What's in the book?

9 chapters and 6 Appendices

1. Crafting heritages. A step-by-step guide on how-to make your own species compatible with all the major 5th edition versions. A5e, ToV, 2014, 2024, Free5e. Appendix A provides even more information including how the complete character creation process compares between versions. Appendix B provides a worked example for the fully playable culture, the Whiskerlings, Tiny mouse folk suitable for any game.

2. Crafting Cultures. Complete with a random Culture trappings generation system, this details how to make a culture to put in front of your players that will really come to life for them. Broken down into an extensive list of ways to provide exciting concepts for a culture: spiritually, geographically, and socially, it also explains the best way to present this to your players.
- How does a culture see themselves, how do others see them, and how does the culture see adventurers, allowing you to get the important parts across.
As an aid to role-playing, there are 50 different ideals and taboos which you can use as a basis to help your players understand what they should value about the culture and what they should try and avoid.  Appendix C provides

3. Crafting Backgrounds. A complete guide to making backgrounds for Advanced Fifth Edition completed by Dave Clark of Full Moon Storytelling. This veteran background maker with hundreds of examples of work provides a breakdown of how they created the oracle and the processes that go into this oft-overlooked aspect of the game.

4. Crafting Feats. A crash course in feat construction, looking at full feats, half feats, feat chains, feats with prerequisites and the very cool and eminently transferrable synergy feats and transformational feats pioneered by the creators of Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition.  Appendix E provides a concise summary of the pros and cons of variant character ability score creation methods for adding variety to that part of the game.

5. Traits by Type. Nearly 90 pages of the various traits available from a wide variety of games systems. Neatly costed and sorted this mammoth undertaking will allow you to easily pick, choose, and substitute whatever you need to make your players happy and more fully envision your world!
Traits come sorted by
- Anatomy
- General
- Combat
- Exploration
- Social
- Science Fiction
and include Weaknesses, exciting ways to have naturally escalating rules for say being a Fey and dealing with Cold Iron, that you can tune to your tastes and the tastes of your table. With over a dozen subcategories, it's easy and convenient to make what you want. This includes the rubric to help you evaluate your own work against the existing and really do your own game design with confidence!

6. Premade Heritages. 7 immediately playable heritages with three never seen outside of niche fan circles and one of those exclusive to this book.

Arboreals - Large tree people. ENTirely different from dryads.

Brownies - Tiny with wings. More than a little pixie-ish. Will work for bread and milk.

Firmhadrai - They’re dogs that think they’re people. Aww. (Previously in Gatepass Gazette)

Hengeyokai - Triple stated fey that can shift between tiny animals, regular humanoids or a cross of the first two.

Snowfolk - Short lived constructs that will lead you a merry dance if you let them.

Unicorns - Like, a horse, but with a horn coming out if it’s head? 

Whiskerlings - Tiny, mouse-like. Prone to scampering. (They’re in the illustrations.)

7. Premade Cultures. Revamped and revisited from first edition with the Squeaklefolk, exclusive to this book.

Cuberos - Underground slime herds with a sideline in barrel making. (Previously in Gatepass Gazette.)

Island Hoppers - Explorers and sailors, the like of which the world has never seen

Pastoralists - A herder culture pushing their animals across the steppe.

Rho-Bhur - A former nomadic culture that’s settled down but still remembers the old ways.

Rover - an itinerant traveling culture delighted to see the world.

Reef Singer - an oceanic culture that uses communal song to create islands to live on. (Previously in Gatepass Gazette.)

Squeaklefolk - the Whiskerling culture, distrustful of outsiders, desperate to protect their families.

8. Premade backgrounds. Covering the niches left unexplored!
Beachcomber

Clerk

Cube Herder

Gravedigger

Tavern Server

9. Premade Feats
45 Feats including synergy and transformational.

Appendix F. Analysing Maps.
With the amazing maps from Jog Brogzin, I'm looking at maps that you can use for your own personal, inspirational use, and discuss them through the lenses of economics, environment, politics and history in order to help you you enrich your game.

Past
In February 2022, I asked for £600 to make a nicely formatted document to let people see how they could convert their games of 5e into A5e and how they could import 5e stuff into A5e. I used a nice little points based system invented by others, a certain degree of reverse engineering, and I'll be honest, educated guesswork.

In April 2022, I slapped my head and said "d'oh!" and realised that actually? Feats work in the same way. I put a book together which used the same system to create feats, feat chains, level dependent feats, transformational feats to cover things like the vampirism and lycanthropy of the base books but weirder, synergy feats which reward multiclassing for players with specific visions of how their characters should be.

Present
Since that time, I've edited several books for EN Publishing and continue to be involved in the development of amazing 5e projects like Wyrmworks Publishings "Free 5e", pushed out my own micro setting (The Elysians) and rules for vehicles ("One if by Land, Two if by Sea, Three if by Air", started the "Battle Ready" line of pregenerated characters and just kept regularly writing for the Gatepass Gazette, the official journal of EN Publishing's Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition.

Future
With the absolute EXPLOSION of content AND a "I can't believe it's not a new edition" edition out there, it seemed only fitting and proper to create a second edition, and boy howdy... it's gonna be big!

Over 120 pages of glorious hardback goodness!

So, my goals for Crafting Heritages, Cultures and More: Worldbuilding are:

With your help, I can make this happen. With your help, we can end the scourge of saying "The darkness crowds in around you..."
"I have Darkvision!"
"Me too! I can see in the dark!"

With over 55 pages of trait material, I'm doing a dive into the ins and outs of the things that get players to invest in a culture. A random culture generator can be inspiring, so that's what you're going to get.

I've also got a cultural ideals and taboos system. It's pretty simple, what things does your culture care about? What do they hate? Instant clear, obvious hooks to get your players into character and engaging with your material.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
My friends, I won't lie to you. My work has had a tendency to be a bit dry. The elf aesthetics have overwhelmed that gremlin energy which make the books such fun for those who read them. No more.

In the course of going through how to make the various heritages, cultures, backgrounds and feats, I will be going through the steps of how to create the Whiskerling Heritage, who form key parts of the Squeaklefolk culture. 

In this way, I hope to get those narrative juices flowing and add some gorgeous inspiration to your own work.

EVEN MORE!
In a flurry of revised advice, this 9 chapter behemoth includes:

Now, in addition to the delicious and delectable artwork you've seen so far, I am very pleased to announce my collaboration with Jog Brogzin who has kindly brought in some amazing maps to help spur creativity. These maps will be available for your personal use and will, I hope inspire you to greater levels of creativity. As part of the work I'm undertaking I'll be writing about how I approach each map and what leaps out at me and what considerations you need to bring to it to give your game that oh-so-satisfying mechanical crunch as well as the delights of customising your world setting to be EXACTLY what you want it to be!

Don't delay, back today!

Shipping Costs
The printing and delivery will be handled by DrivethruRPG.com who are totally reliable for this work and so the shipping costs I know of are from here.

IF Drivethrurpg.com does not deliver to your country normally, or is not reliable, I won't be able to deliver your book to you and you should NOT order a hardcopy. If it does then no worries! If they can get the book to you, then we can get the book to you and you can order a hardback book if you want (and it will be very nice).

Any questions, if you live in a specific country please reach out and let me know and I'll ask for you!