ancestry, Culture, and Cultural Setting system can be a way to truly take D&D forward. However, how PF 2E handles Racial abilities through Feats is very much in line with what I see as a core design principle. Overall, PF 2E handles almost all character customization through Feats and I think this is a step in the right direction for a more flexible system.