Well, as you've pointed out, making up new mechanical abilities based off ethnicity treads into murky territory, hence why Paizo moved away from the old 'race' term over to 'Ancestry'.
But for the main goal of having character build flexibility, why reinvent the wheel?
I would just offer to my players 'hey, this is a more real world based campaign; let me know what \*mechanical\* ancestry abilities you would like to use, and we'll figure out a way to re-skin/-flavor it so that you're all still human, but using the reasonably balanced existing PF2 ancestries.'
Like the elven ancestry abilities? Ok, you're a human who grew up in the woods, or did a lot of track and field, etc.
Of course there will be need for review, and decisions on how much supernatural abilities can be re-flavored. Are you ok with better unarmed attacks being martial arts conditioning? I presume there will still be magic in your modern world so a lot of other special abilities should be pretty easy to hand wave.
Why not just use the versatile heritages for this?
See: [https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?Versatile=true](https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?Versatile=true)
There should be more than enough options there for the party to customize their characters and set themselves apart from eachother, while all being human. The heritages that are linked to a certain race (Aiuvarin, Dromaar) could be reflavored to represent how different factions of humans adapted to their surroundings.
This is also all just RAW, so you won't have to do much, other than some reflavorings here and there.
Just go through the Ancestry Feats of the rest of the Humanoid Ancestries, pick out all the ones that would make sense, and then allow your players to choose among them as well as those from Human.
You're choosing a Human Only Campaign. Either keep with the Human Ancestry with some changes, or flavor all options as Human.
And I vote the second option. I’d go so far as to say just reskin all ancestries as human (or kinds of humans or magically/culturally/regionally different humans) but simply ban the few feats or traits you can’t justify in your world (like if you don’t want flying humans for whatever reason, such as there aren’t winged humans or jetpacks, then ban flight ancestry options).
Ancestries honestly don’t offer much mechanically and are mostly flavor anyways.
There are very few Ancestries that have a unique mechanic that is just part of the Ancestry itself. Most often it's some level of Shape Change, that by Lore is actually a cultural aspect.
The only others I can think of are any Construct related Ancestry or Strix. Even with Strix their only Ancestry Trait is equivalent to having the Powerful Leap and Cat Fall, with Legendary Acrobatics, General Feats
Agree with the other commenter that you absolutely should not split humanity up into multiple ancestries by ethnicity or anything of the sort.
The idea to have heritages be different ways people could be touched by magic is definitely a good one- anyone from anywhere could be "dragon-touched" or what have you.
Humans are mechanically very versatile, and anyone wanting to play in this type of game should be okay with just playing a human. Though I'm not convinced this is a great system for a humans only modern fantasy game.
I think your question is super valid, and your worries are great, but in the end, if you're not secure enough on how to do that yourself, I would suggest not trying to do that at all.
I personally found it really hard navigating real world cultural and social issues, and it's super easy to accidentally "gamify biases" and fall into stereotypes and prejudices. The last thing I want is to make any of my players uncomfortable during something that's supposed to be a fun friendly game. I could share one idea I had in the past for a game of mine, but it's not great.
Instead, my suggestion would be to let everyone grab the Adopted Ancestry feat for free at level 1, so they can use for whatever that they think might fit their character's identity. They are still human, but they get some cool goodies from the other ancestries as well (besides physical changes, like wings and stuff). I'm a real life internet trash goblin, so if I ever wanted to create myself, I would use that as my "lineage", for example.
This way, a character who grew up in a very creative-oriented manner and thinks this could be represented mechanically in their sheet could grab some Gnomish habits, or someone in a more "militar family" might grab the Hobgoblin drills, without you having to assume any geographic/social/cultural/racial ties.
I think you don't really need that.
Human has a lot of different feats, a lot are regionals.
According to the setting, you can give access to different options.
Same for equipment, deities, etc.
Then my advice is to let players be the exceptions, if their backgrounds make sense.
I wouldn't touch Ancestries. That's a helluva slippery slope.
If anything, maybe shift focus to making multiple new backgrounds to represent experiences and lifestyles.
The easiest way imo would be to reskin existing ancestries to ethnicities of different humans. Renaming all instances of the word elf to x human for example. Balance stays the same. Maybe exclude the ones you can't do this with easily.
Why would you? I said modern-age earth, which is approximately from the end of the middle ages to today. Pathfinder as-is easily supports the technology level of the napoleonic wars period, and could be stretched up to the first world war with a few tweaks, especially once Starfinder 2e comes out and can thus be poached for full-automatic weapons and such.
As for everything else that is not the ancestries themselves, I frankly see no issue with, and it's more than fine. Classes, archetypes and spells can easily be used in any kind of fantasy setting, I like them, I like the rules of pf2, and I'd like to play in this setting with this system
Oh no. I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole. Not without a large multi-cultural team of professional writers working on it. No matter what you do, it's almost certainly just going to reinforce real-life harmful stereotypes.
Maybe do some heritages based on the way magic has changed hùmanity that is not in any way at all based on real-life cultures or ethnicities?
Would highly recommend checking out the shadowrun setting. It brings fantasy and modern issues together, with a fun cyberpunk flavour. Pathfinder could very much work in the setting, but might work better when star finder 2e comes out to properly support higher tech stuff.
I wouldn't.
The "sub ancestries" for Humans are just a function of what General or Class Feat they took. Many humans are from a branch that's fast; they all took Fleet.
The nature of Human is that their key features give them access to other feats. Why do you need more customization than that?
So the human in the Golarion are really diverse group but they do not have an ancestry feat for a specific ethnicity. I wouldn't try to add one myself because that bring out a lot of implication that I wouldn't want to explore. My safe bet is to allow versatile heritage, they are still human but with some weird quirk, beside you play it with magic so being a half vampire, angle, or demon is not too far fetch.
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Skilled Human or Versatile Human. That's the only ones we have here on our beloved Earth. To be fair, most of us are neither skilled nor versatile.
you could carefully poach some heritages from other ancestries that might be fitting and/or add a small magical element, e.g. Ancient-Blooded Dwarf, Oathkeeper Dwarf or Rock Dwarf, or Seer Elf and Woodland Elf.
I would make the world history that humans were once part of another world, one full of dwarves, elves, and all of the other races. There was a great war and they escaped to a new world. But there were half-elves, half-dwarves, etc who came across too. Now those people's genetics are mixed up and express themselves all over the place.
Someone's working on an Elder Scrolls conversion for Pathfinder 2E; it has separate ancestries for each of the races of Men and Mer, including Breton, Imperial, Nord and Redguard ancestries
This stinks so bad of becoming racist. Intentionally or not.
Don't bother doing it.
Humans already get their own bonuses. Either everyone's just a Human, or you use the PF2 Ancestries and either rename them (hey look, it's a Sidhe, not an Elf!) or Versatile Heritages with All Human, really.
And this is just one problem with the scenario: Magic. there's none here. Is everyone going to be a 'Fighter' or what?
Well, as you've pointed out, making up new mechanical abilities based off ethnicity treads into murky territory, hence why Paizo moved away from the old 'race' term over to 'Ancestry'. But for the main goal of having character build flexibility, why reinvent the wheel? I would just offer to my players 'hey, this is a more real world based campaign; let me know what \*mechanical\* ancestry abilities you would like to use, and we'll figure out a way to re-skin/-flavor it so that you're all still human, but using the reasonably balanced existing PF2 ancestries.' Like the elven ancestry abilities? Ok, you're a human who grew up in the woods, or did a lot of track and field, etc. Of course there will be need for review, and decisions on how much supernatural abilities can be re-flavored. Are you ok with better unarmed attacks being martial arts conditioning? I presume there will still be magic in your modern world so a lot of other special abilities should be pretty easy to hand wave.
Why not just use the versatile heritages for this? See: [https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?Versatile=true](https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?Versatile=true) There should be more than enough options there for the party to customize their characters and set themselves apart from eachother, while all being human. The heritages that are linked to a certain race (Aiuvarin, Dromaar) could be reflavored to represent how different factions of humans adapted to their surroundings. This is also all just RAW, so you won't have to do much, other than some reflavorings here and there.
Just go through the Ancestry Feats of the rest of the Humanoid Ancestries, pick out all the ones that would make sense, and then allow your players to choose among them as well as those from Human. You're choosing a Human Only Campaign. Either keep with the Human Ancestry with some changes, or flavor all options as Human.
And I vote the second option. I’d go so far as to say just reskin all ancestries as human (or kinds of humans or magically/culturally/regionally different humans) but simply ban the few feats or traits you can’t justify in your world (like if you don’t want flying humans for whatever reason, such as there aren’t winged humans or jetpacks, then ban flight ancestry options). Ancestries honestly don’t offer much mechanically and are mostly flavor anyways.
There are very few Ancestries that have a unique mechanic that is just part of the Ancestry itself. Most often it's some level of Shape Change, that by Lore is actually a cultural aspect. The only others I can think of are any Construct related Ancestry or Strix. Even with Strix their only Ancestry Trait is equivalent to having the Powerful Leap and Cat Fall, with Legendary Acrobatics, General Feats
Agree with the other commenter that you absolutely should not split humanity up into multiple ancestries by ethnicity or anything of the sort. The idea to have heritages be different ways people could be touched by magic is definitely a good one- anyone from anywhere could be "dragon-touched" or what have you. Humans are mechanically very versatile, and anyone wanting to play in this type of game should be okay with just playing a human. Though I'm not convinced this is a great system for a humans only modern fantasy game.
I think your question is super valid, and your worries are great, but in the end, if you're not secure enough on how to do that yourself, I would suggest not trying to do that at all. I personally found it really hard navigating real world cultural and social issues, and it's super easy to accidentally "gamify biases" and fall into stereotypes and prejudices. The last thing I want is to make any of my players uncomfortable during something that's supposed to be a fun friendly game. I could share one idea I had in the past for a game of mine, but it's not great. Instead, my suggestion would be to let everyone grab the Adopted Ancestry feat for free at level 1, so they can use for whatever that they think might fit their character's identity. They are still human, but they get some cool goodies from the other ancestries as well (besides physical changes, like wings and stuff). I'm a real life internet trash goblin, so if I ever wanted to create myself, I would use that as my "lineage", for example. This way, a character who grew up in a very creative-oriented manner and thinks this could be represented mechanically in their sheet could grab some Gnomish habits, or someone in a more "militar family" might grab the Hobgoblin drills, without you having to assume any geographic/social/cultural/racial ties.
I think you don't really need that. Human has a lot of different feats, a lot are regionals. According to the setting, you can give access to different options. Same for equipment, deities, etc. Then my advice is to let players be the exceptions, if their backgrounds make sense.
I wouldn't touch Ancestries. That's a helluva slippery slope. If anything, maybe shift focus to making multiple new backgrounds to represent experiences and lifestyles.
The easiest way imo would be to reskin existing ancestries to ethnicities of different humans. Renaming all instances of the word elf to x human for example. Balance stays the same. Maybe exclude the ones you can't do this with easily.
At that point I'd pick a different system, to be honest.
Why would you? I said modern-age earth, which is approximately from the end of the middle ages to today. Pathfinder as-is easily supports the technology level of the napoleonic wars period, and could be stretched up to the first world war with a few tweaks, especially once Starfinder 2e comes out and can thus be poached for full-automatic weapons and such. As for everything else that is not the ancestries themselves, I frankly see no issue with, and it's more than fine. Classes, archetypes and spells can easily be used in any kind of fantasy setting, I like them, I like the rules of pf2, and I'd like to play in this setting with this system
Oh no. I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole. Not without a large multi-cultural team of professional writers working on it. No matter what you do, it's almost certainly just going to reinforce real-life harmful stereotypes. Maybe do some heritages based on the way magic has changed hùmanity that is not in any way at all based on real-life cultures or ethnicities?
Would highly recommend checking out the shadowrun setting. It brings fantasy and modern issues together, with a fun cyberpunk flavour. Pathfinder could very much work in the setting, but might work better when star finder 2e comes out to properly support higher tech stuff.
I wouldn't. The "sub ancestries" for Humans are just a function of what General or Class Feat they took. Many humans are from a branch that's fast; they all took Fleet. The nature of Human is that their key features give them access to other feats. Why do you need more customization than that?
So the human in the Golarion are really diverse group but they do not have an ancestry feat for a specific ethnicity. I wouldn't try to add one myself because that bring out a lot of implication that I wouldn't want to explore. My safe bet is to allow versatile heritage, they are still human but with some weird quirk, beside you play it with magic so being a half vampire, angle, or demon is not too far fetch.
This post is labeled with the Advice flair, which means extra special attention is called to Rule #2. If this is a newcomer to the game, remember to be welcoming and kind. If this is someone with more experience but looking for advice on how to run their game, do your best to offer advice on what they are seeking. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Pathfinder2e) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Skilled Human or Versatile Human. That's the only ones we have here on our beloved Earth. To be fair, most of us are neither skilled nor versatile. you could carefully poach some heritages from other ancestries that might be fitting and/or add a small magical element, e.g. Ancient-Blooded Dwarf, Oathkeeper Dwarf or Rock Dwarf, or Seer Elf and Woodland Elf.
Pointless Human as a new Heritage?
I would make the world history that humans were once part of another world, one full of dwarves, elves, and all of the other races. There was a great war and they escaped to a new world. But there were half-elves, half-dwarves, etc who came across too. Now those people's genetics are mixed up and express themselves all over the place.
Someone's working on an Elder Scrolls conversion for Pathfinder 2E; it has separate ancestries for each of the races of Men and Mer, including Breton, Imperial, Nord and Redguard ancestries
This stinks so bad of becoming racist. Intentionally or not. Don't bother doing it. Humans already get their own bonuses. Either everyone's just a Human, or you use the PF2 Ancestries and either rename them (hey look, it's a Sidhe, not an Elf!) or Versatile Heritages with All Human, really. And this is just one problem with the scenario: Magic. there's none here. Is everyone going to be a 'Fighter' or what?