Tales of the Valiant: More Backgrounds!

Tales of the Valiant is a hungry game, and I need more lineages and heritages. It comes with a great "basic set" of standards, but I always need more. In the base book, we get:

• Beastkin (Animal-kin)
• Dwarf
• Elf
• Human
• Kobold
• Orc
• Syderean (Tiefling & Aasimaar)
• Smallfolk (Halfling & Gnome)

What a great list we have, but you know what? I'm hungry for more! Let's expand the world of Tales of the Valiant with even more lineages and heritages!

We got one "official" supplement with many more, which is good to see. We got the following in this book:

• Dhampir
• Dryad
• Eonic
• Gnoll
• Goblin
• Lizardfolk

I am surprised the Gearforged are nowhere in ToV or the first lineage supplement. These are Midgard-specific, so many of them are coming in a Midgard-focused ToV book soon.

Also note, no dragonkin or eladrin.

But we need more! We need to start raiding Kobold Press' older race guides for other lineages and heritages. When we convert these in, remember to drop all ability score modifiers! Tales of the Valiant does not use racial stat mods, just the special abilities since stat mods are factored into ability score creation.

The next stop is the Midgard Heroes Handbook, and we must be careful to avoid repeating some of the topics already covered or ones covered by options in the ToV lineages. This book includes bearfolk, ratfolk, ravenfolk (all are covered by beastkin). We see repeats here like gnomes, dwarves, and elves - so we can ignore those. The ones worth using here are:

• Centaurs
• Gearforged
• Minotaurs
• Trollkin

The Unlikely Heroes book has a few more and a few more repeats. Some of these are more suited for the Southlands part of Midgard. Worth keeping from this book are the following:

• Derro
• Jinnborn
• Kijani
• Lamia
• Sahuagin

The Kobold Press Southlands Players Guide has more, again, focused on the Southlands area.

• Catfolk
• Tosculi
• Subek

The Tales of the Margreve Players guide has three suited for this area:

• Alseid (deerfolk centaurs)
• Erina (hedgehog folk)
• Piney (trenatfolk)

We can go underground and find the Underworld Players Guide for some classics (plus another dhampir, which is in almost every book):

• Darakul (ghoulfolk)
• Dark Trollkin
• Drow
• Mushroomfolk
• Satarre
• Shade

That is a lot of lineages! And we have not even left Kobold Press books. Converting anything else is as easy as dropping the racial stat modifiers and only using the special powers.

Tome of Heroes is up next, and this is an excellent book since you also get class options. There are a lot of practical backgrounds, many of which are repeated in other books, but this is a one-stop shop of the best, plus it comes in a hardcover. This book is the best source of "extra subclasses" you can buy for ToV now, and you get a lot. Highly recommended if you feel ToV needs more character options.

The Tales of Arcana 5E Race Guide is also an excellent inspirational source of lineages. Be forewarned; there are many goofy ones here, but there are also some real gems. Some of the races include a +4 ability score modifier here, and I would knock that down to a +2 if you use it at all. If it is a +2 or lower, ignore it. Also, some of the races here are very OP, so adjust them if you feel they will blow out your game. Some of these are professions or classes. All that said, this is an excellent book for inspiration and unique NPCs. Some good ones (among many) found here are:

• Android, Cyborg
• Angel, Demon, Devil, Devilkin, Icari, Imp, Painbringer
• Behemoth
• Cthuul
• Djinn, Efreet
• Draconic, Demidragon
• Elementals
• Fairy, Leprechaun, Satyr, Seelie
• Flora
• Gargoyle
• Ghost, Skeleton, Vampire, Zombie
• Giant, Ogre. Porg, Troll
• Golems
• Griffin, Manticore
• Hoyhnhnm
• Pandnaros
• Tortan
• Vashnai
• Walrusk

And it is easy enough to pull in any other 5E lineage from any book you own.

Also, don't forget the Roll for Combat books! Many of these have progression paths in your lineage, and give you far more in terms of improvement and development, and customization than any of the other books here.

Is Modern Fantasy too Cartoony?

I love different ancestries and character types, and these have always been a part of my game. The above is from the Pathfinder 2e Advanced Players Guide, and they are some very cool options for characters.

But I noticed this trend in almost every fantasy game these days.

Everything is turning into a cartoon.

What I find troubling about this is not the options it gives us, but often I find players will use these as a reason to not develop a background and go with an animal stereotype "as" their character. If you did this with any human race, it would be deeply troubling, but with animals, players will adopt the stereotype and lean into it as if it were their entire archetype.

I am a mouse person. Therefore, I go crazy when I see cheese!

I am a catkin, so I lick my paws and groom myself! Catnip makes me go wild! I purr and growl!

I am a crow or raven person, so I caw-caw when there is trouble!

I am a wolf person. Therefore, I walk around with my tongue out, pant, and howl at the moon!

And I sit at the table and want to scream. Would you not do that! You are just replacing problematic human stereotypes with "ha-ha" animal ones, and if these races were actually in the world - they would likely find that just as offensive as well. I bet if we played a game with humans only, you would complain about having to create a backstory and character concept and call the game boring.

I like having them in my game; it just bothers me when players get lazy and use typical animal stereotypes as their character. No backstory, personality, who am I, drama, family, or connection to the world - just an animal stereotype sits at the table.

Is it fun to roleplay and act like an animal? I guess so, but I get a table full of players doing this, and I feel like I am in a cartoon.

Good Players Make the Difference

Now, to be fair, there are some excellent anthro role-players out there, and I see some great stories and characters based on animal heritages. Those who take the time, love the ancestry, and use that to enhance the story they are telling are great players to have at a table. They also lift others around them who choose animal character types and elevate the game. They also play against stereotypes and use that to enhance their roleplaying.

I suppose modern D&D and Pathfinder exist in a world influenced by anime and manga. Since you see a lot of animal-style characters in that media, it transfers to roleplaying, and people want to see them here too. It is not bad, just something a lot of games do very poorly and often enforce the stereotype "as" ancestry instead of creating a unique world and culture for them.

Quality over quantity.

Do they fit into the world and history, or are they just here?

To respect an ancestry is to give them a place in the story of the world. A home. A history. Culture and tradition. A reason to be here. Importance.

Options

Not that cartoony is not bad - this is purely a choice and style decision. I love anthro RP when it is done right. I do not like it when it is used to bring lazy stereotypes to my table; any more than stereotyping a human or traditional fantasy race would be welcome. Because you are an animal, ancestry does not give you a pass from having a family, building a connection to the world, and having an interesting backstory to share with others.

But there are options.

I don't want to call the non-cartoony options "pushback" because that would be unfair to games and the people who wrote them. Many games make a conscious decision to give a curated set of options for backgrounds and ancestries, which is very cool for groups that like the more Tolkien-style stories or gritty fantasy worlds like Game of Thrones; we have games that provide those choices. Even games are entirely anthro and animal characters, so those options exist too.

Choice in gaming is always good, and I feel those who frame this as pushback against the modern cartoony style are just looking for anger clicks. People have preferences and choices, so supporting those is always the best and most inclusive way.

The Low Fantasy Gaming RPG is an excellent 5E-style of option for a more realistic style of game that keeps the rules people are used to. I prefer the word realism because it perfectly contrasts the cartoony style. I can have a low-fantasy cartoony world with anthro characters, for instance. The realism-to-cartoony line has a lot of points in between and gives you a slider you can adjust to taste.

I can add anthro ancestries to Low Fantasy Gaming, but the game gives me the familiar starting point of the human-elf-dwarf-halfling base with a half-skorn (beastmen) option that can be swapped for orcs. If my group chooses to add one anthro race to this world (like replacing skorn with wolf-kin), it immediately stands out and is unique. Still, I would also require my group to do the homework and explain how it fits in, what the conflicts are, what the society is like, their internal factions and all the fantastic world-building stuff.

But for groups that want to create a more familiar style of world and game, these options are fantastic.

I would likely stop with just a handful of significant, highly detailed special ancestries than a book full of random and flavorless options. I don't want 100 different animal shapes to roleplay with; I want a handful of great and flavorful ones that fit into the world and character stories - even if it is just one.

Basic Fantasy: 4+4 Races and Classes

During the audio Podcast discussing Basic Fantasy, Chris Gonnerman mentioned his perfect version of a fantasy game was “four races, four classes, and that is it.” Of course, there are plenty of web supplements for the game that add races and classes, but Chris sticks with his original idea that “4+4” is all you need for a perfect fantasy game.

You can see where the inspiration for this comes from, the basic four character roles are covered: fighter, mage, thief, and cleric. No, you do not have infinite choice, as is normal with any modern role-playing game. With a lot of games, such as Pathfinder, you can be a bard, or a druid, a barbarian, or any other fantasy staple. Basic Fantasy supports that too, but elects to keep the core game simple with 4+4.

Infinite Choice is Good?

Is infinite choice desirable? If you run a grocery store, you will quickly figure out that offering customers infinite choice is a path to confusion and lower sales. You really only need so many choices when it comes to buying cornflakes. I mean, really, namebrand or generic is about all the choice I want to make here. With classes in a fantasy game, admittedly having more choice feels like a good thing because you want to have a rich and varied world with many different options for players to find a unique and satisfying role in the world. The same thing goes for races, you would feel, with more options feeling like a richer and more varied fantasy world.

There are times I feel when limiting race and class choices actually produce a more compelling world. I find my creativity is heightened when I have less choices and I have to become creative when making something unique. If all Basic Fantasy has our the 4+4 race and class choices, I have a world where humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings all have to coexist. There can be no other fantasy races beyond possibly monster races, so these four races will have a history together and you will find that you are starting to create a rich background in order to make this limited choice more unique.

There are times when you have infinite choice where if you have a race that fits a custom role you will tend to pigeonhole that race into that role. Let’s say in my world I had a custom race of “bear people” that lived in the North lands and where your stereotypical barbarian tribe race. With my custom bear race I just pigeonhole them into that role. Without the bear race, I will have to take one of the four races that I have available and create a tribe that acts in that role. I just want these people to be big, hairy barbarians so I don’t really need a race of bear people when I could just quickly modify one of the four and everything stays simple. I could get rid of the hairy part and just put a tribe of elves in this role, or leave them hairy and use dwarves. I start having to be creative with the limited choices I have, and yes it really is a flavor question, but it does highlight not having choices and having to make do with your creativity.

The same can be said for classes. In a world with just fighters, thieves, mages, and clerics – the conflicts and interactions between these four views of the world become simple. The mages, of course like magic and the arcane world. Clerics see the world differently, worshiping gods and the powers of the divine. Fighters and thieves fill the roles of law and chaos, respectively.

Less Means More

Without druids, there is no “cult of nature” making the world’s background a little simpler. Without bards, there are no ways of casting magic through song, making arcane science just a little bit simpler. The same can be said for barbarians, which are just angry fighters anyways, so the method in which military conflicts are handled in this world are simpler. You do lose some extremely flavorful classes, such as paladin, so there is a trade-off to limiting classes, especially when a lot of players expect to be able to play characters in these roles.

But there is a point to limiting choices in that the game really only needs to fill the four most important roles when it comes to dungeon exploration: the warrior, the guy who steals things, the healer, and the magic user. The game is about dungeon exploring and filling one of those four roles inside of a dungeon environment. The paladin, while an extremely popular and flavorful class choice, is a hybrid class that fills two of the four roles, and is less desirable when you are trying to give every player at the table a unique role to fill that does not cross over another player’s role. In order for the game to remain at its purest state, you need to make a choice between warrior or healer, and choose to do one of those roles in the game.

When Do You Want Choices?

In a more story-based game, I would say go for it and have lots of custom classes because ultimately the story is more important than putting a player in a predefined and strict role. In a more limited environment, such as a dungeon where you need to make important choices based on limited resources and defined character roles, I understand the design decision behind limiting classes so a player has to work hard at being effective in the role that they chose. A mage cannot fight, and there is no spell blade class, so you need to use magic highly effectively in order to survive in a dangerous environment when you are a mage. Again, this is a limitation, and it is forcing you as a player to become creative within your role to use the tools best to supply to you to overcome challenges and obstacles.

With infinite choice, of course I can settle right into a comfortable role where I can play my paladin, fight all day long, heal myself, and have most of the powers of the cleric while I swing my sword. I do not have to make choices based on if I want to fight more or if I want to do divine magic more with this character in this game. I can have it all, and I do not have to make that choice. This is why there are so many custom classes in games like Pathfinder, the game is trying to cater to a wide audience by supplying infinite choices so a player can come into the game and find a role that is custom crafted to their play style. When you have to make a hard choice about what you want to play, this is admittedly more difficult, and therefore less desirable when you’re trying to make a game that appeals to a wide audience.

Although with newer books, I feel Pathfinder has too many classes. Another day we will discuss that.

The Difficulty of Choice

That said, I do like games with limited choices in that if they provide compelling choices than I am attracted to the difficulty of having to make that choice. If the choices are meaningless, there is less of a reason to play. If any choice is good, I am also less interested. I like having to make a hard decision and live with it and do well within that role.

I also like that the game does support modding it so a player that really, really wants to play a paladin or barred can play one of these classes. It is not the default way of playing, but it is supported because given today’s games you need to support these choices. The game does put limits on you, but is not so strict that it says you absolutely cannot play one of these classes. There is a little wiggle room, and that is more a strength of the system then it is a weakness. I do like thinking in the mode where the original for classes are the primary classes in the world, because of the simplification of player choices, and also the creativity that a referee has to work within in order to create a unique game world.

Watering Down the Bad Guys

It's days like this that make me miss AD&D 2nd Edition and their total ban on anything demonic or related to the planes of the Abyss or Hades. I will get to my thoughts in a minute, but let's get some background first.

George was doing a read through of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting World Guide, and he did a 'state of the world' report to me, just for fun. Demons figure prominently in the world, and when I came to think of it, demons figure prominently in most Pathfinder adventure paths too. Demons here are the 'big bad' and it seems I just can't get away from them in the setting or published materials. Cheliax, the Worldwound, and a bunch of the enemeies in the Adventure Paths are all demonic figures, and I had a feeling that I misses the days where demons were special, extremely rare, and extremely secretive entities that were more manipulators than the en-masse-enemy-de-jour. I mean, this is Paizo's choice, and I accept it, but I like my infernal forces to be special, one-of-a-kind enemies, such as a demon who lives at the bottom of a dungeon and manipulates goings-on there indirectly.

Switch over to D&D4, and the initial situation is a little better, especially if you limit the game to the basic books. In the 4E Dungeon Master's Guide, we have rules to build custom monsters, and we used these to build 20th level human mercenaries, 16th level plant monsters, and all sorts of other non-demonic bad guys. Just playing with the basic book, you could run an entire campaign without playing the demon card, and just have enemies based on whatever you want. We ran a campaign like this for the longest time, with various bad guys popping up, and with demons playing a lesser role in the background - but still as threats.

Old habits die hard, and it does get worse in Heroes of the Elemental Chaos, a supplement on the demonic side of the 4E World. Here, the planes of hell are laid out in detail, with an uncharacteristic description of demonic planes and their populations of billions of demons laid out. Nothing kills a game like creating hopeless places like this and expecting DMs not to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of what was just dumped on their carefully created campaigns. Yes, DM Fiat applies, you don't have to use it, but this is the official world, and demons have just been promoted to a major role in the ecosystem of the world and its monsters.

I do wish for a world where demons were special again, rare, and existing as the manipulators in the background, not troops on the battlefield. I guess it's a natural progression of demons as the bad guys, you seen it with the Drow as well. In the beginning, the Drow were wicked creatures of the underdark, sadistic evil elves, very rare and special when met. Then the drow became the enemy-de-jour, and you seen them everywhere, armies were on the surface world, and they appeared frequently in modules and on magazine covers. We then had the drow-as-antihero phase, and then today's drow as everyhero phase - they are part of the normal race mix. They have to invent creatures to replace the sadistic evil drow on old-days, like the githanki or something. Demons and their tiefling pop-PC-choices are following the same path, and sooner or later, you'll see something branded as 'worse than demons' appear, like the demons of the demons.

Back to the main point, demons are really prevalent in modern-day gaming, almost too prevalent. I miss the freedom to define the campaign's big-bad as anything you want it to be (aka 4E original 3 books OR Pathfinder minus Golarion), and not have later supplements redefine the world. It is enough to just have dragons and their humanoid servants be the campaign's enemy, or evil mages and their armies, and just leave it at that. There is a point where you need to step back and say, "We need to support referee's and their choices on what's important, and be sure the game company is not dictating a favored enemy or play style."

By making demons the big-bad, it tends to water down everything else in comparison. It feels like Dark Elves in Golarion are window dressing, humanoids are servants of demons, undead are second-fiddle players to demons, and dragons are not really important at all to the world and its history. 4E is a little better with the balance of importance of enemies and their factions, but we do tend to slide towards 'Orcus being the big-bad' at times, and it trends towards gods vs. demons in the end-game. All factions should threaten the world equally, undead lords in Pathfinder should be able to trash the demon's plans, the dark elves could rise and assassinate a demon prince, and even a dragon could get into the fray and kick serious tail. The world should be dangerous, and all enemy factions should be a threat.

Yes, what's in your campaign is your choice, but it is hard to get away from some of these things if you are playing the official releases. Those releases create a 'shared world' for all the players, and control their expectations. If all of a sudden, you see a game with custom enemies and the game doesn't support it, you may run into players that would see that as derivative or off-the-beaten-track. My preference is for freedom and custom enemies, special and rare when they need to be, and respected and celebrated as unique and powerful foes.