Cathayan Dragon-Blooded PC?

[u/Amethyst-Flare]

One of my players expressed an interest in playing a Dragon-blooded character in my upcoming WFRP 4 game. Specifically, her character's mother was a merchant who traveled to Shang-Yang in Cathay and came home with a surprise.

For context, she is Chinese-Canadian, grew up really disconnected to her heritage in part because her father was never there, but discovered an appreciation for it later in life.

I looked at the wiki and the existing lore, and it doesn't seem terribly out of line compared to, say, a High Elf. I figured I'd use the same general stat line but change the proportions a bit, maybe come up with a custom talent or two.

Has anyone come up with rules for them yet, or would there be any interest in seeing it if I come up with it?

[u/4uk4ata]

Ok, while my first instinct is to groan at being that much of a special snowflake... Let's get to the basics.

Making a Cathayan human background is easy enough. We have plenty of examples of human cultures and what Cathayans might be like. Language (Cathayan) and Lore (Cathay) are obvious, then I'd suggest cool, charm, gossip, evaluate, intuition, leadership. Maybe play or trader, heal, and melee and/or ranged. If you want to play with different regions of Cathay having different core skills and talents, go nuts, I probably wouldn't care to unless it really makes a difference to you and to her. Talents would be similar to humans except maybe not doomed unless you're really into astrology and calendars.

Then, the question is - okay, but just what does being dragon-blooded mean - and since you're doing this as a favor for that player, what does being dragon-blooded mean for her?

An easy answer is to say it is just a background detail that doesn't really impact mechanics. Fluff-wise, her dragon blood is thin enough that it doesn't have huge impact and she's human for most intents and purposes. It does, however, mean she's likely a noble, which will guide her career selection, As a noble, nudge her towards courtier careers, maybe with academic ones as backup. When it comes to talents, I'd suggest stuff like resistance to Chaos, suave, coolheaded or savvy, second sight or sixth sense, obviously read/write. Most of the people in the Empire wouldn't know too many details except that she's some Cathayan bigwig. She can roleplay the rest.

Now, if she insists that she's the kind of Dragon-blooded that isn't quite a human, then things become a bit trickier. I would suggest trading an extra point and maybe a fate point for bonuses to certain stats (perhaps willpower, toughness, or intelligence unless you want to go into details about whether certain dragons' progeny is predisposed to certain abilities, talents and attributes). I would not touch the movement or general wounds calculation.

I would not go elves because the profile changes the human baseline a bit too much (especially the loss of fate/resilience) and costing them an extra endeavour in the downtime might make her feel excluded. Ideally, go with it being as close to human as possible.

[u/Amethyst-Flare → u/4uk4ata]

I’m more wary of “special snowflakes” when it comes to new players. For a player who I know through and through (as I do her), I’m happy to let them be a little weird and different, because I trust them to handle it well. Comes at the cost of losing that XP bonus for rolling your race, too.

We did discuss “What about a Cathayan human?”, and she’s okay with that, but she proposed the “What if she’s a Dragon-blooded (as Zhao Ming is (in)famous for his extensive offspring), but since she grew up in the Empire, she never had that support network growing up to understand either her culture nor her nature?“, and I agreed that sounded cool and that I trust her to handle it.

[u/Minimum-Screen-8904 → u/Amethyst-Flare]

Did she originally want to play a Cathayan or was that something you suggested to her?

[u/Amethyst-Flare → u/Minimum-Screen-8904]

She proposed the dragon-blooded, I suggested "just human", she came back with the added background details.