[5e] My Homebrew Setting: Yskarithe, the Worlds Triune

[GnomeWorks]

Some folks have expressed an interest in me posting my 5e homebrew. Before I do that, though, what I work on needs to be understood in context.

I've been writing about my homebrew setting for around 25 years, and running games in it for 20. I started homebrewing for it back in 2e, which went about as well as you'd expect for a 9-year-old trying to follow the shitastic guide in the 2e DMG (which, I'll mention, I was specifically forbidden from reading by my father, who believed that only the DM - him - should have access to it).

There's a whole lot of stupid history that I won't go over here because it isn't really important. What is important is the overall shape of the setting and its primary conceit. Without that understanding, my approach to homebrew - in general, but 5e, in specific - comes off as weird.

This document fragment - which has been coloquially called "the beams document" - is from a larger player's guide for my setting that I'm working on putting together. It explains what the beams are, in my setting, and how they work. There aren't any actual mechanics discussed, but the general feel for each of the beams is. The mechanics of how each beam works is hinted at in general terms, without anything solid (just to avoid overwhelming people: I wanted each beam description to be limited to a single page, and this is intended to be digestable by people new to both 5e and my setting).

What the beams document doesn't discuss is how this looks from a class design perspective. That's this table (links go to threads here for discussion of that class):

Beam	Adept	Expert	Fighter	Healer	Pet	Spark	Tank
Arcane	Virtuoso	Princess	Runeblade	Artificer	Summoner	Mage	Arbiter
Psionics	Erudite	Dreamer	Monk	Ardent	Gestalt	Psychic	Cenobite
Technology	Borg	Detective	Gunslinger	Physician	Rigger	Engineer	Ironman
Divine	Avenger	Vestal	Judge	Priest	Incarnate	Invoker	Paladin
Void	Echo	Ninja	Vampire	Zen	Medium	Voidchild	Hollow
Primal	Zodiac	Explorer	Hunter	Shaman	Caller	Bender	Warden
Time	Xelor	Oracle	Harrier	Kismet	Seer	Epochent	Templar
Chaos	Factotum	Jester	Discordant	Gambler	Iconoclast	Anarch	Vigilante
Memory	Mimic	Scholar	Learner	Cypher	Resonator	Akashic	Quixotic

The basic overall idea here is to take the 4e ideas of power sources and the grid and do it "right." In the past I've been very fast and loose about class design in relation to the beams, but 5e kind of helped wake me up in that regard, and made me realize that in order for the beams to operate as the primary central conceit of the setting, the class - and race - design needs to be focused on them. In prior editions in which I homebrewed, it was effectively impossible to have a party of a single beam - or if you did, you'd have two or maybe three classes present. Something about 5e woke me up to the idea that this is stupid, and so we have the image above.

To give some context for what each of the roles means:

• Adept is a full caster but with a gimmick beyond casting. Few if any of their class features interact with their casting: they're basically intended to be a gish, replacing the fighter part with a gimmick.
• Expert is a skill monkey with some flavor appropriate to their beam thrown in. This lets me justify giving them actual class features at high level that let them hang out with the casters.
• Fighter is exactly what it says on the tin, a complete non-casting fighter-type that has flavor of the beam thrown in. Again, this is intended to justify me giving them caster-like abilities at higher levels so they can maybe stay relevant.
• Healer are support classes with a core healing ability that looks like a paladin's lay on hands on crack, along with cantrips and a half-casting progression. Though the role is "healer" they're more like 4e leaders in that they do a bunch of other stuff on top of healing.
• Pet are petmaster classes. These are sufficiently distinct in my mind to warrant a separate role, because the approach to action economy in 5e is fucked in regards to having pets so they need more specific class design. They get cantrips.
• Spark is the in-setting term for casters in my setting, so it got stuck here because "caster" is magic and the other eight beams explicitly are not magical. Sparks have full casting and almost all if not all their class features relate to making their casting better.
• Tank is what you'd expect, all of them have d12 hit dice and explicitly have various protection and/or aggro abilities, along with a paladin smite equivalent. All are half-casters but don't get cantrips.

To avoid having a fucking tome for players to pore through - and to try to make them more generic - I've begun work on a document for each of the beams. So SteamWorks, for instance, has all the tech stuff: races, classes, and inventions (their spell equivalents), among other things. In effect you could theoretically take SteamWorks as it is and run a setting fully off of that, and get some kind of steampunk-ish setting.

Anyroad, that's the context for everything I've done, in terms of homebrew, for D&D 5e. Feel free to tear my setting doc to pieces. If you have a salient point to make, I'll try to address it. If you have a question, I'll try to answer it without getting too stupidly-deep into my setting lore, unless that's what's desired.

[owlassociate]

Thank you, I'm really excited to see more of this. I know the word epic is mostly used ironically nowadays, but it feels epic in a meaningful way. It reminds me of Final Fantasy.

I'm very curious about how the beams interact with the setting. Like, how common are people that know of and walk the beams? Basically, how "high magic" are the assumptions of your setting. Feel free to dive as deeply as you'd like in answering that, I'm a huge fan of stuff like this.

As for the class system, I'm wondering if you actually have 63 distinct classes or is it more like 7 classes each with 9 subclasses? And how does multiclassing work? Can you multiclass between beams and/or roles?

My one criticism of the document is that the color coding for the beams is kind of samey. I'm pretty sure Void and Technology are the same color, and they both look really similar to Chaos. So, if you're planning on using a color scheme to format the beams, I'd recommend using less neutral colors.

[...You Lost Me]

I'm a sucker for large tables of player options like this.

It sounds like the primary tactical differences are decided by class. How much do beams affect gameplay? Is it substantial enough that all 9 tanks feel significantly different from one another?

[Krusk]

I also broke my heartbreaker down by powersource, and gave each powersource one class of each role in the 4e vein. I've even got my own copy of your Image, although mine's a spreadsheet.

I look forward to seeing more of this.

[GnomeWorks]

I know the word epic is mostly used ironically nowadays, but it feels epic in a meaningful way. It reminds me of Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy is very much an inspiration here. If/when I post a map, don't be surprised if you see some stuff that looks familiar.

I'll also point out that some of the derivation here is intentional, while some is just holdover from younger me being derivative. One of the underlying ideas for the setting is the notion that "all stories are true," they just take place in their own universe, and the framework of the multiverse rests upon these beams. Universes near to each other "bleed through" a bit, in various ways.

I'm very curious about how the beams interact with the setting. Like, how common are people that know of and walk the beams? Basically, how "high magic" are the assumptions of your setting. Feel free to dive as deeply as you'd like in answering that, I'm a huge fan of stuff like this.

It's a bit like Eberron in that regard: pretty much everybody is aware of all of the beams, and public education - where it still exists - typically goes into them in some detail, though usually with a focus on the local preferences. Low-tier powers of each beam are relatively common, but high-tier is much rarer than might be expected in your typical setting. A 1st-level mage is way more common than in normal D&D, while a 12th-level mage is way more rare.

I've also nixed a few classic D&D things. Spells like raise dead and such don't exist, but there are variations that let you bring back someone who died very very recently (typically within the last minute). Short-range teleports are common, but intercontinental-style teleportation isn't a thing, with rare (and often stationary) exception. Planar travel is very rare and very difficult, and I don't do the great wheel cosmology: instead, there's a "spot" in the astral where the beams come into contact with the "edge" of the setting, which creates a plane that is similar to the prime but strongly-aligned to that beam. Each has a flavor of outsider but they typically just chill there.

Pure martials exist, though they're not as common, but they do have an advantage: their abilities can work anywhere, against anyone. This is why swords and bows are still around in a setting with casual space travel, because anything more advanced than a crossbow has a good chance of just straight-up failing to work against folks and critters aligned with two of the more common beams.

One of the major inspirations that helped solve a lot of problems all at once was the notion of the Wish economy. From that, I introduced the concept of mox, which is the crystalized physical manifestation of a beam, and is a necessary component for crafting magic items of any appreciable power. Mox comes from very specific trees, which grow only in areas with heavy concentrations of power of a given beam. As the myrrh tree grows, it produces mox, but also acts as a beacon for monsters (termed "vilekin" IC) and can transform vilekin into unique, more powerful variations if they feed directly from the tree. This serves a whole bunch of purposes: it prevents civilizations from farming the things; it limits powerful magic item creation; it explains where/why monsters exist, including unique and variant creatures; and gives adventurers a reason for their profession to be in demand.

As for the class system, I'm wondering if you actually have 63 distinct classes or is it more like 7 classes each with 9 subclasses? And how does multiclassing work? Can you multiclass between beams and/or roles?

The intent is to have 63 classes, yes. Around I think 20 are in some stage of being written.

Edit: Sorry, forgot the bit about multiclassing. I've found Frank's arguments against MCing compelling, and as such have a soft ban on the concept in place at my table. This has not always been so, though.

In the past, characters could multiclass, including in classes that were of opposing beams. In 3e, each class had the equivalent of SR against their opposing beams equal to 5 + their levels in classes of that beam. If you had SR against a beam whose abilities you were trying to use, so like a mage/engineer trying to cast a spell, you have to overcome your own resistance to that beam, or the effect failed.

This was enough of a barrier to use that in all my time running this setting, I've only seen someone try to mix opposed beams once.

Mixing between Trinities is okay and happens all the time. Mage/priest, akashic/paladin, and learner/rigger are combos I've seen. However, the whole thing about mixing resource management schemes is absolutely true: some of these mixes worked better than others, just because of how their management schemes worked.

So personally, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't work, and I don't allow it at my table. I feel that my homebrew allows for enough variety, as it stands: for each of the 63 classes, the plan is 4 subclasses, except for sparks, who get 5.

If a player had a compelling reason for multiclassing, and had a concept that warranted it that somehow... maybe. But even then, probably not.

My one criticism of the document is that the color coding for the beams is kind of samey. I'm pretty sure Void and Technology are the same color, and they both look really similar to Chaos. So, if you're planning on using a color scheme to format the beams, I'd recommend using less neutral colors.

Younger me did a great job in picking colors, in that Technology is grey while Void is black. In formatting these kinds of documents it's difficult to differentiate those two while maintaining readability. I've played around a bit with using "louder" colors, but I wasn't happy with them.

It sounds like the primary tactical differences are decided by class. How much do beams affect gameplay? Is it substantial enough that all 9 tanks feel significantly different from one another?

The beams are differentiated in a few different ways.

The first is by resource management. Each beam's casting system uses a different resource, has a different management scheme, and all that.

Then, spell lists are different between the beams. While each class within a beam has their own list, they're all subsets of the big list for each beam, to which sparks and adepts have full access. The spell list for magic is specifically pared way down from what is normal in D&D, to open up room for the other beams (and same goes for divine and primal). There is some overlap - there are some workhorse effects that D&D typically assumes you'll have access to, so they all need some variation thereof - but I try to make sure stuff at least feels unique or is properly flavored.

Each class then has its own mechanics that are influenced by the beam. So the void tank and the time tank, for instance, while they fulfill the same niche, hopefully feel and play differently. The intent is along the lines of 4e: sure, a fighter and a paladin are both defenders, but they play a bit differently and have different kinds of tools at their disposal to get the job done.

I also broke my heartbreaker down by powersource, and gave each powersource one class of each role in the 4e vein. I've even got my own copy of your Image, although mine's a spreadsheet.

I also have a spreadsheet, though it is much more chaotic than that simple image and has stuff all over the place.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

You have a Borg class and a Mimic. That means I would, at the very least, consider playing your game... and I dunk on 5e for being boring as shit all the time. I haven't cracked open the document yet, but I am curious about one thing: How has all of this changed with the advent of each new edition?

[GnomeWorks]

You have a Borg class and a Mimic. That means I would, at the very least, consider playing your game... and I dunk on 5e for being boring as shit all the time.

I think the issue, ultimately, is that the core D&D classes are bland. It's nothing against them, they're just old hat, at this point.

Borg is written, though needs a rewrite because I changed how the tech resource management system works, and I'm unhappy with how their gimmick turned out (insufficiently elegant).

Mimic isn't written yet, and I haven't really put a lot of thought into how I'm going to make it work, because I've never gotten that concept to work out before. But I think it's worth a shot.

I haven't cracked open the document yet, but I am curious about one thing: How has all of this changed with the advent of each new edition?

The 2e version of the engineer had weird equivalents to thief skills and a d7 hit die (because I thought the d7 was neat, and I was like 10 at the time), and I wanted to add such a thing to my gaming because of a combination of seeing an ad for Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and reading Dream Park, and the former was where my whole "magic v. tech" thing originated.

I remember picking up the 2e Complete Psionicist, and loving it. My folks do pretty bog-standard fantasy with their gaming, so something like that was completely foreign, and I worked out how to add it to my setting immediately. I don't know how or why, but I figured it made sense to make it opposite the other two "forces" in my setting, and so that's what happened.

I converted to 3e almost as soon as it came out, because it was way easier to understand than 2e (it took me forever to understand 2e saving throws), and my folks hated it, when I was at the age where things they hated had to be good because what did they know? The OGL also made a huge impact because suddenly people were talking about homebrewing in a cohesive way that was better than stuff like the Netbooks of 2e.

Over time, the other six beams slowly got added, though not in a sensible or coherent fashion. By 2000, all nine were present, but it was gross and incoherent.

After the 3e psionics book came out, I ran a really long PbP game on EN World, set in my setting and focused on psionics. The Psionicle was probably the first time people took my setting seriously, even though that game was... I did a lot wrong, and there was a lot stupid there, and I wish I could tell those guys how much I appreciated them taking the game seriously. Dire squirrels... what the fuck, younger me.

In '05, my first semester in undergrad, I was ready to scrap the setting, but a friend of mine convinced me it was worth saving, so instead I hammered out the metaphysics and got it all worked out, and basically rebooted the setting. I wrote a few classes, and we played the first serious games in my setting at that time.

In 2008, the tech rules I wrote up were published. You can still find it in some of the big 3e/d20 torrents. It was called Steamworks, published by 12 to Midnight. Got good reviews, though honestly I wish it hadn't, because it's mostly terrible. I'd love for someone around here to do an OSSR on it, for the laughs.

Um, let's see... I thought 4e might work really well, because of the power sources thing, but that turned out to suck ass. I tried to do a time power source, and just lost steam really early because of how soul-sucking doing homebrew for 4e is. So I stuck with 3e.

Over the years I visited various forums and tried to read and study game design a bit, to try to get better at homebrewing. Finding this place was a massive shift in my understanding of things, and I took a lot of things from here to heart. A lot of my late 3e homebrew probably looks like what Tome would be if it were done by a guy working in a vacuum.

Anyroad, maybe around a year ago, I figured that if I were going to find a new group, it'd probably be 5e, so I might as well see what I could do with the system. That woke me up a bit, because I'd kind of designed myself into a corner with 3e. I found 5e's simplicity refreshing: yes, there is less game there, but honestly 3e is a bit of a mess, and it gave me an opportunity to reconsider a lot of my design choices I'd made in 3e.

So here we are.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I'm liking this so far. My anxious brain wants to see a couple points of similarity with my own heartbreaker, but the only one that actually has any substance is that I also have a Mimic class. In that case, though, the Mimic is the rogue variation for a demonic race. Hope you have more to post!

[GnomeWorks]

Races

I've also started referring to races as "peoples," but I'm probably going to use those terms interchangeably here and throughout my writing.

Over the years, my relationship with typical fantasy races has been really rocky. I've never liked elves: specifically I've never liked how they work, in terms of aging, and it always rubbed me the wrong way. I think in all my years of running I've had exactly one player play an elf, because they're generally regarded as assholes in my setting.

Anyroad, I gradually moved away from just having the stereotypical races, and wound up with a truly stupid number of races. This ranged from the introduction of sapient robots, to making goblins and orcs relatively normal members of society before it was cool.

Never kobolds, though. Just couldn't find a niche for them. So they don't - and haven't ever - existed in my setting.

When I started poking my nose into 5e and started thinking about the setting, I also came to the conclusion that the races available also told part of the story of how the setting worked. Having an absurd mish-mash of races gave players options, sure, but I felt it was starting to mess with setting coherence: how could I justify having like 40-some races on one planet? And yes, while I have casual space travel, there isn't FTL (yet), with the notable exception of the tyranids showing up at one point, so I can't really use the Star Wars argument.

What I decided was that the races needed to reflect the central conceit of the setting. Using stereotypical races results in stereotypical fantasy: so if I'm not going to do stereotypical fantasy (which I obviously am not), then I needed to redo that and figure that out. Yes, it would mean toning down the player options, but... well, I've tried to keep some around, as you'll see.

So now we have ten races:

• Humes, which are humans, I just like "hume" instead. Ten subraces, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
• Espers, who are people that used to be humans in the way-back, but wound up getting an extra-heavy dose of magical radiation. They bred true, and now are a separate people, who are inherently tied to the arcane. Terra (FF6) or Kuja (FF9) would be good examples.
• Cym, created through a jackass in the way-back who tried to destroy the psionics beam, which scattered psionic power into gems. Some of those gems became sentient, and pulled themselves out of the ground. Think shardminds with a less-dumb name and less-dumb origin story.
• Artilects, robots who originate from a set of 29 robots who were built by my world's equivalent of Ada Lovelace. Their only hard-coded order was to go forth and multiply: beyond that, they're as free-willed as anybody. Think Johnny 5 or Chappie.
• Draenei, who were super-low-level celestials who got pissy with their bosses about mortals not making good choices, so were told they could go give them better direction at the cost of becoming mortal.
• Firbolgs, who the spirit of the universe made in response to draenei and isci showing up. Nature-themed giants who refuse to name things.
• Isci, were originally created as minions of the Void sent to infiltrate and subvert mortal civilizations and give the Void a strong foothold in reality. When the Void tried to eat them, a lot of them decided they'd rather not die. The Void is still salty about it.
• Thran, time-traveling telepathic plant-people from an alternate timeline where the tyranids succeeded in eating most of the star system. They hooked up with the "keystone timeline" via player-induced shenanigans.
• Rythuli, who are world-hopping faeries, keeping more of the capricious and mischief angle while losing the natural world bit. Nobody is really sure when they showed up or how, and a lot of them have at least a subconscious awareness of the fourth wall.
• Vesuvans, who are super-secretive shapeshifting gnosivores.

Some of these are obviously stolen from other sources, but as mentioned earlier, that's kind of one of the conceits of the setting.

The hume... ethnic groups, I suppose, for lack of a better word, are as follows:

• Brujah, are basically like nomads and such. They're not big on big organized society. Brujah humes can take the troll-blooded feat, where trolls in my setting were more WoW than D&D.
• Cleyran, more attuned to nature, think more like Europan pagan or hippy sort of deal. They can take the yuanaga-blooded feat, who were effectively yuan-ti but more naturally-attuned and less poisonous and evil.
• Deryni, people who are more psionic than most others. They can take the goblin-blooded feat, where goblins in my setting were naturally psionic after having dealt with being enslaved by an alhoon for a long time, which they dealt with by sinking their continent.
• Hylian, bunch of folks who hold that their people are often more aligned with the Divine for various reasons. They can take the deva-blooded feat, who were weird Divine-aligned folk who kept reincarnating rather than follow the natural soul cycle normal for Divine-aligned.
• Ivalician, folks who have no particular bent towards any beam. Regular hume.
• Lynaen, humes who were super close to gnomish and halfling cultures before those folks got removed from the setting. They can take the gnome-blooded feat, where gnomes in my setting are more about memory and knowledge.
• Ronkan, humes big into technology and progress and all that. They can take the dwarf-blooded feat, where dwarves in my setting were more WoW-like and into engineering and guns.
• Sheikah, humes who have just a touch of the Void. They can take the evarcha-blooded feat, who were creepy spider-people big into the Void.
• Tolarian, folks who for whatever reason are super into Time. They can take the tabaxi-blooded feat, because in my setting tabaxi were from an alternate timeline.
• Valyrian, humes who against all sense were into magic and hung around elves. They can take the elf-blooded feat, for obvious reasons.

Hume ethnicities are not terribly well-developed at this point, because prior to my decision to cut down on the number of races around, it seemed less than important to figure out how humes worked when I had 40+ other races to worry about.

However, part of the goal here is to try to maintain some level of player option, while still keeping things... sensible. These other races that I wiped out were part of the setting, I'm not going to retcon them out, so having various hume bloodlines around where there was strong mixing feels sensible and appropriate. The setting was always intended to be kind of more cosmopolitan, and if I didn't have a metric ton of work to do on mechanics, probably would have fleshed that out more.

[OgreBattle]

Warcraft's got the best trolls to be called trolls, you going for an islander cannibal theme too?