New Racial Traits

A curious aspect of life in the Blight is that it subtly, over generations, moulds its inhabitants, exaggerating the effects on their physicalities and mentalities of the ways in which they apply themselves within its confines. For example, descendants of labourers are, on average, noticeably more hulking and brutish than their forebears, and descendants of scholars have, on average, wider eyes and larger craniums. Some of these effects are modelled by racial background traits and others by alternative racial traits.

Blight Racial Backgrounds

As you review these racial backgrounds, you are likely to be struck by the fact that their mechanics closely resemble those used for the racial subtypes presented in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Advanced Race Guide. Your drawing of this conclusion would not be inaccurate. They are, in fact, generally built as the Paizo racial subtypes are built. So why the name change? Well, there’s a good reason for that, too.
Frog God Games — as a champion of old-school games — has taken for its cue on the use of racial subtypes the same approach as was used in 3.0/3.5 and earlier iterations of the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game with a more traditional method more akin to the concept of “subraces” of old. This approach was held by Necromancer Games during its years releasing 3.0/3.5 materials and has been carried through by the Frogs as well, most recently with the release of LL8: Bard’s Gate and its (re)introduction of the wood elf and street dwarf racial subtypes. It appears again in the shortly forthcoming Mountains of Madness with the mountain dwarf racial subtype. So rather than make an abrupt about face for this book and start using the terminology in the same way as the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Advanced Race Guide, we continued to use racial subtype as we have in our previous and future products.
However, we also didn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater in regards to the Paizo mechanics for racial subtypes, so we retained them but renamed them as racial backgrounds. We think that the use of racial subtype in the connotation more along the lines of the old subraces makes sense anyway, since the concept of type and subtype in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game already exist to define the sort of creature a thing is rather than more of an emphasis on the sorts of skills it has.
And as with all things Frog God Games provides, these rules are here for you to pick and choose as you please and as best suits your game. If you prefer to use the Paizo nomenclature regarding racial subtypes, then by all means drop the racial backgrounds name for racial subtypes and just go with the old-school subraces if you want to reference the racial subtypes we’ve added by another name. As always, make of it what you will.