Battlezoo Ancestries: Expanding 5e's Character Options

Most 5e supplements give you new things to fight. Battlezoo Ancestries, from Roll for Combat, gives you new things to be. Want to play a dragon? Not a dragonborn — an actual, hoard-building, wing-spreading, fire-breathing dragon? Done. Want to play a sentient dungeon that has awakened to consciousness and sends an avatar out to interact with the world while its corridors and traps exist inside its own body? Also done. Want to play a minotaur, a slime, a doppelganger, or an intelligent magic weapon? Battlezoo has a book for each of them.

This is character creation pushed to its absurd, glorious extreme, and it works because the team behind it includes some of the most experienced rules designers in the tabletop RPG industry.

Roll for Combat and Mark Seifter

Roll for Combat is a tabletop media company that produces actual play podcasts, reviews, and — most relevant here — the Battlezoo line of supplements for both Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e. The creative engine behind Battlezoo is Mark Seifter, Roll for Combat's Director of Game Design and formerly the Design Manager at Paizo, where he was one of the four lead designers on Pathfinder Second Edition.

Seifter's pedigree matters because the Battlezoo Ancestries books are not simple reskins of existing character options. They are ground-up mechanical designs that need to function within the 5e framework while delivering on wildly ambitious fantasies. Playing a dragon that grows from a whelp to an ancient wyrm over a full campaign requires a progression system that does not break the game at level 1 or become trivial at level 15. That is a hard design problem, and it is the kind of problem Seifter was hired to solve.

Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons

The flagship product in the Battlezoo Ancestries line lets you play a true dragon. The core conceit is that your dragon character performed a special ritual to gain power quickly through adventuring rather than waiting millennia to grow naturally. This narrative hook solves the obvious balance problem — why is a dragon the same level as a human fighter? — with elegance.

The book offers over 45 dragon ancestries spanning the full spectrum of D&D dragon lore and well beyond it. The chromatic and metallic dragons are all here — Red, Blue, Gold, Silver, Copper — but the list extends into exotic territory: Astral Dragons, Dream Dragons, Time Dragons, Apocalypse Dragons, Infernal Dragons, and the wonderfully named Toadstool Dragons. Each ancestry comes with unique traits, abilities, and progression features.

Two new subclasses — the Draconic Ravager and the Dragon Mage — allow players to specialize in martial or magical draconic power. But the real depth comes from the Draconic Gifts and Evolutions system, which provides hundreds of customization options that let you build your specific dragon fantasy. Want a dragon that breathes lightning and has prophetic dreams? Build it. Want a tunneling dragon that hoards knowledge instead of gold? Build that too.

The Hoards of Power subsystem deserves special mention. Instead of shopping for magic items like a conventional adventurer, dragons power up by building their hoards. This is a mechanically interesting alternative to the standard 5e treasure economy, and it reinforces the dragon fantasy at every turn. Your hoard is not just flavor — it is your progression path.

Battlezoo Ancestries: Dungeons

If playing a dragon sounds ambitious, playing a dungeon sounds impossible. And yet, Battlezoo Ancestries: Dungeons makes it work. Your character is a dungeon — corridors, rooms, traps, and all — that has awakened to sentience and sapience. You have a life force, a spirit, and an avatar that you project into the world to interact with other characters.

Five heritages define the physical form of your dungeon: an archipelago where each "floor" is a separate island, a mysterious labyrinth, dank caverns, a tower ascending to the heavens, or an ancient tree. You can summon familiars and hazards from within your dungeon, challenge your own inner rooms to unlock benefits for your party, or conquer the floors inside yourself.

This is, without question, one of the most creative character options ever published for 5e. It is also — and this is the surprising part — mechanically coherent. The dungeon ancestry integrates with the standard 5e class and level system, meaning you can be a level 5 dungeon wizard or a level 10 dungeon rogue. Roll for Combat even offers the Dungeons PDF for free, which speaks to a confidence in the product's quality and a savvy understanding that giving away the most outlandish option is the best possible advertisement for the rest of the line.

The Year of Monsters

Battlezoo Ancestries: Classic Creatures (originally titled Year of Monsters) expanded the line to include a dozen monstrous ancestries released monthly throughout 2023. Demons, gremlins, intelligent weapons, oni, nymphs, doppelgangers, minotaurs, slimes, mimics, and more each received full ancestry writeups with heritages, progression features, and narrative hooks.

The project also included 150 new monsters for DMs and introduced the Battlezoo Eldamon system — a creature-collecting mechanic that lets players befriend, train, battle, and evolve elemental monsters across 10+ elemental types. The Eldamon Trainer class provides a full progression path for players who want a companion-creature focus, while the Elemental Avatar class offers a more direct fusion of character and elemental power.

Why This Matters for 5e

The Battlezoo Ancestries line demonstrates something important about the 5e ecosystem: the rules chassis is far more flexible than its default presentation suggests. The standard 5e assumption is that you are a humanoid with a class. Battlezoo dismantles that assumption and rebuilds it from the ground up, proving that the d20 + proficiency + ability modifier framework can support character concepts that the original designers never imagined.

For DMs, this creates both opportunities and challenges. A party that includes a dragon, a sentient dungeon, and a slime creature is going to interact with your campaign setting in ways that the Dungeon Master's Guide does not prepare you for. Managing these expanded character options alongside standard 5e content is exactly the kind of organizational challenge that tools like Lorekeeper's campaign management features are designed to handle — tracking which ancestries are allowed, which characters are using them, and how they interact with your world's lore.

The Battlezoo line also represents a philosophical position about what 5e is for. It argues that the system is a toolkit, not a template, and that the most interesting stories happen when you give players options that force them to rethink what an adventurer looks like. When your party's fighter is a minotaur and your party's wizard is literally a building, the stories you tell are going to be unlike anything the standard Player's Handbook anticipated — and that is precisely the point.