Elder Scrolls Flavoured Birth Augurs

The Warrior

Birth augurs are a neat idea. They help give each character a little more uniqueness. In the end they're just a simple numerical modifier but they can really shape a character by shining a spotlight on a particular trait. They have the right flavour for a Luck-based bonus too - we all have little superstitions about people having luck in certain areas of their life but not others. Some characters feel destined for a certain class just because of their birth augur.

What's even better is the player in my campaign who chose to play a Thief with a negative to all Thief skills. I love that. Despite Luck being totally against him, he has chosen his own destiny. That alone has made him a fun character to play with.

The thing that I find lacking with birth augurs, however, is any consistent theme or cohesion. I can't even tell what they're supposed to be. They come across as something like zodiac signs and yet they clearly aren't - one of them is "Lucky Sign" which more explicitly calls out a star sign but another is "survived a spider bite". I'm not the only one who has raised an eyebrow at that. 1 in 30 people have been bitten by a spider and that's the most interesting thing about their luck?

That's not even an augur of one's birth!

I get the feeling that the designers intentionally veered away from being specific here. Defining a bunch of star signs would have implications about the cosmology and the setting, which DCC intentionally leaves blank. Unfortunately the result is a table that has very little flavour and feels uninspired. In much the same way DCC encourages creating custom Mercurial Magic tables to flavour magic to different kinds of Wizards, custom Birth Augur tables can give some flair to your world and its cosmology. At the very least, you can do more with it than the original.

The Inspiration (Morrowind and Oblivion)

The Mage (interestingly the file is named "The Wizard")

Videogames were my main pastime growing up, and if I recall correctly Morrowind was the game that taught me to use the keyboard and a mouse simultaneously. It's no surprise then that the Elder Scrolls series has had a massive influence on my taste in RPGs, both digital and analog. Oblivion I didn't play until much later, but it kept the same system.

During character creation you are asked to choose a star sign from a list. From a mechanical standpoint you're just choosing a perk, but the existence of the star signs has implications for the world and your character is immediately tied to the world. This has deep personal implications for a character, likely influencing their path through life via the grand direction of the cosmos.

That sounds kinda like a Birth Augur.

The Lore (The Firmament)

The Thief

The real reason I'm doing this is because the lore of the constellations in The Elder Scrolls is weird and cool. Things that are weird and cool should be stolen entirely used as inspiration.

There are thirteen starsigns. If you played Skyrim, you'll know them as the Standing Stones, which are just the same thing further gamified.

Three of them are the Warrior, Mage and Thief. These guys clearly come from the big three archetypes in RPGs and that cements this trio as a real concept within the world rather than just a game mechanic. They're known as the Guardians.

Each of them has three constellations as their Charges.

The thirteenth constellation is the Serpent, who wanders the sky unpredictably. The Serpent is usually threatening one of the Charges, and the Guardians' job is to defend them. Those born under the Serpent are "the most blessed and the most cursed".

The very sky itself is alive and in conflict. It has personalities within it, those personalities are meaningful to both the world and the game, and it affects characters both mechanically and in-universe. There is a fair bit more to the cosmology and it's also implied that the phases of the two moons affect these, but the game simply lists these 13 options to choose from and that's more than enough for us to make something cool out of it.

The Table

Roll a d12 and d14. The d12 represents the season of your birth, and the d14 represents the Serpent's activity during the season. If you roll doubles, the Serpent was threatening your constellation at the time of your birth and you take the relevant Serpent augur instead.

d12	Birthsign	Standard Augur	Serpent Augur
1	The Warrior	Melee attack rolls	Melee damage rolls
2	The Lady	Wil. saves	Armor Class
3	The Steed	Speed	Initiative
4	The Lord	Fort. saves	Hit Points
5	The Mage	Corruption rolls	Spell damage
6	The Apprentice	Number of languages	Spell checks
7	The Atronach*	Spell checks x2, negative corruption	Spell damage x2, negative corruption
8	The Ritual	Turn unholy checks	Magical healing
9	The Thief	Ref. Saves	Thief skills
10	The Lover	Personality checks with hirelings	Critical hits
11	The Shadow	Sneak and hide checks	Backstabs
12	The Tower	Find secret doors, find traps	Lockpick, disable traps

*The Atronach starsign has double the effect on spell checks (or damage, if Serpent) but a negative effect on corruption rolls. This is to thematically suit the Atronach as it exists in the Elder Scrolls games: great power at a cost.

All the effects on here were either taken directly from the DCC core book or this awesome extended Birth Augur table, with one obvious exception. There are less results than the original table and it isn't evenly distributed because you need to roll doubles to get the Serpent augurs. The probabilities of this might actually be a problem - you'll get even more doubles, which still happens often with a d30. The Serpent results are designed to feel more significant, as "those born under the serpent are more blessed and more cursed". Whether it's a blessing or curse obviously depends on your Luck modifier.

If we wanted to go crazy with this we could potentially double the number of signs by creating variations depending on the moon phases as Morrowind implies - one for each with the "Prime Aspect of Masser" or "Prime Aspect of Secunda".

The Takeaway

Custom Birth Augur tables can inform what kinds of individuals exist in your world and how they tie in to the cosmos. The Elder Scrolls' magic is vastly different in flavour to DCC's magic, and that shines through when looking at the differences between DCC's Birth Augur table and Elder Scrolls' birthsigns. Notably there isn't a clear Cleric archetype because magical healing is basically a wizarding school, so there were no Cleric-focused signs to port directly over.

This got me thinking about creating custom Birth Augur tables per setting, just the same way someone might create custom Occupation tables to better suit what kinds of people are expected to come out of character generation, or Mercurial tables for certain kinds of Wizards. It's easy and it's fun.

I wonder about taking this a step further down the cosmic route and tying Augurs in with Alignments...