Guidelines for creating a race/species for both D&D 2014 and 2024.
You’ve gone through the Player’s Handbook, Monsters of the Multiverse and every other book and their dozens of playable species and none of them quite cut it. Perhaps you have a great idea for a completely new species, maybe you want to make an existing creature playable, maybe you want to create a new subrace or maybe you just want a species with traits that neatly fit the optimisation you want from your character.
Whatever it is, you may want to create a custom race. But doing this in a balanced way is easier said than done. You want to avoid being over or underpowered as this can feel unsatisfying at the table. You’ll also want to create something that’s interesting and unique to the game.
Wizards of the Coast have published guidance on doing this in 2 different places. One is in the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the other in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. Both are perfectly fine approaches. I’ll use these as starting points for homebrewing your species, but as I take you through this step by step, I’ll provide some additions to their advice too. I’ve also added some extra guidance on how to adapt your homebrew species for the 2024 rules.
General principles of creating a homebrew species
To start with, here are some general principles to follow when creating your own custom species:
- If you can simply reflavour an existing race with aesthetic changes, then this is much easier than creating a homebrew race.
- Avoid creating something that is overpowered. This may feel unsatisfying for other players and may not be approved by your DM.
- Equally, avoid creating something underpowered as this may feel unsatisfying for you.
- Use an existing race as a template. This will help you maintain balance. This should preferably be a race that possesses similar capabilities to your homebrew race.
- Try to swap traits that are as similar as possible.
- Not all traits are made equally. You can’t just mix and match the best traits of 3 different species.
Homebrewing a race/species step by step
Now we’ve got the guiding principles out of the way, you can follow this step by step process
1. Determine appearance
Describe what the species looks like. Try to make it unique to this species.
2. Determine culture
Describe the culture of the species. Again, you’ll want something that’s different from other species. This might include elements of their history.
3. Choose a name
Give your species a name. Pick something that is memorable and not too hard to say (as people will forget it). You might consider making the name descriptive. For example, if your species are a group of dog people, they might be called “canith” or if they are bat people, they might be called “echoni”. This can help players immediately recognise the name of the species and what kind of creature it is.
4. Creature type
Normally this is humanoid, but since Monsters of the Multiverse released and in D&D 2024, Wizards have released playable species that are different creature types.
5. Size
You should be small or medium. Some species can be either, in which case, you can let the player choose.
6. Speed
Most species have a movement speed of 30ft. Older species have sometimes been slower with 25ft speed, but official species have moved away from this so I’d generally avoid having a slower speed. Some species are a little faster with a 35ft speed. I’d generally avoid anything faster than this.
You may also choose another movement type that you have a speed for like a swim, fly, climb or burrow speed. Treat these extra movement types like traits as these can be powerful abilities. I’d also treat an enhanced movement speed like a trait too and reduce the power of your other traits appropriately. You’ll notice that species like fairies and Aarakocra have less powerful traits as a result of their fly speed.
7. Ability score increase
More recently published races allow players to choose one ability score to increase by 2 and one by 1 or three ability scores to increase by 1. You can choose to specify the ability score increases, but I prefer the more recent approach.
8. Languages
Most races know common and one other language the player chooses. Older races have had languages specified for them, but again, this is less flexible.
9. Determine your traits
This is where most people go wrong as creating balance can be challenging. There are a couple of ways this can be handled in a balanced way.
I. Use Tasha’s custom lineages approach
In this method, you gain 2 traits:
Feat: A feat of your choice for which you qualify.
Variable trait: Gain either darkvision with a range of 60ft or proficiency in a skill of your choice.
This is a solid approach for maintaining balance but may not have the flexibility to build the kind of species you want. For instance, you wouldn’t be able to build something like a Fairy, Changeling, Centaur or Warforged with the options available here. But these are nice easy rules to follow for race creation.
II. Adapt an existing race
This is the approach suggested in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG). Essentially, you take an existing race that is most similar to the kind of race you want to build and you adapt it. If you want innate spellcasting on your race, pick a base race with innate spellcasting, if you want a race with skill proficiencies or natural weapons, choose a base race with these traits.
Swapping like for like is simple enough. If you want a different skill proficiency to the base race, you can swap for another skill proficiency. If you want to swap resistances or spells, just make sure you swap for the same level of spells and that these kick in at the same level. However, even then, you get some challenges. For example, the DMG gives the example of adapting a Tiefling into an Aasimar. They suggest that you could swap fire resistance for radiant resistance, but radiant damage is rarer than fire damage so you could give the Aasimar necrotic resistance too. But then they suggest this is more powerful so you might only give the Aasimar utility spells instead.
This makes even a methodology as simple as this challenging, but the important thing to keep in mind is that you want to keep power levels roughly the same as other races.
10. Ask someone else for feedback
It’s easy to get caught up in some cool ideas for a new race and miss something important. Maybe you’ve accidentally made the race too powerful, maybe it’s not worded clearly or maybe some traits don’t synergise well. It’s always important to get feedback and to playtest these options.
I’ve homebrewed my own character options and happen to think I’m pretty good at recognising balance issues. However, I find that someone else’s feedback and playtesting is always valuable with homebrew creations.
Adapting species homebrew guidelines to D&D 2024
If you’re using the 2024 rules, then the approach outlined above changes slightly in a few small ways:
- No ability score increase: This is now granted by your background, not your species so don’t include it as part of your species.
- No languages: Again, this is granted by your background
- Be aware of rules changes: I’d make sure that if you’re adapting an existing species, that you use a 2024 version (or at least one from Monsters of the Multiverse which uses similar design philosophies). Certain wording and approaches have changed with the latest edition. If you want to adapt an older species to bring it up to date with the 2024 rules, just be aware of some of these changes.
Note that there’s no guidance in the 2024 DMG for creating your own species, but the above advice should mean being able to create reasonably balanced species’.
Example homebrew race: Boneburrow
I’ve created an example species to show you how this process can looks:
The boneburrow are a badger-like group of humanoids that spend much of their time living in burrows. Long ago, their ancestors were shunned by both surface dwellers and underground dwellers. They found sanctuary in the graveyards of the surface dwellers, digging where others dared not. So much time dwelling near corpses led to many rituals and traditions associated with the dead, including necromancy. Now, many boneburrow naturally possess some amount of necromantic power.
Creature type. Humanoid
Size. Medium (about 4-5 feet tall).
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
Ability score increase. When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. You can’t raise any of your scores above 20.
Bone Magic. You know the Chill Touch cantrip.
Starting at 3rd level, you can cast the False Life spell with this trait. Starting at 5th level, you can also cast the Blindness/Deafness spell with this trait. Once you cast False Life or Blindness/Deafness with this trait, you can’t cast that spell with it again until you finish a long rest. You can also cast either of those spells using any spell slots you have of the appropriate level.
Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells when you cast them with this trait (choose when you select this race).
Burrow. Your hands are able to rapidly dig through soil and similar substances. You have a burrow speed of 10ft.
Darkvision. You can see in dim light within 120 feet of you as if it were bright light and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for your character.
There aren’t currently any burrowing species so I though it would be interesting to create one. Burrowing is a potentially powerful feature (being able to dig in and out of the soil to get out of sight of enemies for example or travel unseen). I opted to limit this in speed by a fair bit to reduce the ability to do this too much. I decided to treat it like flight too as a similarly potent feature and used a Fairy as a starting point as they also have innate magic.
With the burrow speed reduced, I felt this left me space to grant darkvision which is a minor trait, but necessary for a burrowing species. This meant I could still replicate the Fairy’s innate spellcasting with spells updated to reflect the more necromantic nature of the boneburrow species.
There were options to grant things like tremorsense, natural weapons and/or blindsight, but this would either have meant removing innate spellcasting or making the species too powerful so I avoided granting these. Even then, I’d suggest that the boneburrow are on the stronger end of species with some interesting options available to them. With that in mind, I might want to playtest this species to ensure that it isn’t too overpowered in practice.
The steps for making your own homebrew species are not too tricky, but getting the right balance within the traits can be. By following the above advice though, it should help to ensure you can create the species you want, while having the right amount of balance to your homebrew creations.
