A pathway of sorts.

A focus or concentration of study. In a way, it's acknowledging that there are several ways to play bards, and allowing for better development of the guild in general by allowing folks to specialize.

(Though GM Raesh could probably explain it better than I could!)

The Heritages, as of right now, stand to be Songsworn, Taleweavers, and Lorekeepers - in a very general sense, these are the battle bards, the performers, and the scribes/historians.

-V.

"Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh, let me live,
Till doom espy my towers and scatter them.
A city spell-bound under the aging sun,
Music my rampart, and my only one."
-Edna St. Vincent-Millay

If you start at the start of this folder you can get some more details, I think I moved all the discussion here when we made the folder.

Anyhow, gist is, there's a couple of dramatically different ways to approach being a Bard and as GMs have come and gone over the years the guild has been pulled in a few different directions. This has resulted in a guild with some fairly fractured development and Heritages are part of our move towards making the guild more holistic. They're going to be somewhat like Moon Mage sects, allowing us to have some hooks for both lore and mechanical development.

As mentioned the three Heritages are the Songsworn, the Lorekeepers and the Taleweavers, which roughly correspond to combat, lore/magic and performance though they are a little more complex than that.

Being a member of a Heritage will mostly grant RP perks (Much like sects currently do), but eventually they will also have some smallish mechanical benefits called Feats - however those will not be part of the initial release since I'm going to need to do quite a lot of back-end work to fix everything up to the point where I can realistically build them.

That said, everything to do with Heritages will be entirely optional.

-Raesh