The word family means something different to everyone. You might have a biological family, adopted family, stepfamily, or any other kind and combination you choose; family bonds come in all types. To determine the number of family members you grew up with as an active part of your life, roll 1d% on the following table. Use the medium family for most ancestries, small if you’re a half-elf or half-orc, and large if you’re a goblin or halfling. For ancestries other than those in the Core Rulebook, use the column that best suits the ancestry. It’s up to you whether these family members are parents, siblings, grandparents, or other close relatives. Table 4-5: Family Size d% IntroductionHello and welcome to the Archives of Nethys, the official home of the Pathfinder Second Edition system reference documents. Here you can find all the rules, character options, and monsters needed to play Pathfinder Second Edition. The Archives houses all of the rules from the Core Rulebook as well as every sourcebook that Paizo publishes. By going to the Source tab on the sidebar, you can select a sourcebook and view all the character options that come from that book. Ancestry paragon characters have a bit more versatility and power than other characters, though their extra abilities are usually limited to themes the ancestry already was suited for. It’s unlikely to affect the game balance of combat encounters, but it might make exploration and social challenges easier for the heroes. This alternative ability score generation method replaces ability boosts and flaws with a number of Ability Points. Players determine their ability scores by investing Ability Points into each score, as seen in Table 4–1: Cost for an Ability Score. These give players more customization in their ability scores and can allow a player to really prioritize their favorite ones, but the system is significantly more complicated to use. Table 4-1: Cost for an Ability Score Total Ability Points Spent

If you choose to eliminate runes entirely, this can reduce the PCs’ damage since they won’t have runes like flaming or holy. If you’ve removed nearly all treasure, challenges might become more difficult, even with automatic bonuses. Table 10-9: Party Treasure by Level Level When choosing an ancestry for a simplified ancestry character, you gain the ancestry’s normal abilities at 1st level, choose a heritage, and gain the appropriate lore feat (Dwarven Lore for dwarves, for example) as your ancestry feat. Simplified ancestry characters never gain ancestry feats beyond that first lore feat. If you want to keep the power level of your game consistent, you can replace the ancestry feats gained at higher levels with general feats. Sometimes the story of your game calls for a group where everyone is a pirate or an apprentice at a magic school. The free archetype variant introduces a shared aspect to every character without taking away any of that character’s existing choices. It can also provide a lighter version of dual-class characters by giving everyone a free multiclass archetype.Playing a dual-class character certainly gives a character more options, and adding additional spellcasting classes can result in a significantly wider variety of powerful spell effects available to each character. Nonetheless, this sort of dual-classing is more likely to increase the party’s longevity than it is to drastically adjust the level of opponents a dual-class character should be fighting. The increases to saving throw proficiencies and Hit Points make characters somewhat sturdier and able to take on slightly higher challenges, but not every fight should be harder, nor should encounters exceed extreme-threat difficulty. Intelligent: Give an item a spark of intelligence to make it more intriguing. Certainly, the player characters are used to intelligent weapons, but what about an intelligent folding boat? Once an item is imbued with intelligence, its use can no longer be taken for granted, instead requiring a diplomatic encounter or battle of wills. Can the PCs convince the boat to unfold? If so, can they then persuade or cajole it to allow them aboard to make their journey? Using an intelligent item can prove problematic if the PCs don’t appease it in some way—and woe to the adventurer to whom it takes a disliking. Dual-classing in two similar martial classes to double up on their advantages can result in characters who, instead of increasing their flexibility, become drastically more powerful in one focus. For instance, a fighter/ ranger with the flurry hunter’s edge gains access to incredibly accurate press actions, and a barbarian/fighter has the barbarian’s high damage plus the fighter’s high accuracy. One way around this is to simply disallow combinations that double down on a narrow ability, and instead encourage dual-class characters that open up narrative options and increase the character’s flexibility. The other solution is to raise the challenge from the opposition, treating the party as if the characters were a level higher. However, this is a choice that affects the whole group, even if only one character is built to mow down foes. If a character gains the same proficiency rank in a statistic more than once, they still use only the highest rank. In the example above, when the cleric gets Alertness at 5th level, they wouldn’t change their Perception rank, since it was already expert due to the ranger’s initial proficiencies. If you grew up with three or more family members, you had to mediate family conflicts and negotiate a crowded home. Add a Charisma ability boost and a Dexterity ability boost to your options.

Haunted: A restless spirit haunts the item. This lingering spirit might be something that evokes sympathy from the PCs, such as a young child who died in a tragic way or a grandmother who was killed by her family so they could gain her fortune. Such spirits may be benevolent, allowing the characters to use the item without complication, but appearing upon the item’s use, reminding the party of the object’s brutal history and asking them to help grant the spirit peace. Alternatively, a nasty spirit could inhabit the item, in which case each use might require a battle of wills. In this case, the party might then seek the means to exorcise the spirit so that they could gain unfettered use of the item’s powers. Affinities Residual material harvested from a slain elemental can be used in the creation of magic items that have spells with specific descriptors, as summarized in the table below. The initial implementation is fairly straightforward: the proficiency bonus just becomes +2 for trained, +4 for expert, +6 for master, and +8 for legendary. We recommend giving an untrained character a –2 proficiency modifier instead of a +0 proficiency bonus. Classes with focus pools get all the Focus Points granted by all of them. These share one focus pool as normal, with the standard cap of 3 maximum Focus Points. Exact XP: Once the game session is over, take your list of defeated CR numbers and look up the value of each CR on Table: Experience Point Awards under the “Total XP” column. Add up the XP values for each CR and then divide this total by the number of characters—each character earns an amount of XP equal to this number.Non-magical Treasures: This expansive category includes jewelry, fine clothing, trade goods, alchemical items, masterwork objects, and more. Unlike gemstones, many of these objects have set values, but you can always increase an object’s value by having it be bejeweled or of particularly fine craftsmanship. This increase in cost doesn’t grant additional abilities—a gem-encrusted masterwork cold iron scimitar worth 40,000 gp functions the same as a typical masterwork cold iron scimitar worth the base price of 330 gp. Listed below are numerous examples of several types of nonmagical treasures, along with typical values. Your modifier for a task is usually made up of your relevant proficiency bonus and ability bonus, though it may also include various other bonuses and penalties. Other bonuses or penalties come in three types: circumstance, status, and item (you can also have untyped penalties, but not untyped bonuses). If you have more than one bonus of the same type, you use only the highest bonus. Likewise, you use only the worst penalty of each type. Alignment-detecting effects don’t exist. In the moral intentions variant, you might replace such an ability with one that detects whether a creature is following its own intentions, or to detect others with similar intentions to the creature using the ability. Determine the average level of your player characters—this is their Average Party Level (APL for short). You should round this value to the nearest whole number (this is one of the few exceptions to the round down rule). Note that these encounter creation guidelines assume a group of four or five PCs. If your group contains six or more players, add one to their average level. If your group contains three or fewer players, subtract one from their average level. For example, if your group consists of six players, two of which are 4th level and four of which are 5th level, their APL is 6th (28 total levels, divided by six players, rounding up, and adding one to the final result).

High CR Encounters: The XP values for high-CR encounters can seem quite daunting. Table: CR Equivalencies provides some simple formulas to help you manage these large numbers. When using a large number of identical creatures, this chart can help simplify the math by combining them into one CR, making it easier to find their total XP value. For example, using this chart, four CR 8 creatures (worth 4,800 XP each) are equivalent to a CR 12 creature (worth 19,200 XP).The following rules for harvesting trophies from creatures and monsters should augment the classic method of dispersing treasure and rewards, but they are not intended to increase the expected wealth by level at your table. If you use this system for trophies, you should make sure to reduce the amount of other treasure and rewards by an equal amount to the harvested components. In Step 2, she starts by determining how many points she has to spend. She gains 2 dedicated Ability Points in Intelligence and Dexterity for being an elf, 2 in Dexterity for being a criminal, and 2 more in Dexterity for being a rogue. She also has 19 flexible points to spend: 15 plus 4 for the two ability scores she voluntarily lowered to 8. At 8th level, you gain a +1 potency bonus to saves, increasing to +2 at level 14 and +3 at level 20. At 7th level, you gain a +1 potency bonus to Perception, increasing to +2 at level 13 and +3 at level 19. Determine the total XP award for the encounter by looking it up by its CR on Table: Experience Point Awards. This gives you an “XP budget” for the encounter. Every creature, trap, and hazard is worth an amount of XP determined by its CR, as noted on Table: Experience Point Awards. To build your encounter, simply add creatures, traps, and hazards whose combined XP does not exceed the total XP budget for your encounter. It’s easiest to add the highest CR challenges to the encounter first, filling out the remaining total with lesser challenges.