Ancestry/Class 5e Hack Pages
reverse engineering in my spare time
I have been prepping to run a local 5e game for some friends so, yes, I have been tinkering with design
The idea with these is to simplify 5e’s design and cut away a lot of the noise. My dwarves aren’t like 5e dwarves, so I don’t need the list of names. I don’t like racial attribute modifiers, so those go in the trash, too. Turns out when you cut away all of the things that you don’t need, you’re actually left with a pretty slim package. So I kept cutting and tweaking.
I picked the ancestry features based off of what I like. Half-Orcs are cool, so I made them better. It’s cool that Elves don’t sleep, so I highlighted that by wrapping it into an even weirder package. Dwarves are hard drinkers with big livers so they can eat almost anything and drink lots of liquor. They are also resistant to magic! Humans have an identity now- we’re the toughest and also the bravest. “Halfling” is my catchall term for little dudes- goblins, gnomes, hobbitlikes. They can all talk to animals, dart between legs, and are a little luckier than normal. Dragonborn don’t have to choose a color anymore, they can just look like whatever and breathe the element they choose. They also have big claws so they’re never quite unarmed. [1]
The classes are just the traditional 5e classes, straight from the SRD. I like having a reference at the table for hit dice and etc- especially for the lower levels.
The plan for this is to be printed and put inside a 3 ring binder for reference at the table. I don’t know how much more material I’ll bother to make in this style but, as usual, it was fun to work with Evlyn Moreau’s art!
We’ll see. For now, you can at least check these pages out. Let me know what you think.
[1] I was going to give the dragonborn wings but couldn’t really justify it. I also wanted to smush dragonborn and warforged together into ‘dragonforged,’ being robot dragons with a breath weapon but elves already have weirdo sleep.