Our group tried out Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e recently, and it went great! In this post, I’ll talk about what Ancestry & Culture is, why we tried it, and our experience with it.
What is Ancestry & Culture?
This zine by Arcanist Press is a way to replace the idea and mechanics surrounding race in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. The zine’s introduction discusses why we want to replace the way 5e handles race, and I highly recommend taking a look—you can see a 30-page preview of the product on its DriveThruRPG page, enough to read the introduction and familiarize yourself with the mechanics.
To summarize, the way that race is depicted in 5th edition is an essentialist approach—saying that by nature of their race, all elves get certain traits that aren’t shared by gnomes, dwarves, et cetera. This is both overly simplistic and harmful. As the author of the zine, Eugene Marshall, writes, “What folks call racial differences simply do not map cleanly onto anything in our biology as simplistic as the concept of race. What’s more, that concept in the real world has been used to justify historic atrocities. […] Because these harmful concepts have no place in our world, they need not be in the stories we tell with our friends either.”
Ancestry & Culture preserves the narrative core of elves, tieflings, dwarves, and other options we love to play by splitting 5e’s race mechanics in two—ancestry and culture. Ancestry is your genetics and your physiology, including your size, lifespan, and other attributes like the dragonborn’s breath weapon. Culture is your upbringing and how the community you grew up in shaped your development. Culture includes ability score increases, languages, and other attributes like the high elves’ weapon training.
This zine only covers options available through the Open Gaming License (OGL), so you won’t see options for non-OGL 5e races (like the dark elves or firbolgs). However, Arcanist Press has released Custom Ancestries & Cultures that adds a plethora of new options. And, the core Ancestry & Culture zine contains guidance for building your own ancestry and culture options.
Why we tried it
Our group has been playing 5th edition for a few years now. I think when I started playing D&D, I accepted 5e’s way of doing things for a few reasons. First of all, I just wasn’t really thinking about how depictions of fantasy races could be harmful. I didn’t think that hard about why, in the rules, certain races were more intelligent or stronger than others.
Because 5e’s art depicts a diversity of characters, and because of the PHB’s encouragement to play a character of any gender, I looked at the race mechanics and thought, “well, I guess this is okay.” I allowed myself to accept the parts of the system I was unsure about because it seemed empathetic and progressive in other areas.
Once I became aware of the problem, I didn’t think I could do anything about it. I didn’t know how to approach a homebrew solution that was functional. I was sort of lost until I learned about products that sought to fix the issue.
Our DM wanted to run a one-shot session outside of our normal campaign. We’d talked about the different options for changing 5e’s race problem, and though it was close, the players for the one-shot decided on trying Ancestry & Culture.
Using Ancestry & Culture
I really enjoyed how easy to use Ancestry & Culture is. It made things easy on both the player and DM side of things. Essentially, players get two choices (which ancestry and culture fit their character concept best) instead of one. This allowed for fun character concepts like our druid, who was the child of a triton and an elf.
Some of us wanted to play characters who were satyrs, centaurs, and so on. The DM could spend some time separating the original mechanics into an ancestry and culture using the zine’s guidance. Overall, the change from 5e’s base mechanics to ancestry and culture was pretty painless. (We haven’t figured out a good solution for building a character with different ancestry and culture in D&D Beyond, but I’ll let you know when we do!)
The zine also has some lovely art that provides a lot of inspiration for character building. I’m excited to use Ancestry & Culture in the future to create unique characters!
You can find Ancestry & Culture on DriveThruRPG, along with Custom Ancestries & Cultures, which I haven’t tried yet, but I think it looks awesome!
Have you found a way to use ancestry and culture in D&D Beyond yet? 😉
Not quite! The rules found in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is the closest we’ve gotten so far.