Filling out your character sheet in Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most important parts of a new campaign. However, once you have a decent amount of experience with the best tabletop RPGs under your belt, you might start to notice yourself gravitating to the same ol' character creation options again and again. Don't you think it's about time to shake things up a bit? Battlezoo Ancestries can help with that.
Battlezoo Ancestries is a set of D&D or Pathfinder-compatible supplements from Roll for Combat (led by Mark Seifter, co-creator of Pathfinder Second Edition) that provide expanded ancestry options for your tabletop adventures. For example, in your travels across the TTRPGverse, you may have come across Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons, a book that lets you play as a Dragon. For clarity: that's not a Dragonborn, you can already play as those. We're talking an actual Dragon. While a playable Dragon may sound like the overpowered homebrew of the world's most annoying player, it's actually carefully balanced – thanks in large part to the in-depth game design experience of the folks who wrote it.
Living Legends is Battlezoo Ancestries' latest outing that steps things up a notch and delivers even more wonderfully wacky forms for your next player character to take. It's currently in its funding period on Kickstarter but it's already smashed its $10,000 goal. After just two days on the crowdfunding platform, Battlezoo Ancestries: Living Legends has raised over $61,000. When you look at the delightfully odd ancestries on offer in Living Legends, this impassioned response from tabletop RPG players really starts to make sense.
There are 14 playable races to choose from in Battlezoo Ancestries: Living Legends; that's four more than what you'd find in the official D&D Player's Handbook. Among these you'll find angels, devils, werecreatures, living gargoyles, giants, arboreals (living trees), cerebrophages (Mindflayer-type brain munchers), and more.
As it is, that list is already pretty wild, but there are some other creatures that particularly caught me off guard and had me raring to play. You can be an 'Evil Eye', a tentacled eyeball that gives massive Beholder vibes. Can’t decide? Be Transformers-esque fusion of multiple different characters of varying ancestries. Or, you can even be a Swarmblood and be host to hundreds of little creatures that transform your body and move on your command. I think Swarmblood’s my clear favorite: it’s equal parts adorable and skin-crawlingly creepy.
Lucky for me, a preview for the Swarmblood section of the book is available for free. Alongside some awesome art of various swarm-types, this preview also shows the kind of details (stat modifiers, roll tables, etc.) that are included for each ancestry. There’s plenty for both players and Game Masters to chew on, and it should provide a welcome shake-up for any future campaigns.
If you want to back Battlezoo Ancestries: Living Legends on Kickstarter, you have until April 11. Doing so will not only grant you access to a physical or digital copy of the book, but at higher tiers, it’ll land you extra like VTT files and even super cute goodies like a plushie, or a Mimic dice box.
If you're looking for more content to fuel your tabletop adventures, check out the best D&D books. Want something else to play? Give one of the best board games a try.
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