Races in Dungeons & Dragons 4E are good for laying down the broad strokes of a character, but they often don’t feel as “lived in” as the ethnicities we encounter in everyday life. One potent reason for this is a general lack of cultural complexity and diversity. D&D races tend to be presented as monocultural societies—all elves are the same the world over, and so on.

Hard Boiled Cultures aims to make it easy to change that, outlining versatile, easy methods for diversifying the ideas of culture and race in your D&D 4E game. Better yet, the methods break down how to give this diversity real weight in the system, rather than simply relying on “color” text to do the job.

Fred Hicks and Jonathan Walton show you how to reverse-engineer cultural cues out of an existing race writeup, and then create nigh-limitless possibilities for other cultures within that race once the building blocks are made plain.

Inside this 17-page PDF you’ll find a clear, well-documented methods for culture building, a culture building worksheet, tribes of elves, apelord intellectuals, and a dark faerie spin on dwarves. Your campaign worlds will never be the same again!

Hard Boiled Cultures is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Tags | d&d, mythology, obe, wotc