Dungeons & Dragons is great. It also, unfortunately, has long-fed into the inherently colonialist tropes that have long dominated the fantasy genre. Wizards of the Coast has recently made some strides to disentangle their tabletop role playing games from these harmful stereotypes — things like the essential racial traits of Orcs, which peg them as dark-skinned savages that are inherently evil and dumb.

This is a great step. But the folks at Arcanist Press have taken it even further by introducing a homebrewed alternative to "racial" traits for fantasy characters by replacing them with "Ancestry" and "Culture." Eugene Marshall's short book, Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e, offers guidance on how to create characters of one ancestry raised in a different culture (an orc raised by elves, for examples) as well as characters of mixed ancestry (the child of a gnome and a Tiefling) — ultimately allowing you to create a fantasy world that is more inclusive and diverse, like our own, but in different ways.

You can see writer Eugene Marshall using his Ancestry & Culture guide to roll a new character in the video above. Essentially, the guide breaks down things like Age, Size, Speed, Keen Senses, Fey Ancestry and Trance as genetic traits inherited through ancestry, while other traits like alignment, special skills, or languages can be passed down through one's culture. This makes for more well-rounded and interesting characters, and arguably enhances the game overall.

For example, a dwarf who grows up among other dwarves would possess all of the traits from both dwarf ancestry and dwarven culture, whereas an elf who grew up among dwarves would possess elf ancestral traits, such as Keen Senses, Fey Ancestry, and Trance, but dwarven cultural traits, such as Combat Training, Tool Proficiency, Stonecunning, and proficiency in the Dwarvish language.

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https://boingboing.net/2020/08/10/racial-traits-in-dd-are-prett.html