World Building: Adding Racial Variety

Variant races are something that shows up a lot in various campaign settings and splatbooks. Sometimes they have different stats and special rules like the Drow Elves and Duargar Dwarves. Both of these races are adapted to the Underdark in D&D and more powerful (and evil!) than their surface-dwelling counterparts. Adding racial variety isn't just about making a more powerful variant of an existing race, though. It's also about adding flavour and variety to your world. People of the same race living in different environments thousands of miles apart are quite dissimilar in the real world, why should they be identical in your setting? This post is guidelines for adding variety without necessarily changing stats.

By far the simplest way to make a racial variant is to take an existing race and move it to an environment that's drastically different from what players expect. Elves are typically portrayed as living in woodlands and being in close touch with their homelands. What if instead they're living on arid steppes as nomads? These elves may have never seen a tree. Similarly, Dwarves are generally portrayed as living in elaborate stone fortresses carved underneath mountains, but what if instead they lived in grasslands? Maybe these dwarves have never seen a mountain larger than a small hill. Do they still live underground? Do they still build mighty cities or would they live in shallow underground dwellings more like Hobbit holes from The Lord of the Rings? If they don't live in mines do they still covet gems and precious metals? You probably get the point. This kind of free-form thinking is a great way to evolve a new subrace. Just start with one simple idea "Dwarves without mountains" and jump to whatever idea comes next. Maybe draw out a graph showing all the decision branches. Brainstorming exercises like this often benefit from writing every idea down no matter how poorly it fits.

Subrace Brainstorming Example

What follows was written as it came out of my head, as an example of brainstorming a subrace.

• Dwarf
• Lives underground in stone fortresses
• Often very insular and untrusting of strangers
• Covets gems and precious metals
• Loves beer 
• Speaks with Scottish or Gaelic accent

• Dwarves without mountains
• Do they still have mighty cities?
• More single-dwellings
• Above ground?
• Squat stone houses
• Underground?
• Burrows like Hobbit Holes
• Are they still insular?
• No. They're friendly and trade a lot.
• Do they still build with stone?
• Yeah
• They quarry it in open-pit mines
•  No
• They build from mud brick and timber
• Dwarven lumberjacks!
• Do they still covet gems?
• No
• What motivates a dwarven adventurer if not shiny things?
• They're a culture of storytellers. Young Dwarves are encouraged to see the world and return home with tales and artifacts of different cultures

I'll stop there. From this I can generate a subrace that I'll call Traveler Dwarves

• Traveler Dwarf
• They live in the grassy plains of central Ashdar, but a few scattered members of this race can be found in any city
• Their houses are similar to Human houses, made from mud brick and occasionally wood.
• They have frequent contact with outside races. They probably trade a lot.
• Living in the plains, they farm a lot. Maybe they export wheat to their beer-loving mountain-dwelling counterparts.
• Young Traveler Dwarves often join passing adventure parties to see the world, hoping to return with a wealth of stories and treasure.
• Communities are often protected by seasoned adventurers who have returned home

For this race I'd probably also change the stats to give them more charisma and make their favoured class be Bard. The key thing here is that culture decides stats, not the other way around. If they need no stat modifiers they wouldn't get any.

At The Table: Agile Fighting

Flashy combat tactics are cool. Many action movies feature swift, agile heroes executing physics-defying acrobatics to get into striking range of their enemies. At the table you may find rogues or monks wishing to do the same thing. The Pathfinder acrobatics skill describes how you can use it to walk over uneven terrain, jump on to or off of obstacles, and cross gaps, but it leaves out important actions like hopping over short walls or jumping from one stepping-stone to another. These are the kinds of obstacles commonly found in a combat encounter that an agile character with flashy style may wish to traverse to close with their target

Presented here are some guidelines for skill DCs to traverse small-to-medium obstacles at speed. Each obstacle the character intends to traverse will require one acrobatics check and subtract a number of feet from their move distance proportional to how much effort is required to traverse it. DMs concerned about combat balance might want to require a feat (I suggest calling it simply "Parkour", requiring a Dex modifier of +3 or more) to use these maneuvers, or tune the DCs to personal taste.

Applied Acrobatics

Scramble up over a waist-high obstacle: DC 17, costs 5' of movement.

Hop across similarly-sized objects: DC15, Requires getting onto the first obstacle by scrabling up or dropping down but no movement penalty for obstacles of similar height.

Example: Annale the Monk wants to quickly get across a room scattered with boxes. Climbing the first box reduces her available movement by 5', leaving her with 25' of movement in a single move action. Three boxes are between her and her destination, requiring her to hop across them. Each check she succeeds gets her another box closer to her destination. A near-fail will stop her movement but allow her to stay atop the boxes. A bad fail will cause her to fall off.

Wall kick: DC 20, costs 10' of movement plus a 10' minimum run-up for a total of 20' to execute.
This difficult maneuver involves running, jumping, and kicking off a nearby wall to gain additional height. Checks: With a running start of at least 10' such that at the end of the run-up you are next to a wall (or pillar, large tree, etc), make the DC 20 Acrobatics check, and an Acrobatics check for the high jump you aim to make. Add however much you beat the DC 20 check by to the result of your high jump check, then determine if the new result beats the DC for the high jump. Failing the jump leaves you standing at the base of the wall where you started the jump.

Example: Thorai the Ranger wants to jump to a good ambush position seven feet off the ground in a tree. She's a skilled acrobat with a +10 acrobatics skill. The jump DC is 28, putting it out of reach except for a very-good roll but attainable with a well-executed wall-kick. She starts 10' back from the base of the tree, runs straight for it and kicks off. First the wall-kick roll results in a 26, then the high jump roll results in a 25. Thorai beat the wall-kick DC by 6, so she adds 6 to her outcome for a result of 31 and successfully pulls off a seven-foot-high jump that would have otherwise been near-impossible.

Pounce From Above: DC 5 + Opponent's CMD, ends movement.
You jump onto an enemy from above. If the enemy is smaller than you by 2 size categories or more, you stomp on it and land in an adjacent space. If the enemy is larger than you by 2 size categories or more, you land on top of it. If the enemy is within 2 size categories of your size, you can attempt to grapple it with a +5 circumstance bonus on your CMB roll. Regardless, if your fall is high enough to cause damage both you and the target take the same amount of damage from your fall onto it. Your target still gets attacks of opportunity if it sees you coming.

Pounce From the side: Modified Grapple check, ends movement.
You leap at your opponent and attempt to tackle him with a running start of at least 10'. This is mechanically a charging grapple and not actually a direct application of Acrobatics. Instead, use your Acrobatics bonus in place of your dexterity modifier in your CMB when determining the outcome of the grapple. Attacks of opportunity still happen if your target sees you coming. Failing the grapple leaves you prone.

Hopefully these give you some ideas of other ways your to spice up combat with agile characters.

Upcoming Articles

World Building: Adding Racial Variety - Elven cultures on Teredahar span the gamut of refinement and savagery.
At the Table: Dynamic Difficulty - The healer called in sick! Cancel the raid? I think not.

World Building: Zoom out to Region

If you followed the basic rules for a starting location described in my previous article, you should have a simple starting town with one or two adventure locations. You should also have named but not yet described a small set of nearby settlements to make the world feel bigger than it actually is. After one or two sessions, your players will probably have exhausted this small-scale starting location and be looking to visit some of these places they've heard about, or generally set out on a quest following the plot hook you've been dangling. Now it is time to zoom out the map and populate more of the world beyond.

The same rules as the starting-town still apply at the broader region level:

• Consistent access to water is essential for enduring settlements.
• Adjacent regions will have similar climates (though you can start transitioning to different ones at the region level).
• Conserve detail to just the areas near where the players are and where they will be going. Keep surrounding regions vague, but give them names and refer to them occasionally. 

Defining a Region

A region is an area defined by natural boundaries with a similar climate and terrain. Often a region will have one controlling power but it is possible for a region to be contested between powers or neutral and anarchic. A region could be as small as a single county or as large as a nation, but power isn't what defines a region; nature is. Example regions are The Shire and Mordor from Lord of the Rings, and County Cork in Ireland.
 
At the edges of a region the terrain and climate will begin to transition into that of the adjacent region. These borders can be distinct, like a river or the point where trees give way to plains, or fuzzy like the transition from foothills to low mountains. You may be tempted to create regions in a square or hexagonal shape, but remember that regions can be long and narrow or have long fingers reaching into their neighbours. For example a long mountain chain or fertile valley may be form a thin region between two others or protrude its neighbour, respectively.

Building a Region Map

At any scale beyond the starting town, it's beneficial to have a map. I'm going to describe one map-making technique here but feel free to experiment and find what works for you.

1. Start with a hexagonal grid. The centers of each hexagon are one hour's walk (approximately 3 miles for most characters) apart. If your players have access to faster means of travel (horses) and/or the region is sparsely populated, you may want to make the distance between hexes greater.
2. Place your starting town in the center of the grid. 
3. Figure out how large your region will be. This is purely a matter of taste and how much time you want to pass as your characters travel. In real life dry, flat regions such as plains and deserts tend to be much larger than mountainous or rainy regions because there are fewer natural barriers. A messenger on horseback riding from the seat of power to a county's farthest outpost might take three days, but how far he travels in that time depends on the terrain and climate. Often a lord's ability to rule an area is directly impacted by how long it takes for messages to reach the entire area. 
4. Decide what the natural barriers and neighbouring regions will be, and mark them on the edges of the hexes that will be the border. Remember your starting town doesn't have to be in the center of the region.
5. Starting from the edges, mark each hex with what biome it is (forest, plains, swamp, etc) and any distinctive features or settlements. Remember settlements are usually near water. This is the step where you decide where those named places from before are actually located. They may be located just outside of this region's borders as well.
6. Create a network of roads. Typically roads radiate outwards from cities towards other cities (even in other regions), with forks going to smaller towns, castles, etc. Roads go around obstacles such as bogs and hills, potentially veering significantly.
7. Remove the hex grid and add as much detail as you like. 

Example Region

Here is a map of the Red Hills region in the nation called Din from my Teredahar setting.

Upcoming Articles

At The Table: Agile Fighting - Let your agile characters perform tactical acrobatics and parkour-style movement in combat.
World Building: Adding Racial Variety - Surface-dwelling German-accented Dwarves? Hell yes.

At The Table: Breaking Through Walls

Picture this situation: You have a well-prepared prepared boss encounter with nicely-arranged arena and list of tactics the boss will use. The plan calls for the boss to disable the party's main attacker and then flee when his health gets low. Everything goes according to plan until the boss attempts to make his escape. The PCs roll well and shrug off the boss's disabling attack. When he tries to escape instead of being forced to let him go the party pursue. The boss throws open his secret door and dashes out of the building, with the party hot on his heels.... And then what?

In this kind of situation it's easy for a DM to get flustered. Suddenly the action is outside of your nicely-planned arena and quite possibly outside of the dungeon entirely. The PCs are still immersed in the action but any significant break in the pace will quickly break that immersion. What you need to do is keep the action moving, break through the walls of your dungeon, and let the fight break out into the street/woodlands/fire-plains outside.

Here are some things to consider that will make it easier to let the action break out of the dungeon.

1. What's the lay of the land?

This is simply a starting point. Where is the dungeon? Is it a cave on a mountainside or a nondescript townhouse's basement? What kind of weather and terrain might be found outside of such a location? What time is it?

2. What's typically found in that environment?

A carefully-planned arena will generally feature obstacles and random set dressing that provide cover for players and enemies or generally make combat more interesting and dynamic. Adhoc locations outside of your planned dungeon need these things as well. A hillside outside a cave may be wooded or littered with boulders. A city street may have various buildings, carriages, merchant's stalls, and lamp posts. If you're not sure what the environment will look like or have in it I recommend looking online for pictures of similar environments for inspiration.

3. What's going on outside?

Once you've answered 1 and 2 this is easy. A city street in daytime will have random people just going about their business. At night it will be empty save for vagrants and night-owls. For outdoors locations roll a die to determine the weather. In the wilderness you can optionally roll a random encounter to add unexpected monsters to the encounter, saying they were drawn by the noise of battle. 

4. How will people/things outside react?

Wild animals may flee or attack. Rough terrain may shift and slide. In cities the reaction to a battle will vary with the city's lawfulness and general danger level. Citizens in very dangerous cities may regard the party's battle with complete apathy, or possibly even aid the villain.

5. Don't Hesitate

When the party take things off the rails mid-encounter, just start drawing more stuff on your battle mat like it was always there. You can fill in details as you describe them, just keep your tone of voice the same as during the battle, keep using the initiative order from the previous battle, and get back to the action as quickly as possible.

World Building: Starting a World Book

A World Book (often called a Campaign Bible) is exactly what it sounds like. A book of your world. It describes the people, places, and things in the world and provides a way to organize your thoughts. It's not something your bring to the table (usually) but rather a resource for preparing adventures. The structure of a world book should be well-defined, with sections divided by subject matter and a regular template within each section. You don't want to spend all of your planning time rummaging through disorganized notes.

A World Book can take many forms. It can be a simple notebook with pages between sections left blank to fill in later, a 3-ring binder, or even an online wiki. What medium to choose largely depends on personal preference and how much exposition and detail you want your world to contain.

Sections of a World Book

There are four major sections of a World Book: People, Places, Things, and Events. Each of these sections can have subsections, but try not to divide any deeper. Nothing needs to be written out long-form; every section can just be full of bullet-point notes. See the examples section at the end of this post for some excerpts from my own World Book.

People

There's going to be two definite subsections to People. The first is Peoples. In the Peoples section you describe each race's ethnic traits, religions, and cultural history. The second section is Important Individuals. These are the important players in your world, past and present. Describe their physical traits, achievements, and legends that may have appeared around those achievements.

Places

Primarily this section is interested with describing the regions of your world. Focus on background details like climate and geography and then start thinking about territories. At the highest level of detail a page in this section might outline a nation-state including its climate, people (referring to the People section), imports, exports, and political/military situation. This section is part of a feedback loop with your world map. The map creates natural barriers and biomes that form the basis of territories, which in turn inform where on the map you draw borders, roads, fortresses, etc.

Things

This is a bit of a catch-all, but most importantly this section describes technology. How does the complex interaction of magic and technology play out in your world? Who makes the best weapons in the world? What do the armies of the richest nations equip their soldiers with?

Events

History should be spread throughout your World Book where appropriate to help describe things. This section is for describing the world-changing events that shape the course of your world's history and influence everything that happens after.

Examples from Teredahar

Example of a detailed cultural history

The Psionic Peoples
Sometime around TR 8000 the Illithid race began expanding their domain in the deep subterranean of Tereredahar. Their conquests brought them a vast number of new peoples to consume or enslave. They already had Gith slaves since before coming to Prime. The Drow make poor slaves, but the dwarves and humans they found in their midst proved quite suitable. Modern Illithid society in The Deep and on the Astral Plane was built on the backs of legions of human and dwarven slaves.
In addition to simple slave labor, members of the Prime-native races were subjected to scientific experimentation. It was the survivors of these experiments who became the first psionics. They would come to be called Wilders. The trauma of their ordeals became a source of power then turned to rage against their captors.
Together with a force of natural-born sorcerers, the wilders staged a slave uprising and overthrew their masters. They fled deeper into The Deep to hide from reprisal and there began to study their powers and form a society. They called themselves the Deep Covenant.
With the help of the Deep Covenant more slaves where freed and more psionics joined their cause. The generation of formally-trained psionics were called Psions. In time they became the majority among the Deep Covenant. In time different ideological groups broke off from the Deep Covenant and chose to live elsewhere in The Deep and on the surface of Teredahar. They are Dal'Hellum, The Deepstalkers, and the Wind People.

Dal'Hellum

• Comprised almost entirely of Duergar (deep dwarves)
• Largest population is under Ashdar in the Upper Deep and in some mountainhomes, most notably Kor's Geode, where they overthrew the Mountain Dwarf ruler in TR 10080
• They're known to be sneaky and cunning
• They practice an ordered, logical training regimen that makes them good soldiers when they choose to act openly (which is infrequent)

Example of a Nation-State

The United Republic of Din

• Boundaries (neighbours): The Pale River (Kurudar), Balsom River (Koldar), Koldar River (Ashdar), The Dragon Ocean
• Primary inhabitants: Plains Dwarves, Hill Dwarves, Humans
• Biomes: Coastal lowlands, swamp, volcanic wash, damp coastal islands
• Climate: Temperate with humid summers and rainy winters
• Political: Elective representative republic. One of the few democracies on Teredahar.
• Largest Settlement: Dolvan Keep, a large city built around an old fortress. It is the seat of government and a major north-south trading hub, particularly for the export of refined metal ingots.
• Exports: Raw and worked metal, lumber, fish
• Imports: Food, textiles, magical goods

Example of a piece of technology

Powerstone Cannon

• A typical powerstone shell is a rough sphere, about 8" wide. Some are larger or smaller.
• Powerstone shells are very prone to breaking (and exploding) if damaged
• They handle blunt impacts ok, but if hit on a point will shatter
• Before the invetion of metal jackets for the shells, the cannon barrels had to be completely smooth to avoid breaking the shell in the barrel
• Metal jackets have led some weaponsmiths to experiment with rifled-barrel artillery pieces

At The Table: Adding Detail to Combat

Combat is a core element of D&D. The vast majority of the rules are related to adjudicating combat, and the majority of character's abilities are only really useful in combat situations. The side-effect of this is that combat is a very mechanics-heavy math break that can break player's immersion in the game as they study their character sheets, battle mat, and dice. One simple way to help hold players in the universe is by adding more description to events. Instead of simply saying "the Orc's attack misses", a GM wanting to improve immersion could say "the Orc swings wide, leaving a gash in the wall behind you" while looking across the table at the player who is being attacked. Producing these descriptions quickly without pausing or stammering requires either practice or preparation. Here are some guidelines to help you provide these on-the-fly descriptions of action:

Know the surroundings

This comes naturally when designing an encounter. Most encounters can be thought of as taking place in an arena, be it a dungeon room or square kilometer of woodlands. Whatever the area you expect your battle to take place in, be sure you know what's in it. Focus on things likely to be interacted with or stood near during battle like as walls, terrain, and anything players or enemies might use for cover.

Know the actors' defenses

To effectively add detail you'll need to know what defenses the players and enemies have. This is important so you know if you can describe an arrow glancing off a fighter's shield or being stopped in a flash of light from a wizard's Mage Armor. The easiest way to keep track of this it to have access to a copy of each of your players' character sheets, and keep track of temporary defenses (like Mage Armor) on a scratch pad.

Melee Attack Misses

Result relative to AC	Attack stopped by*	Example Outcomes
Close call -1 to -2	Armour, or Natural Armorr	The attack got past your defenses and struck your body. You were saved only by your armour "The warhammer strikes with a loud crunch, but your armour holds" "The blade glances off your armour, trailing sparks"
Blocked -2 to -5	Shield or Deflection	The attack was on-target but you kept it from hitting your body "You parry the attack with your shield" "The blade is turned aside by your magic defenses"
Miss -5 or lower**	Dex	You evaded the attack, or it went wide and hit something around you "The Golem swings his axe high and you simply duck under it" "The Orc swings wide, smashing the table next to you and scattering its contents across the floor"

Ranged Attack Misses

Result relative to AC	Attack stopped by*	Example Outcomes
Near-miss*** -1 to -3	Natural Armour or Shield	"The shot embeds itself in your shield" "Your arrow breaks against the dragon's scales"
Close -3 to -5	Armour, Deflection, or Dex	"The bolt plinks off your armour" "You sidestep the shot"
Miss -5 or lower	Object or terrain	"The arrow embeds itself in the wall behind you" "The shot goes sailing off into the night"

*If the character doesn't have this defense, pick the next one down
**Within reason, a very bad role doesn't require any player ability to evade
***I use a home-rule where projectile near-misses have a chance of hitting a randomly-chosen adjacent target.

World Building: Where to Begin

Start Small

You probably have grand ideas in your head about what your campaign world will be like: cities floating in the clouds, fierce battles, golden plains of wheat stretching to the horizon, things like that. That's good but thinking about such things before pencil hits paper is just going to give you too much to worry about too soon.

Focus on just a single location where your first few play sessions will take place. The GM guides are a great resource for setting up a single coherent location. I recommend this location be a settlement with a nearby adventure. This kind of "starting town with a haunted mine" seems cliche but there's a simple reason it turns up everywhere: It's easy for both the GM and the players. Everyone knows what to expect which means you can focus on getting used to your players and new players can get used to the game. The guidebooks will help you handle the mechanics of a town and the first adventure site, but the look and feel of the place is still up to you.

A Basic, Believable Settlement

...Just add water. Seriously, assuming your setting is using the pseudo-medieval background expected by most game systems then access to water is an essential first step in creating a town. A river or lake provides drinking water, irrigation for crops, a way to move goods, and a source of food.

...Heat/chill until ready. The next consideration is climate. Human civilization springs up in virtually every place with sunlight and access to fresh water, so this is mostly just a flavour decision. Choose carefully though, because no climate exists in a vacuum and when it comes time to zoom the map out and create surrounding areas it will be your job to make the terrain believable.

...Season to taste. Now that you know the climate of your settlement you can actually create the place. I highly recommend basing your settlement on real-world examples from similar climates. Earth has examples of people living in virtually every environment imaginable and reading about places like yours will help you get a clear mental picture of what the place looks like. Once you have that picture in your head you can shape it to fit what you have designed on the mechanical side (races, population, etc) and use that image to describe it at the table.

Conservation of Detail

Now that you have your anchor town as a dot on the map, it's going to be very lonely without some more dots. Good storytelling makes the world seem bigger than just what's on the page. Consider some of the dialogue from the first act of Star Wars: A New Hope. On Tattooine the characters throw out location names like "Anchorhead", "Toshi Station" and "Mos Eisely" in casual conversation, but only one of those places is ever visited in the main storyline. It's good to have such places just for some NPC to say they're from there, have news arrive about there, or just give the players new places to think about once they're settled in your starting village. Just don't get carried away.

Conservation of Detail is about making the areas near the players feel alive and populated without having to design everything up-front. Travel in medieval settings is usually very slow. Few people ever travel beyond the borders of their own county much less to the next nation. What this means for you is that only the area within a few miles of your settlement and adventure site needs to be fleshed out. If there are mountains in the distance, draw them, and if you want a well-known major city in the same region as the players you should know which road leads there but not necessarily where it is.

That's all that's needed to start a new campaign setting. If your players like it there will be more work to finish when they leave the first settlement & adventure site.