Wrote 524 more words of The Red Concordant. This makes the project 9% complete. I have written backgrounds for the standard fantasy races except humans.
In the game, stats are rolled first, then a background is chosen, and then finally a class. The backgrounds provide a choice of +1 to one of two stats, an ability, and many times a weapon proficiency in a weapon.
Here is two example backgrounds:
Gnome Miner
+1 STR or INT
Weapon Proficiency: Handaxe
Burrowfriend: Once a day can talk to a burrowing animal for one minute. This is usually to ask them to dig out nearby gemstones.
Elven Courtier
+1 INT or CHA
Weapon Proficiency: One-handed sword
Vigilant: Immune to magical sleep or charm effects.
In the final draft, there will be brief descriptions of each background.
RSS - Posts
RSS - Posts
Those abilities strike me as widely-divergent in usefulness.
Audrey Winter Thank you for the feedback. Please let me know anything else that strikes you.
The wide range of usefulness is on purpose. Essentially these are the d20 racial abilities except that each member of a given race gets one of the abilities, not all of them. Only a Dwarven Guardian gets Darkvision, not all Dwarves.
Other backgrounds are more useful in combat like the Gnome Trickster’s ability to effectively teleport 100′ once per day. Some of them of useful against traps like the Dwarven Builder’s Stonecunning ability. Some are useful for gathering information. Others are useful for survival (The Halfling Wanderer’s ability to forage enough food for four people.)
The background, though, has no bearing on the class chosen. A Gnome Miner can become a Magic-User, an Elven Courtier can become a thief.