Lineages

In the Land of the Mists, power and dread lie in the simple question “What happened to me?” The following lineages are races that characters might gain through remarkable events. These overshadow their original race, if any, becoming their new race. A character might choose a lineage during character creation, their transformation having occurred before play begins. Or, events might unfold during adventures that lead your character to replacing their race with this new lineage. Work with your DM to establish if you’re amenable to such a development and how such stories unfold.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ME?

The lineages provided in this section represent a physical and magical transformation that alters you in fundamental ways. You can still appear as you once were, but you’ve changed in significant ways that might overwrite your once physical or magical capabilities. A dragonborn who becomes a dhampir, for instance, loses their connection to their draconic ancestry as the deathless power of vampirism surges through them. Once able to exhale destructive energy, the dragonborn now feels a powerful hunger inside, and their bite is now able to drain life. Some racial traits might remain after you gain a lineage, a possibility captured in the Ancestral Legacy trait. Keep this in mind when you explore the details of how you change after gaining a lineage subsequent to character creation.

Creating Your Character

At 1st level, you choose whether your character is a member of the human race or of one of the game’s fantastical races. Alternatively, you can choose one of the following lineages. If you choose a lineage, you might have once been a member of another race, but you aren’t any longer. You now possess only your lineage’s racial traits.

When you create a character using a lineage option here, follow these additional rules during character creation.

Ability Score Increases

When determining your ability scores, you increase one of those scores by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or you increase three different scores by 1. You follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy.

Your class’s “Quick Build” section offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You’re free to follow those suggestions or to ignore them. Whichever scores you decide to increase, none of the scores can be raised above 20.

If you are replacing your race with a lineage, replace any Ability Score Increase you previously had with these.

Languages

Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player’s Handbook offers a list of widespread languages to choose from. The DM is free to add or remove languages from that list for a particular campaign.

If you are replacing your race with a lineage, you retain any languages you had and gain no new languages.

Creature Type

Every creature in D&D, including every player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters are of the Humanoid type. A race option presented here tells you what your character’s creature type is.

Here’s a list of the game’s creature types in alphabetical order: Aberration, Beast, Celestial, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Humanoid, Monstrosity, Ooze, Plant, Undead. These types don’t have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the text of the cure wounds spell specifies that the spell doesn’t work on a creature of the Construct type.