Hard Boiled Cultures
Hard Boiled Cultures is a PDF product from One Bad Egg that gives players tools for injecting cultural variants of the player races into their campaigns, while giving those variants some mechanical oomph to back them up. Though it is written for use with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, a little tweaking will let you use it with any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, it can be used with any roleplaying game that mechanically distinguishes player races.
I’m a bit of a One Bad Egg fanboy. I’ve enjoyed every OBE PDF that I’ve bought. They excel at taking a core conceit of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition – injecting setting information into the game through rules design – and using it to describe colorful ideas that I am excited to play with. Not only is Hard Boiled Cultures another successful application of this design philosophy, it may be the best that I’ve seen so far because it helps players to develop their own ideas.
Hard Boiled Cultures lets DMs – or players with their DMs permission – play characters that do not conform to the mainstream of their race’s culture, and giving mechanical reinforcement to these differences. At its heart, Hard Boiled Cultures presents the idea that racial traits – powers and skill and stat bonuses – can be interpreted as manifestations of a race’s deeply ingrained cultural norms. Under this interpretation, if a character deviates from those cultural norms, his racial benefits should be changed by this.
Instead of looking at a race’s most distinctive cultural traits and deciding which racial traits must represent this, Hard Boiled Cultures comes at this problem from the other end. It suggests taking a racial trait, say a dwarf’s +2 Constitution bonus, and assigning an appropriate cultural norm to it as you see fit. This means that you will interpret the trait in whatever manner you see fit to, not necessarily by resorting to clichés. The Constitution modifier could represent a lifetime of long sessions in the mines, or it could represent the fact that all dwarves undergo a rite of passage that tests the dwarf’s endurance to its limits, killing those that are not up to the task.
Once the norm has been defined and associated with a racial trait, players develop variants on this norm, from deliberately transgressing against it to reinterpreting it in unconventional ways to taking it as a fundamental element of the character’s personal philosophy. Once this cultural variant has been decided upon, the player then decides what kind of trait would be an appropriate way of embedding that variant as alternative racial traits, replacing one or more defaults.
There are a few reasons why I like this approach to cultural traits. It prompts players to think about their races’ cultures in terms of concrete behaviors, not vague concepts like greedy, nature loving or sneaky. It also prods players’ imaginations, giving them a direction to look when considering what a race’s culture might be like, which is especially handy when dealing with unfamiliar races like the Deva from the Player’s Handbook 2 or the Player’s Handbook 3 preview race, the Wilden. It may also help groups to define cultural norms that are deeper or more nuanced than those that typically come to mind, overcoming the weight of cliché.
As the authors point out in the text, you can really go down the rabbit hole with this, too. Once you have established an iconoclastic variant of a race, you could, if you wanted, then develop twists and variants on that subculture as well. In fact, you can continue on in this manner until you have as rich, or baroque, a culture as you want. One way to use this is to make single-race campaigns less homogeneous. Players that are annoyed how some classic race/class combinations are not well-tuned from an optimization point of view might explore these possibilities as well. If you feel so inclined, the same could be done with unusual race/class combinations as well.
This core mechanical idea can be easily applied to any game that uses racial modifiers, as well. Every edition of Dungeons & Dragons that has separated races and classes has offered racial traits, and games like the HERO System and GURPS use racial packages sometimes. These games could put the techniques described in Hard Boiled Cultures to good use with a little modification.
What makes Hard Boiled Cultures a supplement for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition in particular is the analysis of racial traits it contains. It offers guidelines on how to value different types of bonuses, using feat-equivalent powers as a rough measurement. Skill bonuses, stat bonuses, attack powers, movement powers and utility powers are all put under the microscope, and useful guidelines are provided for how to compensate for adding, removing or modifying any of these elements. This isn’t just useful for tweaking existing races, either – it’s a good tool for anyone developing original Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition races, as well.
Hard Boiled Cultures contains a plethora of examples of its techniques put to use with various Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition races, including One Bad Egg’s homebrew race, the apelord. These examples range from quick, in-line ideas being thrown out to spur the reader’s imagination to an extended example that develops a handful of interrelated cultural twists for elves, related to the needs of a particular campaign concept.
Like all One Bad Egg products, the layout is derivative of the one Wizards of the Coast uses for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. It uses the same fonts, and uses graphics for the page number and section headers that are reminiscent of those used in D&D4e books, although they are not identical. The OBE layout uses a slightly larger font size, and a bit more leading between lines of text, so readability is better even than WotC’s books. OBE also uses gradient backgrounds for some of the tables in Hard Boiled Cultures, though, which is something that looks nice on the screen, but loses its appeal on paper. There is no index, but at 14 pages one is not necessary.
The art in Hard Boiled Cultures is credited to a clip art site. While it is high quality clip art, it still looks like clip art, though, so I would have to peg it as a notch below average. The cover, on the other hand, features a masklike graphic that is vaguely Polynesian in style. This slightly off the beaten path style helps to make the PDF look like it is about foreign cultures.
The writing, on the other hand, is well above average for the RPG industry. It is clean, clear and comprehensible. It has a good rhythm as well, although no one would confuse it for literature either.
For some reason, there is a worksheet PDF packaged with Hard Boiled Cultures. The techniques described are not remotely complex enough to require a proper worksheet, though. There isn’t even any math to speak of. There’s no reason to crack it open in your PDF viewer of choice aside from mild curiosity.
As much as I sing its praises, it is important to point out that many roleplaying groups give their races depth, complexity, nuance and subcultures without the need for mechanical support. Indeed, doing so is likely as old as Dungeons & Dragons. I admire this ability, but I do not share it. Nevertheless, groups that are adept at this sort of thing on their own will probably find that Hard Boiled Cultures is overkill or simply unnecessary.
Hard Boiled Cultures is an extremely good supplement. It gives players tools for creating diversity within the heavily stereotyped D&D player races, and then rooting them in the games systems in a logical fashion. While it is quite possible to add cultural variety to races without these tools, the mechanical tweaks Hard Boiled Culture guides you through give a little extra weight to these changes, fighting the impulse to fall back on cliché. While Hard Boiled Cultures does not provide a complete guide, it is useful to players that want help balancing their own original creations. Finally, if you look past the specific implementation for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, it can even be applied easily to many other fantasy, science fiction and horror roleplaying games. There is a lot to chew on in this small package. I highly recommend it.
June 3rd, 2009 at 15:34
Thanks for the review, Gerald!
June 3rd, 2009 at 21:36
Indeed! Hopefully you’ll like HBC2, which I just started writing, expanding on HBC to cover some of the new tools that were introduced in PHB2 (Backgrounds, etc.).
June 3rd, 2009 at 22:38
Jonathan,
Oh, indeed. Looking forward to that eagerly.