It’s Midgard Monday! Each week, we visit a corner of the wide world of Midgard. Look for standalone content you can drop into your campaign—whether it’s in Midgard or your own homebrew. Find new inspiration each Midgard Monday!

Midgard is vast and filled with different peoples. Wildly different cultures can exist just a few miles apart, each one a potential heritage for your character. Consider this your invitation to raise a tankard, call out praise to Ninkash, and embrace your inner dwarven adventurer!

A stout drink and a bold heart help you claim this achievement: a full set of Ironcrag heritages, drawn from the thirteen major cantons of the Crossroads region of the Midlands. Drink deep, leave a comment, and maybe, just maybe we’ll crush some foes along the way.

While both of these heritages are primarily for dwarven lineages, both are also available to fit local non-dwarves.

Look at the online Midgard map to find these locations in context!

Melana

Well south of the Ironcrag Mountains proper, rests the canton of Melana. They enjoy the benefits of their location, close to the Seven Cities. The trade opportunities are frequent and strong. Showing the influence of their southern neighbors, Melana elects censors in the Seven Cities tradition of popular government. Yet their dwarven residents cling to the idea of restoring a Kingdom Under the Mountain. They look enviously to the north and dream of war.

Melana Canton Heritage

At the edge of the Septime lands and at the southern mouth of the Tijano pass, the royalist dwarven warrens of Melana live in an unusual symbiosis with the human-dominated surface city of Melana. The city seeks to further its fortunes as a trade hub, capable of supplying the Crossroads with goods at a healthy distance from the Blood Kingdom or the Mharoti than Zobeck. The dwarven monarchists of the Undercity want to use Melana as the staging point for a campaign to recreate a dwarvish kingdom in the Ironcrags. Salting this mixture is a large community of kobolds, striving to gain increased rights and respect in Melana’s elected political structure.

Common backgrounds this for heritage include homesteader, maker, rustic, and soldier.

Prophetic Insight. As an action, you can utter an applicable fragment of the King’s Prophecy, and provide the benefits of a guidance cantrip. When you reach 3rd level, you can cast bane as a 1st-circle spell without expending a spell slot. Once you cast it, you must finish a long rest before you can cast it again using this feature. Your spellcasting ability for these spells is CHA, INT, or WIS, chosen at character creation.

Wronged Past Held Tight. You are proficient with the History skill. If you are making a check related to dwarven matters, double your PB for the check.

Languages. You know Dwarven and one additional language of your choice. Typical Melana characters choose Common or Draconic, reflecting your regular interaction with the kobolds in Melana.

Wolfmark

North of the Ironcrags, beyond the war-torn fields and hills of the former Kingdom of Krakova (and its conqueror, the Blood Kingdom), stands the defiant palisades of the Wolfmark. Forged by Northlander reaver dwarves with the vision, skill, and ambition to act while the vampire lords marched, it offers a best possible hope against the undead hunger threatening to consume the region.

Wolfmark Heritage

You are a dwarf or other refugee who came of age in the peninsula of the Wolfmark in the northern regions of former Krakova. Fighting the forces of the Blood Kingdom has defined the last decade of your life. You might have spent your youth in the Northlands or Krakova, Dornig, even Morgau or Doresh. Wherever you started, you’ve embraced your new home and the freshly forged community created from the gestalt of those cultures. Some may have just escaped the fires of conquest, some may have come to fight those fires, but all of them work together to hold back the undying darkness. Further details can be found in the Midgard Worldbook and Empire of Ghouls.

Common backgrounds for this Heritage include border raider, homesteader, northern mariner, outcast, rustic, and soldier.

Field Veteran. Your time in the Wolfmark has taught you how to live with minimal resources. You have proficiency in the Athletics and Survival skills.

Scrounge and Improvise. You can make Tiny nonmagical items using materials from your surroundings or to make minor repairs. An item takes up to 5 minutes to create and can be anything of 25 gp value or less from the Adventuring Gear table (see Player’s Guide). When done, it must sit or float on a surface within 5 feet of you, or affect an object or portion of a vehicle no bigger than a door. The item is obviously kitbashed, and resale value is negligible. After one use of no more than 1 hour in duration, the item becomes nonfunctional. If repairing or augmenting an object or vehicle, it adds 2 to the DC to disable it, or requires a DC 25 proficiency check to use beyond the hour. A repaired item cannot be repaired more than once using this trait.

Languages. You know Dwarven and one additional language of your choice. Typical Wolfmark characters choose Common or Giant.

New Background: Northern Mariner

You hail from Wolfmark communities or even folk from the Ironcrags who joined a longship crew and sought their fortunes on the bloodsoaked shores of the Neider Straits, Reaver Coast, the Swive, or the Bay of Ghed. You sailed those cold waters and participated in lightning raids, overwhelmed the defenders, then seized your own share of the ill-gotten booty. It’s not a heroic path, but it’s one many dwarves choose along the Nieder Straits.

Skill Proficiencies: Choose two from Acrobatics, Athletics, Perception, or Survival.

Additional Proficiencies: You gain proficiency with a water vehicles and a martial weapon.

Equipment: A set of heavy traveler’s clothes, a mess kit, a set of manacles, a trophy or memento worth no more than 1 gp captured on one of your reaver raids, a pouch containing 10 gp.

Talent

Your time on the crew of a longship was brutal and extreme. You sailed out to raid communities, claim loot, and then return to rest, recover, and prepare for the next foray. This provided you with an unusual set of skills, which still benefit you today. Choose a talent from this list to represent your time: Aware, Combat Conditioning, or Quick.

Adventuring Motivation

d8	Motivation
1	I grew tired of destroying other people’s efforts and want to help people solve problems.
2	I was the only survivor of a raid which went terribly wrong, and decided to start over.
3	My old captain betrayed us and led the crew into an ambush from which few of us escaped. I’ll find him and get my revenge.
4	I fell in love at first sight with the resident of a in the middle of a raid. That person escaped, and I am still searching for them.
5	I returned from an expedition to find my hometown destroyed by a raid. I adventure now to find anyone who knows if there were survivors or who did it.
6	I found a map in a raid which suggested a buried treasure worth a king’s ransom. I just need to find where the map starts.
7	I want to build my own fleet of reavers, and I adventure to learn the lay of the land and find future targets.
8	A relative went raiding and the expedition never returned. Divinations say they’re alive, and they might need rescue.

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Get into Midgard with the Midgard Worldbook! This acclaimed campaign setting is rich and deep, with over a decade of support from Kobold Press.

Want a more focused start? Try the Zobeck Clockwork City Collector’s Edition! This detailed sourcebook
gives players plenty of room to run, and includes adventures within the Clockwork City itself!