Eastern Flavors
There’s one particular ability that really got me thinking about this issue. It’s a region-specific trait out of Pathfinder 1e, and if you’ve ever considered casting shocking grasp through your scimitar you’re probably familiar with it.
Wayang Spellhunter
Source Dragon Empires Primer pg. 14
Category Region
Requirement(s) Minata
You grew up on one of the wayang-populated islands of Minata, and your use of magic while hunting has been a boon to you. Select a spell of 3rd level or below. When you use this spell with a metamagic feat, it uses up a spell slot one level lower than it normally would.
Now if you’re anything like me, your brain just went “yadda yadda select a spell of 3rd level or below….” And I think that’s only natural. When you encounter a rule in isolation, it’s just a rule. If you’re looking at a class guide, for example, then you’re just shopping around for options. You’re trying to get a handle on your mechanics, and so it’s all too easy to ignore the rest of the stat block. The regional requirement (Minata) and the flavor (what the crap is a wayang anyway?) begin to disappear. You grab your super-sweet power and grin a self-satisfied grin. This character is going to kick ass! And everything is great until you get a setting-obsessed GM asking how your dude wound up spending time on an isolated archipelago halfway across the world. So there you are feeling like a tool, stammering out some lame “I traveled a lot as a kid” excuse for a backstory.
I sympathize. Who wants a character to distort and warp around a single rule? I mean sure, you can craft an elaborate origin story to explain how you washed up on the shores of a far-east island and got nursed back to health by a creepy little shadow-man. That’s theoretically interesting, but it definitely doesn’t fit the character you had in your head. You just wanted to role up a gish with some effective abilities! So the natural option at that point is to apply a handwave on the regional requirement. Or maybe you get your GM’s permission to reflavor the ability to something more setting-appropriate. Or maybe you release a new edition where abilities have rarities so that you don’t have to do this song and dance anymore. YMMV.
So how about it, guys? Have you ever found yourself locked out of a spell, feat, or magic item because of flavor concerns? What was it? Tell us your tales of race-specific spells and region-specific races down in the comments!
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Eh, I’m actually the opposite in that I tend to take into account little stuff like that in the beginning. I’m the gal that keeps giving people annoyed looks when they cast “Windy Escape” as a non-Slyph. But, my character creation process is very detailed when I have a setting to work with.
On the other side, we have a story about the Rise of the Runelords game I ran. One of the players rolls a Varsian human so he can start knowing the Varsian language for free. He then goes on to write the rest of his character as a standard villager who has began developing Kineticist powers with no warning or practice. Plays up the “normal village brat” angle. I shrug and move on, deciding that the Varsians who still practice the nomadic ways treat him like all the others who have settled in one place. Now, those of you familiar with that questline and Golarian may remember that there is a certain Varsian item in one of the quests that, while it is non-magical and fairly isolated, would have a huge amount of sentimental significance to the family of the owner. So my Varsian player ignores the family scarf only to have the half-orc paladin decide it seems significant and take it back to the Varsian matriarch that lives in the village. (Disclaimer: I did give the Varsian player a reflexive Knowledge: History to recognize the significance, but he bombed the DC 10 check. )
So being a setting immersive GM like I am, I rp the matriarch showering the paladin with praise and tell her she can request a boon of the Matriarch at any time (Which, since the matriarch is statted as a Druid / Sorcerer / Mystic Theurge, is no small thing. ) So the Varsian player gets a little testy with me and says I am favoring the paladin. At which point I reply that the Paladin just brought back the equivalent of this woman’s family history and special heirloom that was handed down to her from her parents, and her parent’s parents, and so on. So yeah, it was a big deal to the largely marginalized wandering Varsian group.
And am I the only one who keeps trying to swap the word Varsian with Vistani?
Sylphs are famously friendly to foreign mages. They lave teaching their spells to outsiders. It’s in the lore! No really! Don’t double-check or anything, but trust me. It’s in there.
TIL Windy Escape was a Sylph spell.. … oops
There’s a “Raised by the fey” sort of 1st level feat in Pathfinder 1e that would normally be exactly this sort of thing. In my case, however, it actually perfectly fit a character I had built.
…I only wish I’d learned about the option sooner, rather than years after I’d finished that campaign. It would have been perfect.
Fey Foundling? Yeah… I told my buddy about the oradin build, and she wound up grabbing that trait. Then she wound up cringing when I wanted to bring her goofy fairy affinity into the game as a plot point.
“Could we just… No concentrate on childhood?”
“Why not? You’re a crystal dragon paladin / oracle raised by fairies before being taken in the madame of an upscale brothel which you protect sort of like that one episode in Firefly.”
“Oh God… I’m the specialist snowflake!” *hangs head in shame*
Hah!
This one was a gnome who wandered into the First World after a sprite, and ended up in a “Time doesn’t work normally here” area, where she spent 6,000 years playing childish games without noticing the passage of time. She came back as a witch (no oradins here, thankfully, though that party did include a bardadin), with that sprite disguised as a flying squirrel familiar (he eventually revealed his true nature to the party).
I’m… kind of the opposite.
To quote my GM: “You’re making it way too complicated.”
My GM is all in favour of just handwaving prerequisites like that – I’m the one who insists on reading the flavor of every option and building it into the character.
Then I get carried away with a new idea and suddenly have to rewrite the entire backstory…
There’s definitely an art to it. You’ve got to pick your spots and decide what to focus on, otherwise you wind up assigning some overly elaborate meaning to every single skill rank. That mess can get old quick.
I’ve never really looked at the region traits when I’m making a character. Mostly because they tend not to fit the character’s needs anyway.
Although, I have made a homebrew race for Pathfinder and took a good long look at race specific traits and feats to see if my race could possibly take any. My race was kinda like D&D’s Dragonborn with wings. I decided they could take Lizardfolk and Kobald feats and traits, the Strix feat Cloak of Feathers, the traits Aerial Harrier and Winged Aloofness, and any tail feats that didn’t require constriction.
How’d it work out in play? Did you find any appropriate regional stuff?
Haven’t been able to play it yet. I only have time for one game a week, and I’m a player, not the GM. I really want to though. I put a lot of time into making sure it was balanced. You can check it out here if you’d like. The final post has the info.
Cool! What’s the Race Points looking like on that bad boy?
I think it ended up around 12 points. The most expensive thing was the flight speed.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2utaa&page=3?Adjusting-a-race-for-game
Forgot to actually post the link, lol.
I think I used the wrong e-mail address the first time I tried submit this comment…
I’ve never come up against this issue, quite the opposite in fact. Discussing spells with my Rise of the Runelords GM I said “I thought that this spell looked cool, but it’s a [some race] racial spell, so nevermind”. Then he told me it was fine to take it, I probably learned it off someone of that race, or someone who learned it off someone of that race, or something. That feels a bit cheesy to me though; I never took the spell in the end.
Then again that’s the campaign in which I took two feats to have a Varisian tattoo, so I wasn’t exactly looking to optimise massively!
Hey, if you’re minimally competent, who cares about optimization? When I sit down to game, I want my guy to be relevant and contribute. Anything after that is gravy.
This is why my magus uses magical lineage instead of wayang spellhunter. Way easier to explain getting a metamagic reduction on frostbite by saying “Yeah, my mom’s a winter witch” rather than figuring out how to work in a year in the equivalent to the Philippines.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/006/759/both.png
Why not both? Well, I only need 1 for rime frostbites from 1st level slots. And the other trait was going to bruising intellect.
I gave up some flavor once for mechanical benefit. My Warforged Fighter X Machina (Tenth machine in its’ production line) has kind of a Roman theme going on, having been built by the not-Romans but awakening long after the empire collapsed.
Unfortunately pikes (The traditional weapon of a Roman phalanx) are incompatible with shields in 5E in spite of Roman pike formations using them with shields, and are also incompatible with the extra attack from the Polearm Master feat. As a result, I gave up some of the fantasy and went with a glaive instead, along with a series of javelins (Pilum) and a shortsword (Gladius) as a side-arm. (Since that was the actual historical use of swords)
Sounds like a fun character. Sneaky way to get Roman numerals in there.
I opted to play my Warforged less as a “Human but metal” and more as a “Slightly human-like machine”.
Wizard: “Hey X, if you’re not anatomically-correct, why do you bother wearing that skirt-thing?”
X Machina: “Excellent query Wizard-unit! The X Machina-unit has been programmed to comply with the laws of civilization. This unit wears clothes because it’s the law.”
“You are no match for the superior tactical capabilities of the X Machina-unit’s 56 kilobyte processor!” (Intelligence 8. You have 20 year old video games that are smarter than X)
“Non-compliance will result in injury, exsanguination, and severe-cranial-weight-loss.”
I actually do like playing random little game-mechanical requirements to the hilt. They lead to characters I might normally never have thought of.
This definitely includes regional feats. I recall several characters where I was paging through rules and found a feat I liked…but it was specific to a distant region of whatever setting we were using.
“Okay, so she grew up there. What kind of place is it, anyway?”
(read read read.)
“Huh. I can work with that. So I wonder what her family is like?”
(Make stuff up, in the process filling in more random cultural details that the source material left vague.)
“How the hell did she end up in [place where the campaign is actually set?]”
(Hopefully-not-too-implausible road-trip story full of friends and rivals and interesting places and reasons never to settle down in any of them.)
“So do I actually want that regional feat? Hmmm…probably not, but I’m in love with this character now.”
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I like thinking of rules and flavor as a sort of engine: a feedback loop that generates character. For example:
“OK. I want to play an occultist. He needs special objects to focus his powers. What if one of them was a weapon? Cool, I’ll go with transmutation and choose… What haven’t I used before? Bardiche looks cool. Maybe he can be a traveling executioner. Cool! So with all those dead people in his past, he probably has some ties to necromancy. Maybe this ‘necromantic servant’ power calls upon the spirits of the people he’s beheaded? Neat! OK then, what kind of object do you need for necromancy? This ‘ferryman’s slug’ sacred implement sounds interesting. How did my guy meet the boatman on the river of death then…?”
That’s the most fun for me, watching rules cascade into story and back into rules again.
Nicely put.
Reminds me of Gail Andrews the astrologer, from Douglas Adams’ last HHG book. Against all odds, and all Trillian’s expectations, Gail actually gave a sensible explanation of what she does for a living:
“In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better…astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”
That might be a solid metaphor for game design in general.
I’m imagining the Occultist and the Boatman are both avid collectors of the exclusive pins they offer at PEMBS* meet-ups.
*Psychopomp & Executioner Mutual Benefits Society
Heh. Funny you should mention that. My dude exited that campaign when I moved last year. Since he possessed an artifact whose power could only be unlocked with some kind of major sacrifice, he offered himself to Pharasma’s service.
He now works as a psychopomp himself. Occultism is a revolving door sort of racket.
If there is a rule there is a way around it 🙂
Just for the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy lets say that Kinecist is saying: “You and Druid make a Lovely couple. If we survive this don’t worry and just ask me for a threesome”. Or at least that is my head-canon 😛
Huh… I do need to do something with Kineticist over in HoEF. We’re in the Hot Springs of the Gratuitous Nymph storyline for the next ~6 comics, but I’ll have to see about giving her some screen time after that.
I must say it’s always good when one suggest a threesome and people like the idea 🙂
Everyone seems sort of polyamorous on the HoEF side of things, so you never know.
(Except for Thief of course. Thief is the jealous sort.)
So HoEF-Thief and HboH-Thief are more or less the same?
Good for her, bad for Wizard 🙂
That’s the premise. They’re the same characters. Just with some additional timeline shenanigans and a few new faces.
Yep, in the image bellow Fighter looks the same.
They have the same breast… plate 😉
In my personal experience 99% of the time I want a race specific feature that doesn’t come with the race as default…. I’m not playing a character of that race.
The percentage drops when we’re talking about classes, archetypes, or other things, but it’s still a good percentage of “I want to take this thing because it would work with what I’m doing with this character, but apparently I’m not allowed to because it’s reserved for cases where I usually don’t even want it. Yay.”
There are a few many conditionals in there for my cold-addled mind. Can you give me an example?
Well one easily example is probably pretty common to anyone playing as a rogue in a 5e game with the optional flanking rule. There’s a feat elves can take that allows you a third roll if you have advantage on a roll. And while elves make fine rogues of certain archetypes, they don’t work for ALL rogue archetypes and plenty of other races work well too.
I see. And I gather this is part of the reason why you’re so into reflavoring racial abilities scores…?
More like it falls under the same general philosophy that PCs should just have whatever options available anyone else does to make interesting characters.
A muse of inspiration had me building a sorcerer with a geisha background in 5E. So I ended up writing a 10000 word essay on her background, and how/why she traveled 5000 miles over about a year and ended up in Waterdeep, where the game was taking place.
Sadly, no mechanical benefit other than “geisha background” (which is basically just reskinned Entertainer).
Also gave me tons of experience in hating the mechanics of the 5E sorcerer, because it was almost completely worthless for the character design. Needed significant houserule tweaks to make playing the character tolerable, even though, if I ignore the mechanics, she’s still one of my favorite characters.
That’s quite the lengthy essay you’ve got there. Wizard would be proud: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wizard-quiz
I really like the PF2e solution to this problem, with region specific abilities, items and other character resources being given uncommon or rare qualifications. Now something that’s region locked is identifiable as such, and GMs can give out uncommon spells, feats, and other goodies as rewards for doing quests in foreign lands or for foreign dignitaries.
I like that they draw attention to it. By having the authority of Piazo saying that “you shouldn’t feel entitled to all options,” that may push players to think in those terms.
Still, it remains to be seen whether that will have the desired effect. Another commenter pointed out that the “wayang spellhunter” trait I mentioned in the OP is just called “metamagic master” on one of the SRDs due to copyright issues. Context has a way of disappearing, and I can picture some groups ignoring the rarity system.
And if you’re like me and get most of your Pathfinder from d20pfsrd, the wayang spelllhunter feat is just called “metamagic master” to strip it of copyrighted material, so you never see the flavor. Interesting.
(Sorry for the double post. Moderator, please share this one, nkt the one where my name is my email. Thanks!)
Oh, I also made an Elf/Orc race as well. That one was easier to make since I was mostly just combining traits. It has two different stat bonuses, the flavor going that they look like one parent but have the mind of the other.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uxu0?Making-a-new-race-ElfOrc#1
A wayang? Isn’t that an Indonesian shadow puppet? We’ve had them around the house (the house I have since left…) since long before I was born, courtesy of Opa being a colonial kid.
Not come across region-based abilities before, but as DM or player, I’d require the character to be strongly tied in with the region in question. Arcane Archer there would not pass muster.
I’ve had some fun with this in my PFS2 game. When I was building my Paladin character, I decided that even though he’s native to Taldore, his mother would be an immigrant from Tien, pretty much just for the heck of it. So then since I had an extra language slot I took Tienese. Then four or five sessions later, we run across a Tienese character on some mission that has nothing to do with Tien-Ja, and I say “Actually, my character speaks Tienese, so I’m going to greet her in her own language to be polite”. And it felt incredibly cool to actually have one of those little backstory details come up.
Nice! Always a thrill when that random thing on the character sheet comes into play.
Just spotted “sticky paper” and “glass cutter” on one of Laurel’s sheets the other day. She was more stoked about that than her magic armor or her fancy weapons.
Laurel: “It’s going to be so cool when it comes up!”
BTW, props to your GM for paying attention to ethnicity. With all the exotic races running around, I find it’s easy to gloss over the different flavors of human that exist in Golarion.
Flavor text is flavor. There is an impetus to scrap flavor and replace with whatever suits your build, without sacrificing any mechanics for it.
My Raven Queen Warlock sure as heck wasn’t going to hunting on Dandiwiki for their medium size “Giant” Raven when a reflavored Giant Owl was viable and performed the way I wanted.
This comic has become relevant to my gaming. One of my current living world groups have rules for homebrew races so I can apply to put my dragon boy in. He’s an Eldritch Scion Magus / Oathbound Paladin / IB Swash.
Also, I was refining the build of my drow cleric and came across a trait that gives Stealth as a class skill. It requires him to be from the River Kingdoms which is the country I used for his sister Tam’s backstory. So it fits perfectly.