Thursday, February 18, 2021

Knacks or Gifts


I haven't done the work, but it seems like to me that it would be fairly easy, using one or another of the available 5e "race creation" rules sets to essentially make super-powered humans. I don't mean in the costumed adventure sense necessarily but it terms of that branch of fantasy where a lot of people are born with some sort of singular, inherent gift or power.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon in fantasy literature, but is less common, I think, in rpgs. In fantasy novels that utilize this trope (much like in superhero or psychic hero media) gifts didn't to get categorized, and maybe these types of gifts would run in families, creating lineages or ancestries. 

This sort of setup would allow you to get rid of the standard D&D idea of "race" with all its baggage and potentially suggest a bit of a weirder world where magic caused mutations or individuals with these magical gifts became sort of a society set apart (not unlike mutants in marvel, but also not unlike adventurers in D&D).

2 comments:

Dick McGee said...

Very Xanthian idea. My tolerance for Piers Anthony ran out decades ago, but I am still vaguely surprised no one's licensed an RPG using that setting - or maybe they did and i missed it. If nothing else it seems like the kind of thing the OSR community would enjoy hacking - excellent excuse for gigantic tables of random magic birthrights.

Anne said...

The dragonmarks from Eberron are a little bit like this, but of course there's only a few of them, and they explicitly mark you as a member of an important family / corporation.

Although 3e made being dragonmarked into a feat, I think 5e does kind of what you're suggesting and makes it part of your ancestry.

I feel tempted to propose a few alternate ancestries in line with what you're suggesting here the same way I did for alternatives to darkvision ...