Delvebound: Heritages Part I
I've been thinking about a different way of creating your character for a long time, and have been slowly incorporating many of those ideas into my home games over the years. I haven't used race based Ability Score Improvements in my 5e games for almost as long as 5e has been out, as they've never made any sense to me. We all know that heroes are expectational characters, way beyond the average commoner. Why should an Altmer that skipped every tutoring session to go train with the Dominion get a +2 to Intelligence? Why would a Nord noble who has spent their whole life with a silver spoon in their mouth, never lifting a finger to help themselves get a +2 to Endurance? That's been an easy fix, ignoring the ASI granted by your race and just letting the player choose what their character is good at to fit their vision works well. But what if there could be something more?
What if I wanted to make an Argonian character that has lived her life a priest to Dibella in Anvil? Why would this Argonian Priest with the Acolyte background have identical abilities to an Argonian Priest with the Acolyte background that worships Sithis and has never left the dark swamps of Black Marsh? I thought it would be neat if we had a way to represent that through mechanics and not just flavor alone. For a long time I've been talking about if I was making a TES game, I would want to separate the races by ancestry and culture, so the Argonian that has lived their live in the Imperial City can reflect that difference. So with that, I present a first idea of what that might look like.
In this first part of the series, we look at 4 Heritages: Altmer, Argonian, Bosmer, and Breton. When you create your character, you can choose their Heritage by selecting which Ancestry you have, which include Ancestral Traits, and which culture you have been raised in, providing you with Cultural Traits. Tell us what you think in the google doc linked below!
