As you may know by now, a Level Up character’s origin is comprised of heritage, culture, background, and destiny. We’ve covered heritages and backgrounds in detail recently, so now it’s time to look at the other two pieces of that puzzle.

Culture

Where your heritage determines the physical qualities you inherit from your parents, your culture represents the things you learned as you grew up. It’s about nature (heritage) and nurture (culture). When you choose your culture, you get a number of learned features.

There are (broadly) two types of culture in the Adventurer’s Guide. Some are those specific ones found in O5E — wood elf is a specific culture, as is deep gnome. Others are more general — villagers, wildlings, nomads, and so on.

You can combine any heritage with any culture. You might choose to mimic the races in O5E (choose dwarf and mountain dwarf for a dwarf who grew up in the mountain dwarf culture) or make your own combinations (choose dwarf and cosmopolitan for a dwarf who grew up in a big city). These two dwarves will be very different — the one who grew up in the big city will still have the physical dwarven traits inherited from their parents, but won’t have the hammer and axe proficiencies or the stonecunning of the one who grew up with mountain dwarves.

You might ask why we kept the O5E race-specific cultures instead of just having a generic ‘wood’ culture which can be applied to any race, to make wood elves or wood gnomes?

Wood elves have a different culture to forest gnomes in O5E, so both aren’t represented well by a single ‘forest’ culture; and we don’t want all our forest gnomes to have longbow proficiency! So we have the wood elf culture and we have the forest gnome culture, but we also have a wildling culture which is a more general ‘woodsy’ culture.

An elf can come from the wood elf culture, but they might have been brought up by forest gnomes, or the elf might choose the wildling culture instead. The key to all this is choice — it’s up to you what you want your character to be! Any of 9 heritages, plus any of 35 cultures, in any combination, makes for 315 unique origins. And that’s before you factor in background or destiny.

Destiny

Your destiny represents your personal story. We use destiny instead of traits, bonds, and flaws, and destiny ties into the inspiration rules.

A destiny might be something like Wealth, Knowledge, or Revenge. Each comes with:

• Source of inspiration. This tells you how you gain inspiration dice. The Dominion destiny gives you inspiration when you take charge, lead by example, or convince others to do things.

• Inspiration feature. You can spend your inspiration the normal way (an extra d20) or spend it to fuel your inspiration feature. The inspiration feature for the Knowledge destiny lets you spend your inspiration to quickly evaluate a creature or object and glean certain information about it.

• Fulfillment feature. You also gain a feature when you fulfill your destiny. The Revenge destiny says that when you finally get your vengeance, you gain an ability to scare people — people now know not to cross you!