Races: Creating Homebrew
Header Art: Shoony by Paizo Publishing
So, two weeks ago the other creator of this site, Chris, did two things I can never forgive. The worst thing he did was write a listicle. The only slightly less awful thing he did was demand that I create a dog race for 5e when I know, deep down inside of my bitter black heart, he hates the idea of most anthropomorphic races. I can’t do anything about the listicle except try to kill his character on Saturday. As for the demand for a dog race, well, my hands are tied and now I must create one.
But, I decided this could be a teachable moment for everyone. I’ll go through the creation of a dog race, and talk about my design choices and how you can create your own races in Dungeons & Dragons without going overboard with them.
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The Race
Before you can begin creating your race, make sure you have a very clear idea as to what you are hoping to accomplish and what niche you are looking to fill. It might make sense to simply reflavor an existing race into a new one, making a few minor changes or switching a few abilities around. This could be if you wanted to create a parrot-race and so you could take the aarakocra information and just change the Ability Score Increase from Wisdom to Charisma.
Other options include the Custom Lineage rules found in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (2020), though that’s more of a temporary fix as it hands out a feat. It doesn’t provide the flavor of a unique race, but rather helps players make a specific type of build or allows them to create something weird without having their Game Master go through and build a new race for a one-off event. If you are wanting the playable race to be better represented, then it’ll be worth creating racial traits for them.
The Racial Name
You need a defining name for your new race. As a word of advice, avoid using a term like dogfolk, catfolk, lizardfolk, or other similar terms. While it is quite descriptive to players, it is not a term that an entire race of creatures would call themselves. Humans don’t call themselves apefolk, dwarves as shortfolk, elves as forestfolk, or goblins as feisty-angryfolk. The same can be said for people like the Tabaxi or Kobolds, they aren’t going to take kindly to you just calling them cats or lizards. While you can call your race ‘dogfolk’ to help players immediately understand what the race appears/acts like, save it for the first line in your description, not as the WHOLE name of a race.
For our race today, I decided to name them the cycan. This is a mish-mash of two words that evoke canine, dog, hound, and more to me. The ‘cy’ is taken from Cyno- which originates from the Greek word for dog and for ‘can’ I took it from Lycan, which also originates from Greek, this time for wolf. So while the name basically means dog-wolf if you know what words were mashed together to make it, it’s a made-up word that offers something that covers an entire race of similar creatures.
Brief Introduction
When creating your race, provide a quick description for your players to quickly reference if they are confused about what they are reading about. Try to keep this as simple as possible, with a clear reason why someone might want to play as this race. If you have a novel of history for a race, it’s better to add that to a section after the racial traits or else all your hard work will be for not when they just skip over to something they already know.
For the cycan, our hook is that they are dogfolk. In addition, they aren’t a specific breed of dogfolk, but rather this race encapsulates all 190+ breeds of them. I also drop in tidbits that these people align their identities with their pack and there is no general consensus as to who they really are. They prefer associating with their packs and don’t have much contact with others outside of it.
Cycan Names
While you don’t have to provide information on this, it does help players figure out what names would be appropriate - though they may still end up calling their cycan character Fido or Spike. This simply allows you to sneak in a bit more information about this race without the player realizing they are being engrossed by your lore - it also helps you figure out how others of that race might be named themselves and how their names interact with the world at large.
For us, I wanted to highlight the relationship a cycan has with their pack and how they are distrustful of those outside of it. They have a pack name, and then a wide variety of names they pass out to strangers, never sticking to a single name for the outside world. They don’t care if it is confusing if they hand out three names to three different people all within earshot of them, as these people are not part of their pack and can’t be trusted. Those that can be trusted, and thus in their pack, learn their real name which is composed of two parts: their role in the pack + their real name.
Ability Score Increase
A new development for races in Dungeons & Dragons is that it seems like, with the release of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, WotC will no longer be providing Ability Score Increases. I, personally, disagree with that change not because I hate the idea of choosing your Ability Score Increases, but because it provides more information for the player. If they see that a race typically gains a bonus to their Dexterity, they have a better understanding of how their character pushes against the trend of others of their kind by getting that boost into Intelligence or Strength.
For my purposes, I’m going to keep providing them for any races I make.
For your own homebrew races, you can decide if you want to include this part. If you do include it, even just as guidance, every race gets a +2 to a score and a +1 to another score. There are a few exceptions like it could be that you get a +1 to three different scores or if you are a mountain dwarf, you get a +2 to two different scores. If you give two +2s, then your race should have very little extra abilities given out to the player due to the power of that. I’d recommend just never doing that.
For the cycan, they gain a +2 bonus to their Constitution score. They are currently missing their +1 to another score, but that’s because I decided to sequester that to their subrace as 190+ breeds are all going to rely on different scores and it helps to build up the flavor of the subraces by giving it a specific ability to increase. You can see another race that did something similar. The Shifter, from Eberron: Rising From the Last War (2019), sequesters their +2 and +1 into the subraces instead of just the +1. You can freely decide to put the Ability Score Increase behind subraces, though it does make the race feel a bit more disparate if they lack a common tying ability score.
Age & Alignment
I’m just going to quickly talk about these. Thousands of words have been written by other people about WotC’s decision to remove the Age and Alignment information for races. I disagree with that decision, as it provides more clues and guidance for players, but I can also see why some might feel like it is too confining. I love the age for races and wish it wasn’t being removed, so I’m going to keep including it for all the races I create. It’s not necessary, but I recommend creating it for your homebrew races as well simply because it guides the players about your world, even if you are using an official one, and how they might live in the world.
Alignment is a bit less necessary, though I still added it in to squeeze just a bit more lore into this piece of homebrew. I’m never going to shirk from a chance to inject just a tiny bit more lore into homebrew, and I recommend the same for you. This way, the player understands that if they decide to play an evil cycan, they are probably going to be hard-pressed to find others to join their packs, and maybe that’s why they became an adventurer… to form an evil pack for world domination.
Creature Type
This is a brand new addition to the racial traits and is simply here to help your players know immediately what they are. No longer do we wonder if the Dragonborn is humanoid or dragon, as we now know that they are simply disappointments. Kobolds are the true servants of dragons and dragonborns are just in our way.
If you are unsure what to put here, just put down humanoid so long as your race is roughly human-shaped - meaning that they have arms, legs, a torso, and a head. They might have a few more limbs than the average human, but so long as they have a similar silhouette, it’ll be safe to list them as humanoid.
Size
The playable race sizes include Small and Medium, for most races they are going to end up as Medium. You can go bigger or smaller, but understand that no other race does so and you may face problems that won’t be covered in the rules. For example, up to 4 tiny creatures can fit into a single 5-foot square, meaning that if you have a party of 4 tiny pixies, they could all be in the same space to attack a single creature without bothering to spread out. While in most circumstances that won’t be a big deal, if you are hoping to trick them up by forcing them to fight 1-by-1 in a 5-foot wide corridor, you’ll have to come up with something else to challenge them.
Large creatures, on the other side, have the problem that most doors are just meant for Medium-sized creatures. Anytime they want to go through a door, they have to expend additional movement which can make moving around a challenge. In addition, they won’t be able to squeeze into places that a Medium-sized creature has to squeeze into and they have a greater presence on the battlefield, allowing them to hit in more squares around them than a Medium-sized creature or have a wider radius of effect for auras and magical abilities.
Speed
A creature should have 30 feet of movement speed. For smaller creatures, you can decrease that to 25 feet, but you should provide something that helps contradict that setback like an additional tool or weapon proficiency. If you make it so that a creature is faster than that, then reduce the number of things they might get elsewhere.
Some creatures, like the aarakocra, have an additional, alternate speed. They can fly very fast, and thus have a condition associated with their flight, can’t wear medium or heavy armor, and they have very few extra abilities unlike other races who don’t get such fast movement speeds.
Languages
You can provide as many languages as feels appropriate to your race, though in the recent books, playable characters start with Common and one other language that they and the Game Master think is appropriate. Knowing a lot of languages isn’t especially strong in this edition unless it is a major part of your table and thus the benefit of having two languages vs three or one languages is hard to define. I’d recommend either just doing one language, like the cycan, or doing two languages.
Special Abilities
At this point, we can now start getting into what makes this race unique. Because we have subraces, we have to keep in mind we can’t overload the base race with a lot of features, but instead need to save some of the power of our race for the subrace to help them feel substantial. For our base cycan race, they gain advantage on saving throws against being frightened as I took the idea that some dogs, not mine, are quite brave and willing to protect those they love.
This defining trait(s) should be something that is unique to the race and should, ideally, be something that is genetic - not cultural. If you tie an ability to culture, then it makes it weird that all elves know how to swing a longsword but the elf character in your game is adopted by gnomes who have no idea how to swing a longsword.
If you are making a race with no subraces, then you are typically going to offer a creature two or three different minor abilities. While separate they might not be worth a huge amount or be uber-powerful, they should still offer mechanical options for the player, typically ones focused on combat as this is a combat game. Once you create all of these abilities, it should be about the same power level as a feat. We know that because the Variant Human gets a feat at this level, just as the Custom Origin option gives a feat.
Proficiencies
To finish off your race, we should give them a skill proficiency. This can also be the time that you give weapon, armor, or tool proficiencies - though you’ll typically only do this if you don’t have enough Special Abilities to make up the power of a feat. This can be handy if, in your world, every creature of this race has a specific weapon, armor, or tool - though I’d caution against doing that as it means that, for whatever reason, a creature always knows how to use that weapon, armor, or tool even if they had never held it before. While it might make sense for a race you are creating, it doesn’t make sense for all of them and I’d recommend either being very open-ended about what a player could pick for their proficiency or coming up with another Special Ability to help the race.
While some races are never offered a skill proficiency, they are often given stronger Special Abilities to make up for it. Take the goblin for example, while they don’t get any proficiencies, they do get an ability that is almost the exact same as a 2nd level rogue ability - something quite powerful and useful in almost any situation they might come across.
For the cycan, I gave them a choice between two different skills for each subrace.
Subraces
If you want subraces, make sure to place options locked behind different ones. Choosing a subrace should feel just as impactful on your character as choosing the actual race and may have consequences for how you play and interact with the game. For our cycan, the three subraces each have a different ability they can use that define that subrace. It gives them different ways that they play, helping to differentiate them if two or more players decide to play the same race.
If you get to this point and feel like your subclasses are rather samey, it might make sense to just combine them into a single subrace and make feats that players can pick up instead of an ASI that are unique to their race, similar to the feats provided in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything (2017).
Concluding
Now that you have made your race, it’s time to put it through its paces and make adjustments as you play. The best way to ensure a race is balanced is to play it in your games and make purposeful changes to its abilities so that it has moments to shine in your game, but also doesn’t overshadow everyone else.
But before I end it here…
Bonus Subrace - Feisty Cycans
Of course, our three subraces can’t cover every type of cycan. Some cycan are strangely alien coughpoodlescough or hyper-aggressive coughchihuahuacough. As a bonus to all those who read to the bottom of this post, enjoy the feisty cycan.
Fiesty cycan are quite diminutive, typically the smallest of all their kind. They often have the largest packs of any cycan and have been known to defeat powerful creatures by relying on the power of their pack.
Ability Score Increase. Your Strength or Dexterity score increases by 1, pick one.
Size. Unlike others of your kind, you are quite small - but ferocious. Your size is Small.
Powerful Stature. You know that everyone thinks you are just a pushover, but you’ll show them. You have proficiency in the Athletics or Acrobatics skill, pick one.
Enraged Fury. When you get into the fight, you are ferocious to behold. When you damage a creature with an attack or a spell, and an ally is within 5 feet of them, you can cause the attack or spell to deal extra damage to the creature. The extra damage equals half your proficiency bonus. Once you deal extra damage to a creature, you continue to deal extra damage to them with your attacks or spells until they are reduced to 0 hit points, so long as an ally is within 5 feet of them. You can’t use this feature again until you finish a short or long rest.
If you liked the Cycans race we made today and want a printer-friendly PDF of this, or any tool or subclass we’ve made, consider supporting us on Patreon! All homebrew that I’ve created or will create in the future will be uploaded to our patreon in printer-friendly versions. We appreciate any and all support!
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