A Human-Centric World for Shadowdark

Standard fantasy role-playing games present a smorgasbord of player ancestries from standard elves and dwarves to cat people and shark people. Some GMs and players may hark back to simpler game and literary roots. These rules are for those GMs and players.

A Human-Centric World

A GM establishes a human-centric world primarily by the NPCs they introduce. If all or nearly all of them are human, and demihumans and non-humans live in far-off or isolated communities, the GM has a human-centric world.

However, some might find it odd that in a human-centric world most player character parties skew toward non-humans.

To reinforce this from the player perspective, the GM has at least two choices:

1. The edict “All player characters are human.” The Specialties house rule takes the sting out of the edict.

2. Restricting classes based on Ancestry. While potentially problematic, this approach dates to the beginning of the hobby. Ancestry Classes revive that idea for the 21st century.

Specialties

Human characters choose one of the following Specialties¹:

Ambitious

You gain one additional talent roll at 1st level.

Alert

You can’t be surprised.

Lucky

You start each session with one Luck Token.

Mighty

You have a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls with melee weapons.

Precise

You get a +1 bonus to attack rolls with ranged weapons or a +1 bonus to spellcasting checks.

Stalwart

Start with +2 HP. Roll hit points per level with advantage.

Stealthy

Once per day, you can become invisible for 3 rounds.

Ancestry Classes

Each PC with a nonhuman Ancestry is also a member of a class specialized for that ancestry.

Dwarf. Dwarf.

Elf. Elf.

Half-Elf. Half-Elf.

Half-Orc. Half-Orc.

Each ancestry may have more than one class to represent the diversity of the ancestry, but by default each ancestry available to players has at least one class.