Backgrounds as ‘racial moves’
My usual group doesn’t meet very often. As such I tend to over think things, so instead of rolling up 101 discoveries, I felt like trying to add a little more to the base character moves, based around our current game. Some of it’s pinched from the compendium classes in The Perilous Wilds as they looked too cool to not incorporate.
Their setting went pretty grimdark quite quickly. Humanity is dominated by a theocracy with a pseudo-angel figurehead. Other races have been ostracised/banished (if any still exist. I think the word genocide was bandied about at one point). These lands offer little opportunity for adventure. True freedom can only be found on the borderlands.
With that in mind I started playing about. So instead of Elves, Dwarves & Halflings, all adventurers are probably human, their ‘racial’ moves based around their background. Elves and Dwarves may exist still but they’ve probably retreated to lands that are alien to man but not to themselves i.e. The Wilds.
I eventually ended up with five distinct backgrounds for man:
City Dweller – a person from a dense metropolitan area
Frontiersman – a person living on the hard edge of civilisation
Indigenous – one of the many people’s who live their lives in the Wilds
Journeyman – a junior member/indentured servant of a powerful individual/organisation
Wyrd – Either a fresh faced adventurer or a person blessed/cursed by a mysterious entity (bear with me on this one)
I’ve linked the Google doc where I’ve scrawled some of my thoughts/moves. Let me know what you think.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J90gPmyTzPstqo6wFX_o4pJ0LoPuz-cXBCzJPbWkcpQ/edit?usp=sharing
Cool. I like the flavor of these a lot. They are, in general, a lot more potent than the standard Freebooters race moves, but it’s across the board so probably just fine.
Seems like there’s room for a “noble” background, one not tied to a patron but with education, limited access to wealth, some social status (for all the good that does on the Frontier).