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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9755479" data-attributes="member: 6915329">Here you could simply do a generic animal folk. Take a look at how Ebberon's Shifters are done. Instead of doing each individual type of animal as a different type of Shifter (wolf-shifter, deer-shifter), they're divided up into rough types (beasthide, wildhunt) and the player choses one. It's then up to the player to say if their wildhunt shifter looks like a wolf or a lion or hyena. Thus, your animal folk section could be divided in similar ways. Likewise for planar creatures. Level Up, of course, has its Planetouched, with a simple heritage gift to differentiate between infernal, celestial, or elemental. When I put out my LU Handbook of Heritages, I included gifts to allow for law and chaos variants as well, as well as for various types of demons, daemons/yugoloths, and non-angelic celestials. Also, look at how 5.24 has done it. For tieflings, you pick Abyssal, Infernal, or Chthonic, and it's done in a table. Mind, I don't think the 5.24 way is particularly flavorful, since it's literally just spells, damage resistance, and darkvision, but it's simple, and the flavor can be in the description.Doing these races like this gives people the options they want without cluttering up the races section or inviting that, yes, inevitable deluge of new options. I know people who really want to play animal-folk as a form of self-expression, and I myself generally prefer planetouched to any other type. One idea to take from GURPS is language proficiency. As in, a difference between broken, fluent, and native levels of understanding. In GURPS, they actually required this for both speaking and reading. When I ran Ravenloft in GURPS, we had a lot of fun with characters who had lower levels of understanding.While I wouldn't necessarily go quite that far, you could divide understanding into poor and fluent, or do speaking and reading as different things. Instead of saying that culture or background gives you X number of languages, say it gives X number of points. One point for poor understanding, or either speaking or reading; two points for fluent understanding, or both speaking and reading. I'm less fond of this myself, but perhaps that's because the Adventurer's Guide racial cultures just a copy of D&D's various races, and because, well, there's a lot of them. Too many. I like LU, but it's become very bloated.Now, while I've decided I'm not a huge fan of Draw Steel (nothing wrong with it; just not for me), I will say that the way they do cultures is pretty cool and worth taking inspiration from. In that game, culture is divided up into three types: environment, organization, and upbringing, each of which gives skills, and you mix-and-match as you please. Woodland Beaurocratic Noble, for instance. With this, you could then give several sample cultures. High Elf: Woodland, Beaurocratic, typically Academic, Creative, or Noble. Wood Elf: Woodland, Beaurocratic, typically Creative, Lawless, or Martial.Mmm, I'm not sure. Honestly, the only real reason to even care about lifespans in a game like this is when you had supernatural aging, like from ghosts and spells. Unless you bring that back, there's really no point to having this other than as a note for flavor purposes: people in cosmopolitan cities live longer than people in oppressive tyrannies do; elves have lifespans of over a millennia, while orcs rarely live to the age of 60. Yes, there are people who use D&D to play games that span decades or even centuries, but that's vanishingly rare. I prefer languages to be regional or based around very specific ideals rather than on race or even culture (in my current LU game, I have the city-state's language, Albastilian, and also Contract (the trade/legal language), and Tower (the magic language). Plus languages for other countries elsewhere. But the different ancestries that make up the city of Albastile don't have their own languages. But to me, it doesn't make sense that people in different Human cultures would all speak Human. While you could potentially say that there's very little drift in Elven languages (because of their lifespan or their trance-sleep which connects them to their past), that shouldn't be the case for shorter-lived people. And if there's going to be regional Human languages, there should also be regional languages for others. But that makes for a ginormous list of languages.That being said, if you do have "cultural tongues" and choose to rename them into things like Ellowyn, don't do what Draw Steel did and give them completely unrelated names: Dwarfs (and engineers) use Zaliac; bugbears and fey speak Khelt. Huh? That's going to be easily forgettable and then people will just default to Dwarvish and Sylvan. One other idea that's been floating around in my head (and is up for anyone else to use, if they want it) has been to have languages based on the creator god(s). Any sentient beings made by that god or pantheon share a language; there was no "Tower of Babel" event to cause them to have different languages. The key here is that this wouldn't be like most D&D where every sentient race has a god or pantheon. You could say that one pantheon made Humans, Halflings, Ogres, Giants, and other beings based on that sort of idea or body plan, and they all speak the same language. Another one created Lizardfolk, Dragonborn, Aarakocra, Merfolk, Sahuagin, Pterafolk, and other reptile/fish/avian beings, and they all share a language. At least that way it makes sense for you to be able to communicate from someone on the completely opposite side of the world!Maybe you should make all the class features into feats. By which I mean, instead of buying a feat that gives you X abilities, you buy a feat that gives you access to abilities of a particular class. Or perhaps Feat 1 says you get the levels 1 & 2 abilities from the class of your choice, while Feat 2 (prereq: Feat 1) says you get the levels 3 & 4 abilities. This includes what spell levels you have access to and how many slots you get. If you multiclass into wizard and buy Feat 1, you get (using 5.24 as the guide here), Spellcasting Ritual Adept, Arcane Recovery, Scholar, and the ability to cast 1st and 2nd level spells. You can't cast 3rd-level spells or gain additional spell slots until you get Feat 2, which gives you access to level 3 & 4 abilities,. Then give Feat 1 a prereq of being level 5 or something. This means you don't have to balance them as much--the classes themselves should already be balanced.</blockquote>

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