Black Flag Playtest Feedback 1

 1. Lineage / Heritage 

The distinction between lineage and heritage does a pretty good job of kicking away the “culture is biological” thing that’s pervaded fantasy gaming since early days, but the heritages quietly (and likely not intentionally) reiterate the concept of “most cultures are mono-racial”.

Setting up your wood elves and your high elves is dead easy and built right in; the wood elves have a Grove Heritage and the high elves have a Cloud Heritage.  No sweat.

But something like "If you're from the forested kingdom of Velmet (which is, by the way, 40% Elf, 25% Gnome, and 35% everyone else) you likely have a Grove Heritage" isn't a first-glance option, and should be; lots and lots of settings are built that way around.

Beefing up heritages a bit so they stand firmly as ur-cultures to be dropped in that way, and detaching them into a distinct subsection from lineages could get you both.  You'd still want pointers in the lineages naming the common heritages and pointers back in the heritages naming the common core demographics, but widening the gap a bit helps regularize some very valuable stuff.

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2. “Racial Languages”

The holdover of racial languages, on the flip side, go directly back to “Culture is biological”.  Making language being intrinsic to a species across many worlds gets very “All Dwarves think alike” as soon as you look at it for more than a half-second.

And look, I know they’re necessary for full backwards-compatibility, but it would not be terribly hard to actually create a genericized name for each of these, note that each is often and incorrectly ascribed to a heritage despite it being much more complex than that, and move on with the new name.  Nobody will be confused if there’s a table that goes:

Language Sometimes called         Used by
Kharzad         Dwarvish                 Stone heritage cultures, x, y, z.

Quahai Elvish          Grove heritage cultures, x, y, z

(Etc)

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3. Heritage Alignments

Please, just dump this entirely if it’s at all possible to do so.  In the cases where a heritage / culture is so deeply committed to or poisoned by set values that a “usual” alignment even makes sense, that needs a lot more than a quick list entry; that’s a few paragraphs of main text needing to be written.