Character Creation Rules

This is a guideline for using modified character creation rules drawn from both the core rulebooks and the Ancestry and Culture zine.
Step One, Determine your Species: Your species (or ancestry, whatever) will determine features like your Age, Size, and Speed traits as these are most likely to be inherited traits, shared with biological parents. Some skill proficiencies may reflect natural/ abilities as well, and spellcasting/magical abilities can fall under species.
Step Two: This will be determining your culture. Where you're from, what you believe, and how your upbringing influenced your character's life and abilities. Language, skills, some spellcasting, and other abilities are tied to culture, and choosing these should prompt you to think about your character's personal experience with that culture. While there will be cultural traits for selection feel free to suggest other abilities that may fit the character, which we can talk about.
Step Three: Selecting your background! This won't be tooo different from the default, though they will be more specific and personalized than the PHB examples. Think "Dragon Scholar" instead of "Sage" or "Moonlighter Guide" instead of "Soldier". These will determine your alignment, two skills, two tools, one language, starting equipment (if chosen), and allow you to make decisions about who your character is and how they fit into the world. Additionally you will gain a feat, with both the mechanical benefits of the usual level up feats and the flavor of the old background feats, allowing you to take advantage of the connections your character may have.
Playing a character of mixed species: Characters of mixed ancestry might look almost entirely like one parent or the other, or anywhere on the continuum between them. Thus the two children of a dwarf-tiefling couple might both look tiefling, dwarven, some combination, or one might look tiefling and the other dwarven, even though they are siblings. 

• Age. Pick two of your ancestries from the available options. Select a number in between the two ages listed for when people of those ancestries come of age, and again between the numbers listed for their average lifespans. Write these down; these are your age at which you became an adult and your expected lifespan.
• Size. Pick the listed size from your chosen ancestries and choose one of the sizes listed. If both of your ancestries are size Medium, then so are you. If both are Small, then likely so are you. If both Small and Medium sizes appear in your chosen ancestries, you may choose which size you are.
• Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet, unless both of your chosen species have a base speed of 25 feet, or your size is Small, in which case your base walking speed is 25 feet.
• Darkvision. As long as one of your ancestries has the Darkvision trait, you may have darkvision as well, if you choose.
• Additional Ancestral Traits. You may select one other ancestral trait from each of your two chosen ancestries. For example, you might select Fey Ancestry from an elven ancestor, or Hellish Resistance from a tiefling ancestor. If you have a dragonborn ancestor, you may select Draconic Ancestry and either the Breath Weapon trait or the Damage Resistance trait, but not both.