So I decided to create a playable Undead race based on Slavic mythology, partly because I wanted to have fun with it, and partly because I had issues with rusalkas as monsters. I ended up with the Navka (another name for certain kinds of rusalkas in mythology), based on nymphs and rusalkas, and stumbled into a lot of difficulty balancing it, as basically converting a monster into a race has proven tricky. I've contacted two experienced DMs, and both said they liked what I was going for, but couldn't quite decide whether it was overpowered, too weak, or alright. So maybe someone here can help.
For reasons of brevity, I'll shorten the descriptions and omit certain things, and I'll focus on racial traits.
Navka
Navki (also known as mavki and niavki) are unrestful souls of drowned young women or grown-up spirits of children who died before receiving a name.
Navki are inseparably connected to their place of rebirth, be it a body of water, a field, or a forest, and though some choose to leave it and mingle with the living, most stay. Those that leave can never stop longing for their true home, however well their human life might be going, and will take whatever time they can to be in the wild.
Navki live in groups in fields, woods or bodies of water, and often emerge to dance. The sight of navki dancing in the moonlight often lures unsuspecting strangers in, which usually leads to their untimely demise - they dance till they drop dead from exhaustion or follow the dancing navki into the water or the woods, where they drown or get lost.
Racial traits
As a navka, you are an undead spirit of nature. These apply to your character unless explicitly specified otherwise.
Creature type: Undead
Ability Score Increase: Your Charisma score increases by 1.
Alignment: Contrary to popular opinion, navki are not inherently evil. Their rebirth has caused them to shed some of the weaknesses of the living and their understanding of those weaknesses, and they do not take well to being bound by laws. A navka's worldview is usually strongly tilted towards Chaos and Neutrality.
Size: Most navki are decribed as petite and wisp-like, but in reality they come in all shapes and sizes of humanoid creatures. Your size is Small or Medium.
Speed: Your base walking speed is 30 ft.
Senses: Darkvision 60 ft.
Life in Undeath: As an Undead nymph-like ceature, you are immune to necrotic damage, but vulnerable to radiant and fire damage. You are also vulnerable to slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage dealt by weapons made of or infused with essences of sacred plants, even if they do not deal radiant damage. You cannot wield those weapons.
Siren-like: You are immune to being Charmed.
Amphibious: Navki can breathe air and water.
Wither in Longing: Prolonged (over 3 days) stay in man-made settlements such as towns or big cities affects your strength and ability to concentrate. You have the Poisoned condition. The condition can be avoided by spending 1 hour a day in gardens or fields. It is lifted 1 hour after leaving the settlement
Languages: You can speak Common and 1 language of your choice (the language you spoke in life).
Watery Camouflage (1/long rest): You are invisible in darkness or dim light when underwater; ends if you move.
Mesmerising Dance (1/long rest): The navka dances. Every creature within 30 ft. that can see them must make a Wisdom saving throw or be Charmed.
For races, it's best to avoid immunities and vulnerabilities. (In fact, vulnerabilities are rare even for monsters.) I'd lose the damage vulnerabilities and turn the necrotic immunity into resistance. I'd also change the immunity to charm to having advantage on saves against being charmed.
The vulnerability to weapons with sacred plant essences is rather complicated.
Also, if you look at typical undead monsters in 5e, they tend to have poison immunity, not necrotic. So you might want to add poison resistance, depending.
I feel like this is an elf race level of balancing issue, it has a lot of good things but it also has a lot of flavored weaknesses. Really stick to the lore here a bit. You've made it in a way that it seems balanced. "seems" In reality if you play this in a setting where holy paladins are prevalent and druids are enigmatic cultists fervently adamant to protect their forest against beings such as that. It will affect the the race in many ways.
Most undead are just resistant to Necrotic damage maybe take that in mind as not even the Reborn race has resistance with necrotic but advantage against poisoned condition and poison damage. yet the Wither in longing makes it also so that you take the poisoned condition (good flavor wise) and that it has to not interact in cities which is I feel like is the main reason why we play dnd.
Add +2 to Charisma, set a level where they can use their racial features; eg. Watery Camouflage at 3rd race level. Mesmerizing Dance at race 5th level also state the save DC for this (8 + Charisma modifier + proficiency bonus). This race will be RP heavy I already can see it. You need to add more ability scores, but add a set level where these features can be used. Size small and medium that's fine makes the race height flexible.
Hmm I get the feeling that these creatures are undead fey. Also, I don't know if a Siren or Mermaid would be immune to charms, sure they are very charming just don't know if the opposition works so maybe remove that if it doesn't stick to the actual lore or if you want, Navkas are driven for mad for their revenge that would insinuate that they're charmed in some way by their own self blaming others for their death. (Also note: Siren monsters in dnd don't have Immunity to charm) So you might want to remove it. Give them proficiency in Performance instead (performance doesn’t have to be performing instrument but dancing) so if you don’t want proficiency just give them advantage in performance checks made when dancing.
So, my adjustments are Charisma +2, change necrotic immunity if you want to resistance otherwise keep the immunity for the two vulnerabilities (generally not recommended but its your homebrew it should work in your world), remove immunity to charm or change it into advantage, add performance proficiency or advantage on performance when dancing, state the DC for mesmerizing dance, set the level of Watery Camouflage to 3rd level or make it a passive at that level, set the level of Mesmerizing Dance to 5th level race (Usually max for race level setting unless it scales at higher levels). Get swimming speed?
Also for more flavor give them the druidcraft spell.
The Watery Camouflage, if you want it to be only once a day, is a little weak if it breaks the moment they move. I'd actually make it an unlimited trait and more like the wood elf's Mask of the Wild trait, and have it be that you can attempt to hide when underwater and obscured by dim light or darkness.
For the Mesmerizing Dance, you'd need to say what ability of yours is used for determining the DC of the saving throw (Charisma probably?)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Helpful rewriter of Japanese->English translation and delver into software codebases (she/e/they)
So I decided to create a playable Undead race based on Slavic mythology, partly because I wanted to have fun with it, and partly because I had issues with rusalkas as monsters. I ended up with the Navka (another name for certain kinds of rusalkas in mythology), based on nymphs and rusalkas, and stumbled into a lot of difficulty balancing it, as basically converting a monster into a race has proven tricky. I've contacted two experienced DMs, and both said they liked what I was going for, but couldn't quite decide whether it was overpowered, too weak, or alright. So maybe someone here can help.
For reasons of brevity, I'll shorten the descriptions and omit certain things, and I'll focus on racial traits.
Navka
Navki (also known as mavki and niavki) are unrestful souls of drowned young women or grown-up spirits of children who died before receiving a name.
Navki are inseparably connected to their place of rebirth, be it a body of water, a field, or a forest, and though some choose to leave it and mingle with the living, most stay. Those that leave can never stop longing for their true home, however well their human life might be going, and will take whatever time they can to be in the wild.
Navki live in groups in fields, woods or bodies of water, and often emerge to dance. The sight of navki dancing in the moonlight often lures unsuspecting strangers in, which usually leads to their untimely demise - they dance till they drop dead from exhaustion or follow the dancing navki into the water or the woods, where they drown or get lost.
Racial traits
As a navka, you are an undead spirit of nature. These apply to your character unless explicitly specified otherwise.
Creature type: Undead
Ability Score Increase: Your Charisma score increases by 1.
Alignment: Contrary to popular opinion, navki are not inherently evil. Their rebirth has caused them to shed some of the weaknesses of the living and their understanding of those weaknesses, and they do not take well to being bound by laws. A navka's worldview is usually strongly tilted towards Chaos and Neutrality.
Size: Most navki are decribed as petite and wisp-like, but in reality they come in all shapes and sizes of humanoid creatures. Your size is Small or Medium.
Speed: Your base walking speed is 30 ft.
Senses: Darkvision 60 ft.
Life in Undeath: As an Undead nymph-like ceature, you are immune to necrotic damage, but vulnerable to radiant and fire damage. You are also vulnerable to slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage dealt by weapons made of or infused with essences of sacred plants, even if they do not deal radiant damage. You cannot wield those weapons.
Siren-like: You are immune to being Charmed.
Amphibious: Navki can breathe air and water.
Wither in Longing: Prolonged (over 3 days) stay in man-made settlements such as towns or big cities affects your strength and ability to concentrate. You have the Poisoned condition. The condition can be avoided by spending 1 hour a day in gardens or fields. It is lifted 1 hour after leaving the settlement
Languages: You can speak Common and 1 language of your choice (the language you spoke in life).
Watery Camouflage (1/long rest): You are invisible in darkness or dim light when underwater; ends if you move.
Mesmerising Dance (1/long rest): The navka dances. Every creature within 30 ft. that can see them must make a Wisdom saving throw or be Charmed.
Any feedback on this would be appreciated!
I am detecting three different areas where I believe I can possibly offer some insights: D&D RAW & future proofing; mechanical balance & language; and technical implementation on DDB. For my own mental organization I’ll touch on them individually. As to any help I can offer regarding technical implementation, I can currently only comment on the RAW stuff I’ll be mentioning and offer a few general suggestions. Otherwise you gotta lemme know what (if anything) you could use a hand figuring out how to implement for me to help with any of that.
The RAW Compatibility Stuff:
If you check out the first page of the most recent UA Travelers of the Multiverse (👉here👈), you will see that you can either eliminate or else copy/paste standardized language that has been provided by WotC for a chunk of your race. Specifically:
Ability Score Increases, Alignment, Languages, (and Age) will no longer be attached to any email, sub, or variant races at all. *poof* Gone, by by. (See the “Technical” section below for more details on implementing a serviceable workaround to fake it for your race on DDB.)’
A base/sub/variant race’s Size trait will only state its mechanical “size” (Small or Medium) moving forward. All other comments relating to appearance, such as height, weight, build, or coloration will henceforth be hurried in the fluff paragraphs along with any potential comments about “Life Span” (replacing Age) so it’ll be easier to ignore.
All currently published races are being rewritten according to the new format, and scrutinized by a team of sensitivity readers WotC has hired to make sure D&D is as inoffensive as possible. They will all be republished along with the monsters currently in the Monster Manual (who are also being scrubbed and retconned) in in the announced “Monsters of the Multiverse,” which you can learn absolutely nothing more about (👉here👈).
That👆is a sardonic (but accurate) view of what D&D will look like by 2024 (gods help us). Now, you can totally ignore all of that and do whatever you want. However, since I noticed it I figured I would point it all out so you could make the most informed decisions about it possible.
Balance & Language:
You mentioned the challenges you were facing converting Monster traits to Racial traits. That’s because Monsters are designed to be challenging enough to use against a band of intrepid fantasy heroes, and simple enough for one DM to run every other creature (living or dead) in the entire multiverse, all by themself. (And a monster’s average life expectancy is approximately 24 seconds since most combats are over in 4-rounds on average. A monster is just a note in a book until the DM says the magic phrase “roll initiative,” and is back to being nothing but a not in a book again as soon as the DM stops talking about them as “creatures” and starts referring to their corpses as objects.
On the other end of the design spectrum are the PCs. acial traits (and class features) are designed to achieve the exact opposite results. They need to be a little less to keep the PCs from being too tough to challenge by 7th level, intricate enough that a single PC can maintain a single players interest for a few years, with a cyclical ebb-and-flow of uses tied to rests because they are expected to endure multiple 4-round encounters every cycle.
Life in Undeath: As an Undead nymph-like ceature, you are immune to necrotic damage, but vulnerable to radiant and fire damage. You are also vulnerable to slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage dealt by weapons made of or infused with essences of sacred plants, even if they do not deal radiant damage. You cannot wield those weapons.
As others have said, I also suggest either nixing or replace both the damage immunities and vulnerabilities. in addition, the way you have the bit about “sacred plants” worded means the a Navka Druid could never use a wooden staff as a spellcasting focus since it also counts as a quarterstaff. My suggestion to rebalance this trait and make it more in-line with the official stuff is to lift “draw inspiration from” the Gnome Cunning trait and just rejigger it a bit. (Add “dis” to the beginning of “advantage,” change “spells” to something like “sources of [INSERT DAMAGE TYPES] damage.” As for the sacred wood aversion, I would consider possibly making it work like Druids’ aversion to metal (flavorful, but something they knew lots of people would outright ignore). My other idea was changing it to something both simpler and less restrictive like:
“You take 1 additional Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing damage from Magical Weapons made of wood, and cannot Attune to such weapons.”
It’s not quite the same thing, but if it still has the feels you want then use the WotC motto of “streamlined design.”
Siren-like: You are immune to being Charmed.
Wither in Longing: Prolonged (over 3 days) stay in man-made settlements such as towns or big cities affects your strength and ability to concentrate. You have the Poisoned condition. The condition can be avoided by spending 1 hour a day in gardens or fields. It is lifted 1 hour after leaving the settlement
Watery Camouflage (1/long rest): You are invisible in darkness or dim light when underwater; ends if you move.
Mesmerising Dance (1/long rest): The navka dances. Every creature within 30 ft. that can see them must make a Wisdom saving throw or be Charmed.
Lift “Draw inspiration from” the Grungs’ Water Dependence trait and rejigger it by replacing “water” with “natural environments” maybe?
Lift “Draw inspiration from” the Way of Shadows Cloak of Shadows trait, replace ’in an area of dim light or darkness“ with the phrase “completely submerged in water,” and give it a number of uses per long rest tied to Proficiency bonus since apparently orange is the new Proficiency bonus is the new Ability modifier. (This trait is so niche it barely qualifies as more than a ribbon.)
You seem to have omitted a few pieces of critical, need-to-know information regarding that dance. How long is the dance?’ An action? A minute? How long is the Charmed condition supposed to last? A minute? An hour? As long as those feat started happy? Because, as you have presented it here would be permanent.
Amphibious: Navki can breathe air and water.
Your Navka are Undead, sooo…why would they need to breath at all? (Or eat or drink either for that matter) You could either strait-up copy/paste the Dampires’ Deathless Nature (“You don’t need to breathe.”), or perhaps the third bullet from the Reborns’ identically named yet soooo waaayy much more powerful trait (“You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.”)
On a related note, WotC tried floating the idea of Undead as a PC creature type in the UA for two of the three lineages from Van Richten’s. It sank. There are many things in 5e that use “undead” as a keyword, and WotC decided it wasn’t a viable as a PC race option in their view. I’m just pointing it out in case it helps.
Tech Stuff:
So, as I mentioned they are uncoupling ASIs and Languages from races and those will just be generic PC creation bits in future, not tied to Race, Class, or Background. I noticed that DDB implemented that change for the official stuff, but it isn’t automatically applied to new homebrews. So, in order to fake it I still attach that stuff to Races, and then check the “Hide on Sheet,” “Hide on Details Page.” I haven’t tried it with “Hide in Builder” to see if it hides it on the Racial Traits tab, but still display on the Ability Score tab like it’s sposta yet.
ASIs. To make it have the two options (+2, +1 / +1, +1, +1) I create two Options attached to the trait. If you leave the “levels where options known” field blank it will default to 1 @ creation. I’m assuming you know the Modifier to use.
If you're dead set on referencing the Fire and Radiant aversions mechanically, you might try something like giving disadvantage on the next attack roll/ability check they make if they take that type of damage. Or something like "If you take Fire or Radiant damage, you take an additional 1d6 damage of that type."
For dealing with the whole Undead creature type problem, perhaps a feature that says you are considered an Undead for the purposes of Divination magic. So you get some of the quirks of being identified as Undead without going whole hog and dealing with an Oathbreaker's Control Undead, a Cleric's Turn Undead, or a Necromancer's Command Undead.
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So I decided to create a playable Undead race based on Slavic mythology, partly because I wanted to have fun with it, and partly because I had issues with rusalkas as monsters. I ended up with the Navka (another name for certain kinds of rusalkas in mythology), based on nymphs and rusalkas, and stumbled into a lot of difficulty balancing it, as basically converting a monster into a race has proven tricky. I've contacted two experienced DMs, and both said they liked what I was going for, but couldn't quite decide whether it was overpowered, too weak, or alright. So maybe someone here can help.
For reasons of brevity, I'll shorten the descriptions and omit certain things, and I'll focus on racial traits.
Navka
Navki (also known as mavki and niavki) are unrestful souls of drowned young women or grown-up spirits of children who died before receiving a name.
Navki are inseparably connected to their place of rebirth, be it a body of water, a field, or a forest, and though some choose to leave it and mingle with the living, most stay. Those that leave can never stop longing for their true home, however well their human life might be going, and will take whatever time they can to be in the wild.
Navki live in groups in fields, woods or bodies of water, and often emerge to dance. The sight of navki dancing in the moonlight often lures unsuspecting strangers in, which usually leads to their untimely demise - they dance till they drop dead from exhaustion or follow the dancing navki into the water or the woods, where they drown or get lost.
Racial traits
As a navka, you are an undead spirit of nature. These apply to your character unless explicitly specified otherwise.
Creature type: Undead
Ability Score Increase: Your Charisma score increases by 1.
Alignment: Contrary to popular opinion, navki are not inherently evil. Their rebirth has caused them to shed some of the weaknesses of the living and their understanding of those weaknesses, and they do not take well to being bound by laws. A navka's worldview is usually strongly tilted towards Chaos and Neutrality.
Size: Most navki are decribed as petite and wisp-like, but in reality they come in all shapes and sizes of humanoid creatures. Your size is Small or Medium.
Speed: Your base walking speed is 30 ft.
Senses: Darkvision 60 ft.
Life in Undeath: As an Undead nymph-like ceature, you are immune to necrotic damage, but vulnerable to radiant and fire damage. You are also vulnerable to slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage dealt by weapons made of or infused with essences of sacred plants, even if they do not deal radiant damage. You cannot wield those weapons.
Siren-like: You are immune to being Charmed.
Amphibious: Navki can breathe air and water.
Wither in Longing: Prolonged (over 3 days) stay in man-made settlements such as towns or big cities affects your strength and ability to concentrate. You have the Poisoned condition. The condition can be avoided by spending 1 hour a day in gardens or fields. It is lifted 1 hour after leaving the settlement
Languages: You can speak Common and 1 language of your choice (the language you spoke in life).
Watery Camouflage (1/long rest): You are invisible in darkness or dim light when underwater; ends if you move.
Mesmerising Dance (1/long rest): The navka dances. Every creature within 30 ft. that can see them must make a Wisdom saving throw or be Charmed.
Any feedback on this would be appreciated!
For races, it's best to avoid immunities and vulnerabilities. (In fact, vulnerabilities are rare even for monsters.) I'd lose the damage vulnerabilities and turn the necrotic immunity into resistance. I'd also change the immunity to charm to having advantage on saves against being charmed.
The vulnerability to weapons with sacred plant essences is rather complicated.
Also, if you look at typical undead monsters in 5e, they tend to have poison immunity, not necrotic. So you might want to add poison resistance, depending.
Maybe give the race a swim speed?
Helpful rewriter of Japanese->English translation and delver into software codebases (she/e/they)
Good ideas, thank you!
I feel like this is an elf race level of balancing issue, it has a lot of good things but it also has a lot of flavored weaknesses. Really stick to the lore here a bit. You've made it in a way that it seems balanced. "seems" In reality if you play this in a setting where holy paladins are prevalent and druids are enigmatic cultists fervently adamant to protect their forest against beings such as that. It will affect the the race in many ways.
Most undead are just resistant to Necrotic damage maybe take that in mind as not even the Reborn race has resistance with necrotic but advantage against poisoned condition and poison damage. yet the Wither in longing makes it also so that you take the poisoned condition (good flavor wise) and that it has to not interact in cities which is I feel like is the main reason why we play dnd.
Add +2 to Charisma, set a level where they can use their racial features; eg. Watery Camouflage at 3rd race level. Mesmerizing Dance at race 5th level also state the save DC for this (8 + Charisma modifier + proficiency bonus). This race will be RP heavy I already can see it. You need to add more ability scores, but add a set level where these features can be used. Size small and medium that's fine makes the race height flexible.
Hmm I get the feeling that these creatures are undead fey. Also, I don't know if a Siren or Mermaid would be immune to charms, sure they are very charming just don't know if the opposition works so maybe remove that if it doesn't stick to the actual lore or if you want, Navkas are driven for mad for their revenge that would insinuate that they're charmed in some way by their own self blaming others for their death. (Also note: Siren monsters in dnd don't have Immunity to charm) So you might want to remove it. Give them proficiency in Performance instead (performance doesn’t have to be performing instrument but dancing) so if you don’t want proficiency just give them advantage in performance checks made when dancing.
So, my adjustments are Charisma +2, change necrotic immunity if you want to resistance otherwise keep the immunity for the two vulnerabilities (generally not recommended but its your homebrew it should work in your world), remove immunity to charm or change it into advantage, add performance proficiency or advantage on performance when dancing, state the DC for mesmerizing dance, set the level of Watery Camouflage to 3rd level or make it a passive at that level, set the level of Mesmerizing Dance to 5th level race (Usually max for race level setting unless it scales at higher levels). Get swimming speed?
Also for more flavor give them the druidcraft spell.
The Watery Camouflage, if you want it to be only once a day, is a little weak if it breaks the moment they move. I'd actually make it an unlimited trait and more like the wood elf's Mask of the Wild trait, and have it be that you can attempt to hide when underwater and obscured by dim light or darkness.
For the Mesmerizing Dance, you'd need to say what ability of yours is used for determining the DC of the saving throw (Charisma probably?)
Helpful rewriter of Japanese->English translation and delver into software codebases (she/e/they)
I am detecting three different areas where I believe I can possibly offer some insights: D&D RAW & future proofing; mechanical balance & language; and technical implementation on DDB. For my own mental organization I’ll touch on them individually. As to any help I can offer regarding technical implementation, I can currently only comment on the RAW stuff I’ll be mentioning and offer a few general suggestions. Otherwise you gotta lemme know what (if anything) you could use a hand figuring out how to implement for me to help with any of that.
The RAW Compatibility Stuff:
If you check out the first page of the most recent UA Travelers of the Multiverse (👉here👈), you will see that you can either eliminate or else copy/paste standardized language that has been provided by WotC for a chunk of your race. Specifically:
Ability Score Increases, Alignment, Languages, (and Age) will no longer be attached to any email, sub, or variant races at all. *poof* Gone, by by. (See the “Technical” section below for more details on implementing a serviceable workaround to fake it for your race on DDB.)’
A base/sub/variant race’s Size trait will only state its mechanical “size” (Small or Medium) moving forward. All other comments relating to appearance, such as height, weight, build, or coloration will henceforth be hurried in the fluff paragraphs along with any potential comments about “Life Span” (replacing Age) so it’ll be easier to ignore.
All currently published races are being rewritten according to the new format, and scrutinized by a team of sensitivity readers WotC has hired to make sure D&D is as inoffensive as possible. They will all be republished along with the monsters currently in the Monster Manual (who are also being scrubbed and retconned) in in the announced “Monsters of the Multiverse,” which you can learn absolutely nothing more about (👉here👈).
That👆is a sardonic (but accurate) view of what D&D will look like by 2024 (gods help us). Now, you can totally ignore all of that and do whatever you want. However, since I noticed it I figured I would point it all out so you could make the most informed decisions about it possible.
Balance & Language:
You mentioned the challenges you were facing converting Monster traits to Racial traits. That’s because Monsters are designed to be challenging enough to use against a band of intrepid fantasy heroes, and simple enough for one DM to run every other creature (living or dead) in the entire multiverse, all by themself. (And a monster’s average life expectancy is approximately 24 seconds since most combats are over in 4-rounds on average. A monster is just a note in a book until the DM says the magic phrase “roll initiative,” and is back to being nothing but a not in a book again as soon as the DM stops talking about them as “creatures” and starts referring to their corpses as objects.
On the other end of the design spectrum are the PCs. acial traits (and class features) are designed to achieve the exact opposite results. They need to be a little less to keep the PCs from being too tough to challenge by 7th level, intricate enough that a single PC can maintain a single players interest for a few years, with a cyclical ebb-and-flow of uses tied to rests because they are expected to endure multiple 4-round encounters every cycle.
As others have said, I also suggest either nixing or replace both the damage immunities and vulnerabilities. in addition, the way you have the bit about “sacred plants” worded means the a Navka Druid could never use a wooden staff as a spellcasting focus since it also counts as a quarterstaff. My suggestion to rebalance this trait and make it more in-line with the official stuff is to
lift“draw inspiration from” the Gnome Cunning trait and just rejigger it a bit. (Add “dis” to the beginning of “advantage,” change “spells” to something like “sources of [INSERT DAMAGE TYPES] damage.” As for the sacred wood aversion, I would consider possibly making it work like Druids’ aversion to metal (flavorful, but something they knew lots of people would outright ignore). My other idea was changing it to something both simpler and less restrictive like:“You take 1 additional Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing damage from Magical Weapons made of wood, and cannot Attune to such weapons.”
It’s not quite the same thing, but if it still has the feels you want then use the WotC motto of “streamlined design.”
My comments (in order of appearance):
Lift“Draw inspiration from” Fey Ancestry/Dwarven Resistance.Lift“Draw inspiration from” the Grungs’ Water Dependence trait and rejigger it by replacing “water” with “natural environments” maybe?ift“Draw inspiration from” the Way of Shadows Cloak of Shadows trait, replace ’in an area of dim light or darkness“ with the phrase “completely submerged in water,” and give it a number of uses per long rest tied to Proficiency bonus since apparentlyorange is the newProficiency bonus is the new Ability modifier. (This trait is so niche it barely qualifies as more than a ribbon.)Your Navka are Undead, sooo…why would they need to breath at all? (Or eat or drink either for that matter) You could either strait-up copy/paste the Dampires’ Deathless Nature (“You don’t need to breathe.”), or perhaps the third bullet from the Reborns’ identically named yet soooo waaayy much more powerful trait (“You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.”)
On a related note, WotC tried floating the idea of Undead as a PC creature type in the UA for two of the three lineages from Van Richten’s. It sank. There are many things in 5e that use “undead” as a keyword, and WotC decided it wasn’t a viable as a PC race option in their view. I’m just pointing it out in case it helps.
Tech Stuff:
So, as I mentioned they are uncoupling ASIs and Languages from races and those will just be generic PC creation bits in future, not tied to Race, Class, or Background. I noticed that DDB implemented that change for the official stuff, but it isn’t automatically applied to new homebrews. So, in order to fake it I still attach that stuff to Races, and then check the “Hide on Sheet,” “Hide on Details Page.” I haven’t tried it with “Hide in Builder” to see if it hides it on the Racial Traits tab, but still display on the Ability Score tab like it’s sposta yet.
ASIs. To make it have the two options (+2, +1 / +1, +1, +1) I create two Options attached to the trait. If you leave the “levels where options known” field blank it will default to 1 @ creation. I’m assuming you know the Modifier to use.
I hope this helps.
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A few ideas I had while reading the thread:
If you're dead set on referencing the Fire and Radiant aversions mechanically, you might try something like giving disadvantage on the next attack roll/ability check they make if they take that type of damage. Or something like "If you take Fire or Radiant damage, you take an additional 1d6 damage of that type."
For dealing with the whole Undead creature type problem, perhaps a feature that says you are considered an Undead for the purposes of Divination magic. So you get some of the quirks of being identified as Undead without going whole hog and dealing with an Oathbreaker's Control Undead, a Cleric's Turn Undead, or a Necromancer's Command Undead.