Tuesday 21 June 2016

Drakonheim: Character Builder and Archetypes

With a couple of days left to go, the Savage Drakonheim Kickstarter has already tripled its original funding goal, so I decided to put together a web-based character creation tool for it. You can access it here:


As with my other character creation tools, you can start with an archetype or build the character from scratch.

Archetypes

Those who have already backed the Kickstarter may have noticed that the archetypes have a distinctly D&D-style flavor, and those same archetypes are used for the character builder.

Drakonheim started out a few years ago as a trilogy of free playtest adventures for D&D 5e: Rat's in the Sewers, Skeletal Society, and Defense of Drakonheim. Then last year, Matthew Hanson turned Drakonheim into a full setting with his Drakonheim: City of Bones Kickstarter. The setting book is system-neutral, but still maintains a bit of a D&D vibe, with the assumption of common D&D races, classes/archetypes, monsters and spells.

The golden rule for Savage Worlds conversions is to convert the flavor rather than the mechanics, however sometimes the flavor is tied to the mechanics, and such is the case here. Drakonheim: City of Bones dedicates a full page to describing nine of the common character types, each of which corresponds to one of the D&D classes, therefore when I wrote the companion I decided to represent them as SW-style archetypes. This way the companion retains the flavor of the character types described in the setting book, but does so with the same optional archetype concept established in SWD.

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