Birthright (campaign setting)

• 1. Introduction

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  Birthright arrived on gaming tables in 1995, and it asked players to do something no Dungeons and Dragons setting had asked before: rule a nation. Not adventure through one, not save one from a distant threat, but actually govern it. Rich Baker and Colin McComb co-designed the setting in 1994, and when it was released by TSR, it won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement of 1995. That recognition was earned. Matthew Pook, writing for Pyramid magazine, called it the first setting to support player characters as rulers, grounding the game in "diplomacy, politics, trade, construction and (of course) war."

  At the heart of Birthright is a concept called the bloodline. Long before a player sits down to roll dice, a cataclysm split the heavens. Gods died. Their power spilled into mortal flesh. And from that moment, the question of who rules and who obeys became a question of blood. The continent of Cerilia, sitting on the world of Aebrynis, has never forgotten that battle. The questions the setting asks are old ones: what does it cost to hold power, what happens when power is inherited rather than earned, and what do you do when the blood in your veins is tainted by the darkest god of all?

• 2. The Battle at Mount Deismaar

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  Mount Deismaar stood on a landbridge between two continents, Aduria to the south and Cerilia to the north, and it was there that the fate of the entire world turned. Azrai, a dark god, had spent years manipulating events. His armies included Adurian minions, a corrupted human tribe called the Vos, and elves who had grown bitter from centuries of conflict with humanity.

  The human tribes and their patron gods met Azrai's forces on the slopes of that mountain. Midway through the battle, the elves realized they had been deceived. Most of them switched sides. Then the gods themselves clashed, and the surviving gods found they could only destroy Azrai by destroying themselves alongside him. The explosion that followed annihilated Mount Deismaar and the landbridge entirely.

  The divine energy released did not vanish. It poured into every living soul present at the battle. Those who stood closest to a patron god in spirit and in body absorbed the most. Some of them became gods themselves, a new pantheon rising to replace the old. Others received a smaller share, a spark of divine power that settled permanently into their blood. These became the scions, and scions could pass their bloodline to their descendants. A scion who was killed by a blow through the heart could have that blood strength stolen by the killer, making the theft of power something literal and immediate.

  Those who carried traces of Azrai's power faced a crueler fate. Over time their bodies warped to mirror their corruption, producing beings the setting calls awnsheghlien. The Gorgon, stone-skinned and capable of a petrifying gaze, is described as perhaps the strongest creature on Cerilia. The Spider was once a goblin-king who fought at Deismaar. The Vampire was once a young hero who killed a blood abomination called the Sinister and was corrupted by the act.

• 3. Bloodlines and Regency

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  A scion does not merely carry power in their blood. They feel it connecting them to the land and the people they rule, and the land returns that connection. The game quantifies this relationship using regency points, which players accumulate based on the population levels of the provinces they control.

  Population levels run on a scale of 1-10 and shape nearly everything at the domain level of play. They set the ceiling for how large a province's law holdings, temple holdings, and guild holdings can grow. Law holdings represent legal authority. Temple holdings represent religious reach. Guild holdings represent economic activity. A fourth type, source holdings, captures the magical energy stored in the natural environment. Priest and wizard characters can draw on temple and source holdings respectively to cast realm spells, large-scale magic capable of affecting entire provinces at once.

  Ruling a domain is not a side activity. The game uses three-month domain turns to model the actions of nations, paralleling the way combat rounds model individual fights. Within those turns, regents choose domain actions: building castles, mustering troops, establishing treaties, increasing population, managing trade, and responding to random events that disrupt their plans. War on a large scale is handled through War Cards, a system for simulating the movement and clash of armies.

• 4. Five Regions, Five Cultures

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  Cerilia is divided into five regions, each one named for the human group that first settled it, and each one built from a distinct real-world cultural template. Anuire sits in the southwest, cut through by the river Maesil. Its designers drew from medieval England, imperial Rome, and Gondor from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Roele, brother of the god Haelyn, founded the Anuirean Empire, which once covered more than half of Cerilia. That empire endured for roughly a thousand years before fragmenting into some thirty separate realms and twelve duchies.

  Rjurik occupies the northwest, a cold land of pine forests and sparse settlement, modeled on Scandinavia and the Celts. Druids watch over its people; jarls sail longships; semi-nomadic tribes debate whether to join settled communities. Brechtür lies in the central north, where the Great Bay nearly bisects the continent. Maritime trade defines life there, drawing from the Hanseatic League, Renaissance Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Merchant-princes hold power alongside a substantial middle class.

  Khinasi in the southeast is the warmest region, with arid plains, mountains, islands, and deserts. Its culture draws from Moorish Spain and Arabia, and magic is accepted there in ways it is not elsewhere. Mages rule several city-states outright, and the patron goddess Avani's portfolio covers both illumination and enlightenment. Vosgaard in the northeast, known as the Heartless Wastes, is the harshest corner of Cerilia in both climate and danger. Its culture is modeled on the Rus, and the Vos people who live there worship Belinik, god of violence, and Kriesha, goddess of winter, following their ancestors' betrayal at Deismaar.

• 5. Races Beyond the Standard

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  Cerilian elves call themselves the Sidhelien and are immortal, immune to disease, and free from the need to sleep. Unlike elves in other Dungeons and Dragons settings, they are generally chaotic neutral, and they hold an antagonistic stance toward most other races. Their relationship with humans is particularly fraught, rooted in the ancient conflict over land that predated even Azrai's war.

  Halflings in Cerilia carry a stranger origin. They are native to the Shadow World, a separate plane of existence, and they fled to Cerilia after an evil force corrupted their homeland. The taint of that origin remains. Halflings can cross back into the Shadow World more easily than any other Cerilian race. Dwarves, averaging only 4-4 feet tall but weighing 250-300 pounds due to twice-normal body density, tend toward isolation and reserve. They share an endless war with the Orogs, a militaristic underground race.

  Goblins hold a different place in Cerilia than in most fantasy settings. They are regarded as crude and barbaric but maintain several large realms that trade with human nations. Orcs, by contrast, do not exist in Cerilia at all. Gnomes appear in the Birthright Rulebook on the list of monsters, and also in the adventure King of the Giantdowns, but they were never made available as a player character race.

• 6. A Product Line Cut Short

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  Over four years, TSR published twenty-five roleplaying products and five novels under the Birthright banner, along with a computer game developed by Sierra On-Line called Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance. The line included boxed regional sets, individual player sourcebooks covering specific domains, rule supplements for magic and priestcraft, and adventure modules. The publishing schedule was not completed before the line was suspended.

  Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR and ultimately cancelled Birthright before its full catalog could be realized. Five novels appeared during the original run, with a sixth, The Falcon and the Wolf by Richard Baker, published online in May 2000. In 2005, on the setting's tenth anniversary, Wizards of the Coast announced a free web release of published and unpublished Birthright material, though only a limited number of those releases actually appeared.

  A fan-maintained version of Birthright was later built for the revised Third Edition of Dungeons and Dragons rules. This collaborative project, structured over the internet, was recognized by Wizards of the Coast as the official fan site for the setting. Richard Baker, who co-created Birthright, also wrote The Falcon and the Wolf, connecting the original design team to the setting's continued life online.