Ultimate Campaign: When I Was Growing Up...

Thursday, April 25, 2013

In about a month, Ultimate Campaign will arrive in stores and your mailbox, helping both players and Game Masters add a wealth of new detail and exciting new rules to their game. Every week from now until launch, we will be previewing parts of this book to show you what it has in store!

Ultimate Campaign is divided up into four meaty chapters, each one focusing on a different part of your game. The first chapter is devoted to characters and their backstories, giving you a system for determining what happened to your character before the campaign got underway. With over 50 tables in this book, this system is designed so that you can roll randomly to determine your backstory if you prefer, based upon a number of simple character decisions, such as race and class. Alternatively, you can just pick the background that best suits your character.

The results of these tables determine what options you have in selecting your starting traits, which are greatly expanded in this chapter. In addition, some of the backgrounds might qualify you for an exciting new type of feat, the story feat. These special feats can only be taken if your character meets specific story prerequisites. While they give you a simple bonus at first, the feat itself improves if you accomplish an in-game goal. You can only have one such feat at a time, until you complete the goal of that feat, at which point you can select another one if you qualify. Take a look at this example.

Arisen (Story)

Escaping death strengthened your bond to life, but fills you with a need for answers.

Prerequisite: You must have been slain and brought back from the dead, or have the Left to Die or Cursed Birth background.
Benefit: You don’t die until your negative hit point total is equal to or greater than 4 + your Constitution score. Once per day as a standard action, you can force yourself to carry on by strength of will alone, gaining 1 temporary hit point per hit die. These temporary hit points last for 10 minutes.
Normal: You die when your negative hit point total is equal to or greater than your Constitution score.
Goal: You meet in person and hear the words of your deity or your deity’s chosen herald. If you worship a pantheon of deities, you must meet and hear a member of that pantheon—a herald does not suffice in this case. If you worship no specific deity, you must hear the words of an appropriate entity of the GM’s choice.
Completion Benefit: You gain a +2 bonus on saving throws against death effects and fear effects. In addition, the caster level of any conjuration (healing) spell that is cast on you increases by 1 for the purposes of its effects on you alone.

That about wraps up the first preview for Ultimate Campaign. Come back next week for a peek into what our iconics do between adventures!

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer