Heritage

A Heritage is a character property describing, essentially, the accidents of their birth. It is one of several portions of the Tarnished Tale ruleset that are optional for setting designers, existing as a mechanism of convenience to provide for a way to model different lineages into the game. A fantasy setting like Wisteria, for example, may include the usual fantasy peoples such as Elves, Dwarves, Goblins, and so forth as heritages for players to take. Science Fiction settings may chose to do the same. Howl Basin, the Tarnished Tale testbed setting, uses several heritages, but their use is not strictly necessary.

Relevance to Players

When they are available in your setting, Heritages are applied to your character during Character Generation, and they are not usually optional if they are available. Your Heritage *typically* is also not mutable, meaning it is unlikely to change during the course of play.

Effects on Character

From a gameplay mechanics standpoint, the impact of Heritages is intended to be noticeable, but also broadly limited.

Base Aptitude Modifiers

In some cases (see notes for setting developers, below), a Heritage may include modifiers to be applied to the base aptitude. These are summed together and applied to the character after the aptitudes are generated, but *before* calculating the Aptitude Check or any relevant Pools. Like your heritage itself, these changes are permanent (unlike many other traits which might influence the Aptitudes), but can be overcome during landmark advancement, as appropriate.

Heritage Traits

Heritages also include several heritage trait options (usually one primary, mandatory trait, and a selection of a subset for a second or third trait). For example, the Lagos heritage in Howl Basin grants the character a primary trait called Alertness, and gives them a choice between three other traits to further refine the character.

Heritage traits can have both gameplay-mechanical and storytelling implications. For example, one of the Lagos Subtraits is "Jack Lagos", which has both an important connotation for gameplay (affecting pools derived from Willpower), but also marks out the character as a member of a rare subtype of the Lagos known as a Jack Lago.

Heritage traits are always fixed traits and cannot be changed through trait retraining unless otherwise noted in their specific description.

Effects on Storytelling

Heritages usually belong to a unique culture, or sometimes even a wholly distinct species (in the case of Howl Basin, very much both simultaneously). Your setting developer should have included a reasonable amount of detail on the lifestyles of this culture and the nature of the people who identify with the heritage in their notes, and as a player it will help you (and help with Rule Zero to review these notes as they are effectively a cheat sheet on how to play a "typical" member of that heritage.

However, bear in mind - TTRPGs (especially Tarnished Tale) are games about Adventure, and there's no such thing as a "typical" member of any culture who goes on to be a noteworthy adventure. Your heritage tells you how you were born and even gives a glimpse at how your people are generally, but they should never be as large of an influence on your character as their background, current occupation, or their own, individual, personality. People buck the system all the time.

If you are reading a Heritage entry for, say, Wisteria's Atarlie Elves, and you feel like they're too highbrow for your lowbrow bard, do not despair! Your character's atypical qualities are part of what sets them apart from the crowd in their hometown.

Usage by Setting Developers

As mentioned above, the use of the Heritage mechanics in a given setting is entirely optional and can be exclude - the character generation rules explicitly account for this eventuality! It may not always be appropriate or necessary to use Heritages. Also, keep in mind the relatively minor mechanical influences that Heritage mechanics are supposed to have on the game.

When Not to use a Heritage

Heritages should only extremely rarely be used to describe cultures alone, and if they are they should be used sparingly and with consideration to avoiding casting too much shade on the depicted cultures, or giving the appearance of one being favoured (by fate, fortune, etc) over another.

It is appropriate to use heritages to approximate the "races" of Dungeons and Dragons-type campaign settings, or the many kinds of creatures that might inhabit a science-fantasy or science-fiction universe, so long as such care as described above is taken. The Howl Basin test setting takes the approach of having Heritages representing individual species, while the polities often shared by those species are described separately, and purely as lore. As a general rule, these are all appropriate when there are non-phenotypic biological differences between the groups involved - such as comparing the Quillons and Lagos to each other from Howl Basin.

It is however not appropriate to use heritages to simply describe different human cultures or ethnicity; if setting up a setting treatment for an alternative steampunk Vancouver in which you wish to depict a Call of Cthulhu-type story, you should avoid the usage of heritages altogether, at least as far as assigning them to human nationalities or ethnicity is concerned.

Concerning Base Aptitude Modifiers

In general, the base aptitude modifiers should follow the following constraints as a nod to game balance:

• No aptitude should be changed by more than 2, positively or negatively.
• The sum of all BAMs on a Heritage should be 0.

That is to say, it would be appropriate to add 2 to Strength and remove one each from Agility and Intuition, perhaps, but only because the changes "amount" to nothing. BAMs as part of the heritage description should only be a minor part of why to choose a heritage - the storytelling implications and traits should be much more important.

For a point of reference, a change to an aptitude by 2 points would make that corresponding check 10% more or less likely overall to succeed.