Pathfinder Reveals Ancestries and Heritage Changes in Remaster Project
Paizo has a preview of the Pathfinder 2E Remaster Project’s changes to Ancestries and Heritages. And the result is more customization.
The Pathfinder 2E Remaster Project continues apace. And, despite sounding like a 70’s funk band, the project is actually a rework of Pathfinder 2E’s rules, updating, streamlining, and above all else, moving away from being mired in OGL-linked rules. The latter has driven some major changes, as we’ve seen in the Wizard preview.
But today we’re taking a look at some of the remastered versions of Ancestries and Heritages. That is to say, your stat bonuses and your feat options that you get to pick depending on whether or not you’re an elf, for instance. The result is something mre like custom lineages than you might think. Let’s take a look!
Pathfinder Remastered Preview: Ancestries and Heritage Changes
Customization is the watchword for 2E remastered. And it shows heavily in the preview. While we don’t get specific mechanical breakdowns of how this will work, it looks like Ancestries and Heritages are about to get a lot more open in terms of their rules. Here’s a quick taste of changes to Ancestry:
You can get special attribute boosts and flaws for your ancestry, such as a goblin getting better Dexterity and Charisma and worse Wisdom, or you can freely customize your attributes for any ancestry to play exactly the character you want.
The ancestries included in Pathfinder Player Core are: dwarf, elf, gnome, goblin, halfling, human, leshy, and orc.
So not only do we know the ancestries included in the upcoming Player book, but we also know that attributes are getting decoupled from ancestry, it seems like. No idea how this will actually manifest in terms of mechanical ability score allocation, but “you decide which three stats get increased” seems like a good jumping-off point.
Much more exciting for character builders, though, are the upcoming changes to Heritages, which allow you to mix and match and build your own heritage of mixed ancestries. This is where you can be of human/elven or human/orc descent, for one, but it sounds like the rules are even freer:
In order to reflect the great diversity of ancestries and cultures in Golarion, Pathfinder Player Core introduces versatile heritages—extra options including mixed ancestries and extraplanar origins. The most common among these are aiuvarins and dromaars, which represent a mix between human heritage and elven or orc heritage, respectively, in whatever way best fits the story of your character and their family.
Though a character can have only one heritage and one lineage feat, the possible permutations of a character’s background and family tree are virtually unlimited. An aiuvarin character might still have a changeling parent whose nature is visible in the coloration of their eyes even if they don’t have access to changeling ancestry feats, and a pitborn dwarf might very well have an ancestor with fey influences on their bloodline, reflected with a fey muse or patron gained through their class alongside their ancestral fiendishness.
All this in the upcoming Pathfinder 2E Remaster Project!
