Embracing the Diversity of Characters

The Mistgate campaign setting is a Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition compatible campaign setting and supplement that is being written by Sean W. Quinn.

The world of Mistgate is one of robust scientific and technological discvoery throughout the Guild Marches fueled by a renaissance of magic. The guilds explore the Mists beyond the veil of reality, defend the people from monsters of darkness, and delve into the depths of ruins to uncover the lost history of the world.

Over the past few months working on the Mistgate campaign setting, we've tackled quite few topics and subjects, many boil down to adding more content for players and storytellers, such as additional class archetypes that make sense for the Mistgate setting and adapting the game mechanics to be more narrative-friendly.

A few of those changes, which we'll touch on briefly in this article, not only introduces more personalization in the character creation process but it also tackles the subject of diversity and looks to reframe the most fundamental narrative in the Dungeons & Dragons game system around who your character is.

It should be noted that we had hoped to publish this article before Tasha's Cauldron of Everything was released but we never quite got around to it. Since Tasha's Cauldron of Everything was released about a month or so ago, we thought we might add a section in to this article that compares and contrast the approach taken with Mistgate to that of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

A Short History of Race in D&D

In its long history Dungeons & Dragons has tied many fundamental character benefits directly to the race that you choose for your character. These benefits are often immutable.

If you're an elf you almost universally receive a modifier to your Dexterity because elves are agile and use bows and it should be noted that ranged attacks almost exclusively used your Dexterity stat for accuracy (and in more recent editions, damage). After all, you were really just trying to recreate Legolas, right?

In many ways, from a mechanical standpoint these sorts of decisions make sense: you can more easily differentiate character options and you introduce compelling combinations for players. Players who want to go against the grain can also make surprising decisions: that halfling barbarian can be pretty scary.

Go far enough back in Dungeons & Dragons history your choice of human, elf, dwarf, halfling, etc. actually limited which classes you could play or how far you could progress in a certain class. The first edition of the Player's Handbook for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons states that "for purposes of the game the racial stocks are limited to the following: dwarven, elven, gnome, half-elven, halfling, half-orc, and human. Each racial stock has advantages and disadvantages, although in general human is superior to the others." Putting aside for a moment the potentially harmful concept of race in Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy in general, this view in the first edition of AD&D served more to limit a player and their creativity, rather than to allow them to embrace it.

It is easy to become used to these mechanics, but each subsequent edition of Dungeon & Dragons expanded our options, rather than contracting them. From the first editions of the game to the advanced second edition rule set we saw more flexibility in how we could create, envision, and play our characters. In the third edition of the game our choice in character races grew and skills became more than an optional rule. Skills became a central way in which we identified our characters. Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the importance of and how the community embraced the idea of feats. By the time the fifth edition was released the framework for the game already allowed for so much by way of choice not only in our character's ancestry, class, but also in their personality and their background. The fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is a fantastic foundation upon which to build the games future.

Without spending too much time on it, it is worth noting that Dungeons & Dragons is not the only game to do this. Many games make an editorial decision that carries with it either an implicit or explicit judgment of values. Most of the time this is for balance reasons, and there is no malice intended. For instance, the GURPS system applies point values to character templates and you can further modify these templates or "buy out" disadvantages. Many of the Storytelling System games (Werewolf, Vampire, etc.) also apply their own fair share of judgments and stereotypes on characters, often reinforced in the games' narratives. It is within the prerogative of game designers to create rules to constrain a game, to balance a game, and to define the setting—I'm not arguing against any of that. However, when it comes to how a player defines the identity of their character, this feels outdated and unnecessary. Especially as our view of the world changes and broadens. In the context of polycultural settings that are often found in science fiction and fantasy, these restrictions and stereotypes feel even more out of place and often lead to less innovation and creativity.

Moving Forward, More Options

When we first began to write the character options for the Mistgate setting, we did so using the framework presented within the Player's Handbook: you have a core set of traits associated with a character's race followed by two or more options to choose from.

I've always enjoyed toying with game systems, and Dungeons & Dragons is no exception. I have been writing homebrew and house rules since I first began running games—in part because I was a kid and the group I played with didn't let rules get in our way. Without knowing it we embraced the core idea of "rules as fun" without a second thought. All of the homebrew, house rules, and games that I've run often shared a common theme: presenting players with new options for their characters, ways to customize their characters and their stories.

Sometimes these rules work well, othertimes they don't.

In the past I've tried to eliminate the rigid class advancement in favor of gaining character points to buy abilities. allowing you full control over your character's advancement. Taking a lot of my inspiration from the Storyteller system of games published by White Wolf. When it works, a system like this is cool, but it arguably also moves the game away from Dungeons & Dragons toward something else. Instead of trying to completely re-write how class advancement works, I stumbled upon the fantastic Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e by Arcanist Press and I was inspired to instead look at the racial options players have when they create their characters.

Before reading Ancestry & Culture, however, I had already been thinking about how to address a very different problem: in the Mistgate setting the agar have a highly mutagenic DNA, especially the kobolds. This should result in great deal of variety in their culture. Something that wasn't being represented in the rules as they were presently laid out. What I didn't want to do, however, was to come up with a dozen more subrace options. That would be untennable.

I was stuck on this problem for a few weeks. After reading Ancestry & Culture and reading a few tweets about how more personalization would be introduced in the character creation process with the then-announced and forthcoming release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything I began to formulate my own ideas on how I might approach a similar challenge with Mistgate.

When working on this, it was still a couple of months before Tasha's Cauldron of Everything would be released, and I didn't know how the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast was going to handle adding this customization or address diversity in their ruleset. However, I knew two things I wanted to do with Mistgate: first, I wanted to remove the language that tied a character's biological traits from their cultural traits, second I wanted to remove the predisposition to certain ability scores from the character options entirely and make it more flexible.

I have to credit Arcanist Press' for the idea to separate biology and culture in Mistgate. Looking back on it, it seems like such a simple and obvious idea. By separating a character's fundamental traits into four groups: lineage, upbringing, profession (class), and personality (backgrounds) you create a massive amount of flexibility in the character generation process. One that allows for even more diverse and unique characters to shine through.

The concpet of character races and racial traits in Mistgate are eschewed for a combination of character lineages and cultural heritage, along with the traits associated with each. Your choice of lineage and your choice of cultural heritage both grant you an ability score bonus, one major (usually a +2 to an ability score of your choice) and one minor (+1 to an ability score of your choice). Our decision to go this route required a little bit of rethinking for certain character options that bundled cultural heritage closely to their lineage (such as with the Espers) as well as those who had no cultural heritage of their own (i.e. the Nephari). It also forced us to embrace the variant human more officially in the campaign setting.

We really liked the greater flexibility in the character creation process for that came along with being able to freely allocate attribute bonuses. The team and I were further encouraged after listening to Jeremy Crawford talk about a similar approach that would be taken in the optional rules presented in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. When we got our hands on the book, it confirmed that our thinking in this regard was mostly in alignment with Crawford and the Dungeons & Dragons team. Although they made this change, we feel that they could have gone further and are pleased that we took the extra step—following the path already started by Arcanist Press—to go beyond and improve the framework of the game system even more with our adoption of lineages and cultural heritages.

By seperating lineage and culture, we're acknowledging that nurture is just as important as a character's nature, in some ways maybe even more so. Some character choices have different options for how a character was raised. A kit—one of the smaller-statured cultures in the Mistgate setting that share some of the same characteristics of halflings—can choose to be raised in a rural setting or to have been raised in a city as part of their cultural heritage. In this way you still have the concept and options provided by subraces without problematic issues surrounding the idea that a kit from the country and one from the city are in any way different aside from their upbringing.

Further, cultural heritages being separated from the biological lineages means that if a storyteller approves of it players can choose to play a kit that was raised within one of the many human cultures. This is a similar idea that was also precented in Ancestry & Culture. It also provides more extension points to the game.

One of the biggest challenges we faced here was how to fit the human options into this framework. The core options for humans in Dungeons & Dragons are remarkably simple, while also offering a great deal of flexibility. The easiest way we could find to make humans fit in the lineage and cultural heritage framework was to lean into the variant rules for humans.

Feats and Languages

Part of leaning into variant humans is the greater emphasis on feats being a staple of characters in the Mistgate campaign setting. This suits us just fine as we see feats as a way to further differentiate your characters and give them additional capabilities. We're still considering what this means, in the long term, but as of now any character: human, kit, kobold, elw, etc. that chooses a human cultural heritage—and in turn giving up their natural cultural heritage—can gain access to a feat starting out. This trade-off allows you to take more control over how your character was raised.

We may find more options to introduce feats to a character's progression, and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything provides a fantastic template for how we might do that.

Another area that we've been considering recently is languages. With the polycultural nature of the Mistgate campaign setting, there are many languages. The lingua franca of most of the world is Trade Common, but this is more of a pidgin language. Thousands of years of history following isolated groups has resulted in many languages being spoken the world over. The existing rules make it possible to learn a new language during downtime, but we're looking into other possibilities to make it easier to converse. Magic and magitech are fantastic vehicles for promoting communication between different groups, as are new background options that turn a character into a polyglot.

Not Your Traditional Fantasy Setting

The Mistgate campaign setting, in some ways, shares more in common with future-modern settings like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk or science fiction settings like Eclipse Phase when it comes to a character's sense of identity. The heterogeneous polycultural world and the infinite expanse of the Mists beyond typically challenge the notion that all people of a particular lineage are the same. The Midlands have vastly diverse cities with dwarves, humans, elw, kit, droga and kobolds all living side-by-side. While they may take pride in their biological heritage, they think of themselves first and foremost as members of the Guild Marches, Rhevaire, or Thasmudaine.

The world is also much more technologically advanced than your standard fantasy setting; owed in part to the absence of magic for hundreds of generations. Science and technology developed in the void that magic left behind, and when it returned the two forces were both juxtaposed with one another as well as complementary. Science, technology, and magic are the great equalizers in the Mistgate campaign setting, in many parts of the world they have lead to the adoption of more progressive values of liberty and community. In others, they have created an iron grip that tightens and suffocates.

There is so much to explore in Mistgate and we hope to do that more over the upcoming months. Keep an eye out for more posts that explore the Mistgate campaign setting, for discussion of current Mistgate playtests, and for Mistgate to be featured in the upcoming Lorecall podcast: Lorecast.