ARG Friendly Expanded Reincarnation Table


Homebrew and House Rules


52 people marked this as a favorite.

One thing I was really hoping to see in the Advanced Race Guide was a modified version of the result chart for the Reincarnate spell. If all these new races are on the table for new PCs, it's only fair you should be able to come back as one after all. Since there wasn't, I went ahead and made my own:

Advanced Reincarnate Table

I'm fairly proud of it really. Every ARG race is now included, plus a few others, however, by breaking it into sub-tables and throwing in a 33% chance of using the same table your current race is found on, I was pretty much able to keep the odds of coming back as any given thing similar to what's on the original chart for most of the core 7 races, while at the same time weighing things so that someone playing, say, a goblin, has a good 40% or so chance of at least staying goblinoid.

Half-Elves and Half-Orcs come out pretty rarely, as there are a ton of other half-human races that needed to be crammed in, but again, with weighting, hybrids are likely to remain hybrids of some kind, and the odds of coming back as specifically a half-human half-elf on the original chart always struck me as weirdly high to begin with.

The Highly Unusual table is largely optional, no sense turning that 1% GM's choice result into a 0.2% chance, but as there's stats for centaurs and driders in the ARG's examples, I figured it wouldn't hurt to toss them in as a marginal thing.

As of first posting this, the stat adjustments for all this still need filling in, but odds wise, I'm pretty happy with it.


Bookmarked for later use.

Sovereign Court

dot


Woohoo! I just hit 7th Level Druid.. so I can cast this Spell.... so far only 1 Party member has gave me the okay to cast this Spell (if needed)..

We are playing Jade Regent (3rd Book) and about to go after a powerful monster (don't want to ruin it for anyone here), so someone might perish..

I've saved up the 1000 gp Oils for the material component..

Thanks for doing this!


Glad it's appreciated. I just tweaked the first two tables to be more clearly worded (and more importantly, look cleaner) and filled the stat adjustments in.

... and right off the bat, I hit a snag with Aasimars. Unlike all the core races, their only stat bonuses are mental. If I leave these blank unfilled, they become one of those races it's awesome reincing out of, and a raw deal reincing into, like humans used to be.

Personally, I always house rule that you get all the racial stat adjustments of your old race replaced with those of your new, mental included, but I'm trying to stick to the original as-written intent of the spell here as best I can.

So... feedback is appreciated here.

Come to think of it, should I tweak the formerly-non-PC races? Goblins for instance have -2 Str by the Reincarnate spell, but -4 by their PC race listing... and their bestiary entry says -2 Str +4 Dex, but that one I think we can safely ignore at this point.

I might also just add in another page or some notes on be bottom establishing which non-statistical racial features do and do not come and go with reincarnation, but otherwise I think I can call this done.


Dotting for later use/review.

Silver Crusade

.


Very interesting...

None of my campaigns have ever had to resort to Reincarnation, but this would be very interesting to reference if we ever do need it.


I have only seen it contemplated, but they decided against it for the sheer randomness.


It comes up a lot in my groups. It's cheaper, accessed earlier, and needs less of a corpse to work with. Plus, if you're starting off human (or at any non-young age category) odds are really good it'll come out as a net gain stats/abilities wise.

There's often some psychological concerns (once had a campaign which had about 5 PC reincarnations, resulting in 4 gnomes and a half-elf, all sex-flipped) but eh, there's cheap ways to get details like that fixed, and the 50% of spontaneous sex-change is actually just a house rule at that (so why did I put it on my chart?).


Some people (like me) prefer the randomness. Of course, it helps that I mostly play casters, whose mental stats remain unchanged whatever race they become.

Generally, we use Reincarnate more than Raise Dead in the campaigns I play in. The cheapness, the not requiring a whole body, and the randomness all play a factor.


Thank you for this. It's pretty amazing.

Dot


An official updated Reincarnate list would be cool.

I do notice that your tables don't seem particularly worried about type. Did you decide it was more interesting for the spell to shift between types as well as subtypes, or did you just not want to have to make separate tables for different types.

I would like to see an official updated table and a second table for Outsider (native) targets of the spell (I'm pretty sure non-native Outsiders can't be reincarnated - but I could be wrong on that).


Honestly, maintaining types didn't even cross my mind when I was setting it up. It didn't occur to me that everything on the official chart is officially humanoid (I'd have figured lizardfolk for monstrous humanoids), nor did I really think to type-check everything in the ARG.

That would be another interesting way to break it down though. Less of a gamble on the front of stats and useful abilities, but much more of a chance to end up as something really disruptive in terms of fitting in.

Meanwhile, yeah. Native outsider PC races are in a weird place on the death recovery front, where there's a case to be made that when they die, that's it. Personally, I'd treat them the same as humanoids on that front in any game I was running, but either way, it isn't the only potential dead-end on my table here. Getting reincarnated as a Samsaran would get rather awkward, as it would lead to getting reincarnated like a Samsaran the next time you die.

Liberty's Edge

Actually, one of the unusual features of the native subtype is that, unlike other types of outsiders, native outsiders can be raised from the dead or reincarnated as normal. This applies to all of the outsider PC races, as well as odder things like Rakshasas.


Dotted. I would pull some numbers out of the same-as-current/commonplace/mixed heritage categories and add in an animal category, like they did in 3.5. It's just cooler that way. :)


( • )


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Googleshng wrote:
Meanwhile, yeah. Native outsider PC races are in a weird place on the death recovery front, where there's a case to be made that when they die, that's it. Personally, I'd treat them the same as humanoids on that front in any game I was running, but either way, it isn't the only potential dead-end on my table here. Getting reincarnated as a Samsaran would get rather awkward, as it would lead to getting reincarnated like a Samsaran the next time you die.

Interesting point to make. I think I would house-rule that as no one ever gets reincarnated as a Samsaran unless you're born one, and if you're born one, a Reincarnate spell will only ever bring you back as one. Otherwise, given a theoretically unlimited number of Reincarnations, everyone ends up being stuck in Samsaran bodies.

I think that Aasimar and Tiefling would need to have similar restrictions...

Ordinarily, if you're not born an Aasimar you never come back as one, and if you are born one, you always come back as one. But there are exceptions:

Persons not born Aasimar, if they lived a totally selfless or benevolent life, or committed some great deed that directly led to their death (self sacrifice to save another, etc.) Such people if reincarnated might be allowed to come back as an Aasimar (because the choice is still essentially random, "Aasimar" just gets added to the list of races you will potentially return as.)

Those who are already born Aasimar always come back as one unless they spiritually renounce their heritage, or perhaps by committing some terrible and horrible deed just prior to death (such as a mass murder/suicide). Such 'fallen' Aasimar would, if reincarnated, then come back as just about anything other than an Aasimar.

Along similar lines, non-tieflings could reincarnate as tieflings due to a particularly bad life, and tieflings born could reincarnated as something else by deliberately and diligently forsaking their evil heritage.

Dhampyrs would probably be a restricted race too...a dhampyr always reincarnates as a dhampyr (and no non-dhampyrs will). However, a Dhampyr can rid themselves of their "undead genes" in a ritual of purification which also happens to involve exsanguinating themselves. If the ritual is performed correctly, the character gains the ability in death to be reincarnated once (by means of the spell) as a member of the same race as their non-vampire parent.

Sczarni RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

Here's the table that I came up with for my home game. It doesn't have all of the ARG races, but it does include some of them, such as the planetouched races.

I'm also proud of the fact that it includes the chance to end up as an animal, and that if the player rolls an Aasimar or Tiefling, there's a better chance to end up as the "appropriate" race based on the character's alignment.

Enjoy!


It looks great!


Looks good. I would put half-elves and half-orcs on the Commonplace table, which you dubbed the table of "Core Rules Races".


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Replying to a year old post that was in response to something a year older than THAT, but hey-

The thing about the chart as is is that it is designed, primarily, to ensure most of the core races have the exact same chance as coming back as most of the core races as they do on the standard chart, but that every ARG race is represented. Which requires some tweaking.

A human for instance has a 15% chance of being human on the standard chart. On mine, it's a 63% chance of hitting the commonplace chart, then a 25% chance of hitting human. 65%*25%=15.75% Pretty darn close.

Human to dwarf? 12% chance on the classic chart, 11.97% on mine.

There's a 20% of hitting the sub-chart containing both half-orcs and half-elves, which each have 10% of the core chart, and each then has a 20% chance of coming up from there. So if you're starting as a human, you're technically down to a 4% chance of hitting either one, but you have the same chance you always did of hitting "half-human, half-something else."

Plus, dominating that group as they do, a half-elf (or half-orc) has a 53% chance of ending up on the mixed heritage sub-chart. So if you start as one of them, the odds that you will remain the same race you came in as is (drumroll), 10.6%! Vs. 10% even on the original chart.

So bam. Every single one of the 7 core races has the same chance as coming out as their original race as the old chart, and has the same chance as coming out as another of the core races (so long as you aren't crossing the half-human barrier).

While maintaining all that, you have SOME chance of hitting any given race from the ARG, and, much more importantly, if you are starting off as one of those more exotic races, you have a comparable chance to the core races of remaining the race you came in as, or a race with similar qualities to what you came in with (i.e. a goblin has a decent shot of at least staying some sort of goblinoid.

If all the core races were on the same sub-table, either the majority of races would be forced into an incredibly narrow slice of the pie, or I'd have to sacrifice the clear intention of the spell as written to generally maintain local population ratios.

I'm pretty darn proud of the math as I have it.


I love this.

Though, vishkanyara aren't scaled, and najaji are.


Ideally I should tweak it a bit, offer two variations, one by general appearance, one by continent of Golarion or something. Plus a few new races snuck in since I last updated it, which could stand to be included.

As is, I didn't want to break up the Dragon Empires race set.

Vishkanya is still snakelike enough to fit in there I say, but there's something to be said for giving wyveran the boot entirely, getting Samsarans in there... and there's probably a better choice for a Tiny representative on the 00 chart. It's easy enough to make minor tweaks like on your own though.


I recently just got "Ultimate Campaign" and decided to make a completely random character, but I needed a chart for selecting the race. This helped immensely, thank you.


Big ol' .


Oddly enough, over the weekend I got an automated google docs request from someone wanting editing permission on this little chart here. This says to me someone has suggestions for some change or other and is really shy about making them.

Feel free to toss stuff out if so inclined. There's a chance I might do a revision when Inner Sea Races hits.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Used this 2 times just last weekend. 4 over the past two wotw sessions

:)

So a little bump for everyone to check it out


Good to see some free reincarnation stuff. ;)

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Homebrew and House Rules / ARG Friendly Expanded Reincarnation Table All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Homebrew and House Rules