Today’s feature in my ongoing Homebrew blog posts is the Badgen. The Badgen are nearly as old as my homebrew setting itself. I wanted from the very beginning to add one or two nonhumanoid races into my game world. The fist was the Badgen and the second the Canis. Back when I created the races I also wanted to make sure that these races did not overflow my table with players wanting to play them. So I had the genius idea to make the two races Hate one and other. Likely my biggest mistake in the history of my homebrew worlds creation.

Having done this, players few and far between ever opted to even give the races a look. For two main reasons I learned. One if one player decided to make a Badgen, then no one at the table could make a Cainis. As well as if  you played one of either of the races it would limit your party’s interaction with the other races of these types in the game world. I kinda shot myself in the foot right out the gate.

So in my rewrite, I set to pulling out the racial hate between the two so that parties could play both races without any limiting factors to the rest of the party. I hope it fixes things.  This works on a few levels with my existing group as well, because I have moved the storyline ahead a few generations since the “war” that sparked off their hate of one and other. As we have seen in real life time heals wounds.

The Badgen were inspired early on to be designed as a replacement to the Half-Orc in my homebrew setting. So I built them very much like Half-Orcs. But due to my creative self-inflicted gunshot wound to the race. Half-Orcs continued to be played in my world regularly due to the points I made above.

The Badgen has been through several incarnations over the years. One version had the scent ability as well as powerful build. Another was given the ability to rage once a day as per a barbarian. The Pathfinder incarnation gave them Ferocious and Bestial Racial traits. Of all of them, I think this one is the version of the Badgen I am the most pleased with.