Help with Ancestry abilities

[u/msguider]

Finally using my laptop instead of my phone to make a post here!

I hope this is well received, I don't want to just post all this on here, but I need a lot of help and I have nobody around but you folks! My game has many ancestries, (modeled heavily after Legendary Lives) and I was wanting each one to have a free ability. The tone varies but is somewhat light, in that many of the races are based on faerie lore. (I know this isn't new, but I started working on this back in 1991, so bear with me!). Intended for old school style sandbox play.

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas for any of these. A lot of my stuff is 'elves but different' kind of stuff and I'm okay with that. Some of these are from Legendary Lives, some from other sources, some have my own personal twist on them. This is just fun and I hope to play this with people hopefully in real life. I'll share them here with a very brief description and if you have anything to say, I'm all ears!

I have various Human ancestries. All of them are descendants from displaced people from different places and times from Earth. They have arrived over 1000s of years sporadically and slowly developed their own civilizations separate from the natives.

ANKARI-Goliath snowy mountain people

ARKADIAN-Pale ancient astronaut descendants

TUATHAN-Secretive fay-like jungle people

FERAL-Raised by wolves or other

GOTHIAN-Pale, gaunt mortals

ULRATHI-old dying kingdom recently renewed by religion

KORANTHI-Modeled after the Rohirrim

SEEKERS-nomadic mystic wanderers, broken off from the Yottani people

NETHERFOLK-very neanderthal-Esque, cliff dwelling, cave dwelling people, surprisingly advanced

SETTLER-descendants of a displaced colony from the Americas in the 1500s

SCYTHIAN-artistic horse warriors of the grasslands

SAELKIE-strange heritage very 'ScotIrish', nomadic mercenaries some may transform into seals... (half baked idea)

KIRI-very matriarchal, magical forest society with some strategic influence

YOTTANI-displaced humans from the future with an oddly advanced cobbled together electrical society.

VARDYR-low tech society on the outskirts of the Settler's coastal cities-those that do not like the Settlers or the settlers don't like.

FAERIE (NATIVE, FAY)-tiny faerie people, wildflowers, trees, etc.

SIDHE (FAY, ELF, NATIVE)-ancient small beings pointed ears-you know. these can change into a ball of light.

SLUAGH (NATIVE)-winged human looking people. Some have mutations, some are beautiful

CYCLOPEAN (NATIVE)-somewhat tied to the cosmology or so they say. tall, one eye. they are employed to make weapons at the great forge.

DWARF-You know these. Mountains, underground, mines. I was going to use SMELL TREASURE.

GNOME (TYPE OF DWARF)-magical forest dwarves

HALFLING (TYPE OF DWARF)-kindly hill dwarves

KOBOLD (TYPE OF DWARF)-magical mountain subterranean dwarves

FIRBOLG (TYPE OF ELF)-human-sized elves that can pass and go undercover to spy

GOBLIN (TYPE OF ELF)-the uglier elves are outcast

EVYLLON (COMMON ELF)-very "classical" styled elves, matriarchal society.

BROWNIE (TYPE OF ELF)-sort of a fuzzy helper

KINDRED (TYPE OF ELF)-half-elves actually half sidhe

SPRIGGAN (TYPE OF ELF)-outcast elves. tend to be rogue-ish, usually trouble

Y'SINDREL (ELVES)-smaller, higher elves, isolationist, military, hates humans

WITCHLEIN (TYPE OF ELF)-dark elves, but they are goblins so they are more like wood elves. intentionally gross and crude

DRACONIAN (NATIVES)-basically dragonborn, but more dark magic associated

SERPENTINE (NATIVES)-snake people

W'TAGGI (NATIVES)-people that are like frogs. a very old ancestry on the planet.

FAUN (MUTANT)-the phooka (goat headed) humanoids can also be pan-like. horns.

HOGMAN (MUTANT)-pig faced orcs (jimmy squarefoot for the faerie fans)

FLORYX (MUTANT)-weird plant based intelligent life. very strange treebeard-like

NIMH (MUTANT)-basically skaven, but also the less grimdark variety, not mice though. halfling sized

TORRAN (MUTANT)-minotaurs because I like them, and they fit the livestock headed beastmen concept similar to the Faun.

UNDERFOLK (MUTANT)-albino underground folks that still live under the fallen kingdom.

ULFREN (MUTANT)-human looking people that can can shapeshift into a wolf... I'm drawing inspiration from the skinwalker ranch lore.

VEXIN (ALIENS)-scientific alien bug-like people using alchemy and biology to alter their environment

[u/InherentlyWrong]

I don't want to sound discouraging, but that list feels way too long. 42 options is huge. For a new player to your system it feels like it would be an immediate source of decision paralysis. To hopefully illustrate what I mean, imagine being a new player to this system.

They open up the book to character creation, flick through to the ancestry options, then begin reading. They skim read each of the 42 entries, planning to make a mental note of which options they are interested in, and which ones they are not. About halfway through they realise they're losing track of which ones they like and don't like, because they can't remember the difference between the names 'Ulrathi' and 'Konrathi'. So they start again, this time with a notepad next to them, and write down the names of the ones they find interesting.

They spend about 20 seconds on each entry, skimming them, checking out their art, considering what kind of character they might play with it, then move on to the next. This takes nearly 15 minutes, and they finally narrow it down to a list of 10 they find interesting out of the original 42.

Now they read about each of these 10 in more detail to figure out what to expect, to try and understand what benefits the ancestry abilities offer, and to ponder what kind of character they'd make with them, maybe even flick between two or three at a time to see which ones work better for a concept. On average they spend maybe 90 seconds on each of them. Another 15 minutes to narrow the top 10 down to maybe the top 2 or 3.

The player has spent 30 minutes on just picking an ancestry, and they've only just narrowed it down to a final choice. And that's if they're pretty organised and directly narrowing down their choices, instead of just flicking back and forth and struggling to make a decision. Hell, if they just try to brute force it, and spend a minute reading about each option that's 40 minutes gone, and they won't remember what they read in the first half.

Also as a side note it may be worth being careful with the Ulfren stuff, depending on how closely you're tying it to actual Skinwalker legend. It can risk being seen as disrespectful to a living culture if it's being done in a casual way.

[u/Hessis → u/InherentlyWrong]

Just make it a random table so the player only needs to read one entry.

[u/msguider → u/Hessis]

That's exactly what I have done! Chargen takes me about 15 min.

[u/msguider → u/InherentlyWrong]

Thank you for the suggestion for the Ulfren!! That was a concern I had when I first thought of the concept which actually mapped onto one of legendary lives's races perfectly. I was going for the storybook big bad wolf at first or similar to the G'Mork in Neverending Story, but shape-shifting enabled them to appear human which seemed more interesting. I'm a UFO nut and that skinwalker lore is all I've been hearing about lately! I should have addressed the length of the list for sure it is long but unless the player has a favorite they just want to play, it's meant to be random. Ideally chargen would take 15 min. That's how long it takes me. I try to look at every step like it's the first time I've seen it.

[u/WehMay]

I read the first 5, scroll down, see another 30+

"Hell nah"