Into the Darkness

I have been looking for a name for my campaign and I have finally settled on Into the Darkness. You would be surprised how many names have been taken for various dungeon crawl projects and how difficult is, at least for me, to actually wordsmith.

My last week has consisted of getting started on the new school year, and reading through the 5e Player's Handbook. I decided the easiest way to become familiar with the new rules, and decide on what homerules I want to include, is to type out the rulebook as I read through. This has basically turned into a project where I will have a somewhat custom ruleset, and an errata page to show what is different in specific.

Unfortunately, going back to wordsmithing, this lead me back to considering names for various custom races, and whether or not I should reuse names that other systems have already used. I am still not sure which direction I will go, but I have to admit if I had been the one who came up with the Aasimar race I would probably have a chuckle over the name, but having read it as someone else's creation I was less critical.

As with D&D 5e, I will be going with a few races/bloodlines, and each race gets two or more subtypes. An example of this would be the plane-touched bloodline, tentative called Soulborn, which give a core set of abilities, and then the Aasimar or Tiefling give different attribute modifiers and abilities.

To take an example directly from the 5e PHB lets look at elves. The base abilities you get from being an elf is +2 Dexterity, Darkvision, Keen Senses, Fey Ancestry, and a Trance you perform in place of sleeping. You can either be a High Elf, which gets +1 Intelligence and elven weapon training, a Wood Elf, which gets +1 Wisdom and some mobility related powers, or a Drow, which gets +1 Charisma and what we have come to see as the common suite of Drow magical powers alongside a weakness to sunlight.

Following this format gives the players, as it currently stands, ten different choices for racial abilities and ability score modification. This is more than an OSR retro-clone would have, which is what a lot of the recent dungeon crawl centric releases seem to focus around, but I see a lot of promise the the mechanics that exist in 5e, especially the bounded accuracy rules that are baked into the system.