Other than for backstory purposes, what effect does heritage and background have on game play??
Other than for backstory purposes, what effect does heritage and background have on game play??
Other than for backstory purposes, what effect does heritage and background have on game play??
You mark XP at the end of a session when you’ve expressed your heritage or backstory.
EDIT: Oh, also, it sets the parameters for how rolling Consort works.
It gives a great framework for where/how you fit in society too, in a narrative sense. You can explore what themes like stereotypes, patriotism, nationalism, culture, classism, integration, separatism, etc. feel like for your particular scoundrel’s background/heritage in your group’s setting. That is powerful.
My go-to statement for questions like this is “It has an effect in the fiction, but that’s not insignificant.” Because the fiction has an effect on things like Positioning, etc.
For Heritage, our group has made some assumptions of how the various nations tend to view each other in general, and that colors people’s attitudes. Need to talk to Ulf Ironborn? If you can send a Skovlan PC, it might be a Controlled Consort roll. If all you can spare is your Iruvian pickpocket, the same roll might be Risky.
Same thing for Background. Various classes don’t necessarily get along. Historically, interactions between Nobles and Labor have always been strained.
Is there any setting information one can use to assign this? My group was EXTREMELY frustrated by the lack of material to help them make the heritage and background choices.
That’s for your players to invent. What are Skovlanders like? We know they just lost their war for independence. What are Iruvians like? We know what rumors people have about them. And so on, and so forth. Take inspiration from the brief information given, and then make it your own world.
That’s not really helpful. Two sentences about a whole large island, one of which covers geography and the other eye and hair color is grossly insufficient.
This game has hints of a really interesting implied world, but until there is more detail of how’s and whys I don’t think my group will be interested.
Don’t know what to tell you, man! Tons of people get by just fine talking to their players and figuring out what makes sense about the world. Maybe there will be a huge gazetteer about the wide world? But with the game being rooted in Duskvol, I don’t know how many words Harper is going to spend on the outside world.
My group also made some very large assumptions about what each of the cultures was like to begin with, and a lot of this comes out in my writeups.
Our Iruvia is very heavily influenced by pre-Islam Arabia, our Severos is very Mediterranean (specifically Italian), our Skovlan is very Scandanavian. Our Akoros is very western European (Doskvol is very specifically influenced by Industrial Revolution era London). Other groups will have had different ideas about what each of these cultures represents.
Now John may very well have some more detailed information about the Empre as a whole when the actual book comes out, and that’s fine, but this is the Empire (and the Doskvol) that my players and I have been inhabiting for the better part of a year, so for us it’s likely going to remain as such even after the release.
There will be a bit more information about the various Heritages, yes. Not a whole gazeteer of the world, but more than there is now.
It depends if you want to handle it similar to Dungeon World – where PCs are totems – the exemplum of their race/class. In DW – you would make fiction as the only PC of that race/class and that would be the canon for the setting. If you had shared races, you’d collaboratively decide what was in the setting. So in BitD – is the intent to give setting agency to the players to establish facts about the world, or is it to fit them within predefined facts established by the author at time of printing?
Heritage is more like DW style.