d20 Modern Conversion: Alternative Human and Variants

Hey all, here's an alternative human plus some variations for the modern conversion!

Hey everyone, I'm finally back posting after finishing my exams. This is one of two updates I've released today, click here to check out the other: Rules Regarding Radiation!

The standard 5th Edition Human race has always seemed kinda boring to me, which is a shame considering how much potential I think basic humans have in fantasy settings. I understand the instinct to make them into the basic jack of all trades, as they are often considered to be the point of view that we look at these fantastic worlds through, but I think that wastes some narrative potential. Additionally, if you're going to do a jack of all trades there has gotta be some middle ground between the boring but balanced +1 to all stats and the interesting but broken free feat.

My favourite homebrew Human race I've ever seen was Ashton McAllan's version, which tries to view humans through the lens of other fantastical races. The end result is a race which feels not only distinct from the elves/dwarves/halflings lineup, but also distinct from modern humans as well, fitting wonderfully into a fantasy setting.

With this in mind, I wanted to create an alternative to the Human race myself for the d20 Modern conversion. I think this job is a little easier, as there isn't necessarily many other races playing around with humans in a modern setting (though this is of course possible), so a jack of all trades role is fairly appropriate. I mostly wanted to offer a range of more interesting options to players, both narratively and mechanically. In the modern conversion, there are two other races apart from Humans, Robots and Mutants, so I wanted an attribute that could pick out Humans from those two. It had to be something fairly general, and something that the other races could feasibly lack. After searching through other's human variants, I settled on the Ingenuity trait from the "Adaptive Humans" variant by u/heavyarms_. It's fairly general, though I can see some fair narrative justifications for why Robots and Mutants would be less adept at tasks they haven't trained in than Humans.

I also added some variants to the alternative human. The first two, the Altered and the Cyborg, were actually one of the reasons I made this alternative human in the first place. As soon as I presented the Robot race to my players, I was almost immediately asked if they could play as a Cyborg. After that, the implementation seemed fairly simple, and extending the half-human treatment to Mutants was a natural extension of this. The third variant, the Adept, came from wanting players to still be able to play as a magical character from level 1. As much as I like the base class/advanced class system, it can be a little limiting if your advanced class forms a big part of your character. Adding magic as a racial trait seemed like an easy way to alleviate this, especially after any other ideas I had seemed so difficult.

The document on GM Binder: Alternate Human and Variants

Now I'm finally done with university stuff for summer I should be able to post more frequently, but we all know how well should has worked in the past. I'm going to try and stick to at least one update a fortnight, or possibly more if I've got some spare time on my hands. That's all for this time, I sincerely hope to be bringing you new content soon.