The (Un)Usual Suspects!

Have you heard? The Lost Omens Character Guide is available now at your local gaming store and here on paizo.com! If you haven’t had a chance to check out what kind of awesome content shows up in the book, take some time to check out blog posts from the past weeks. All of those posts cover the cool content for ancestries and organizations, but there’s one more section of the book we wanted to show off. However, rather than just giving a typical preview, we wanted to show the book in action and have you, fine readers, follow along at home!

The final section of the Character Guide is an NPC gallery showcasing individuals from the five organizations featured in the book. Each organization receives two different NPCs: a standard, rank and file member and a higher ranking member. The standard member is a level 4 NPC and include the likes of Hellknight armigers and Magaambya adepts. The higher ranking members are level 11 NPCs, such as the veteran reclaimer of the Knights of Lastwall and Pathfinder Venture-Captains. We present a generic stat block to represent each of these NPCs, but my fellow developer Eleanor Ferro also took some time to present a sample personality to attach to each of the stat blocks so they are ready to go for your own games. The Venture-Captain, for example, is Khoumrock Blackthane, explorer extraordinaire! (We like to call him Captain Octo-boots around these parts.)

Illustration by Yanis Cardin

These stat blocks are great, but what if you need stats for one of the other prominent organizations in the Inner Sea? Or, what if you need a Hellknight that’s level 7 or a very powerful Magaambyan mage that’s level 16? Well, the final section of the NPC gallery has you covered! This section provides a new addition to the rules: theme templates. Much like the elite and weak adjustments featured in the Bestiary, these templates are simple adjustments that you can apply to any NPC or monster to give them appropriate abilities that match the flavor of a specific theme. In this case, these theme templates help you create new creatures that are members of the various organizations featured in this book.

While the Character Guide goes into much greater detail, the basics are that you take an existing creature, take a look at its level and apply all of the template’s abilities to the stat block. The higher level the creature, the more abilities it receives. We recommend that you take a look at the final stat block to determine whether or not the creature has grown in power with its additional abilities and adjust its level accordingly. (The recently released rules for creating creatures will be big help here!) With these abilities, you should be able to quickly take any existing stat block and adjust it to the flavor you need. This might be as simple as taking a thief and making them an Aspis Consortium smuggler or something more bizarre like a Pathfinder yeti! We even have a list of different monsters that would be a good fit for each theme template to encourage some more monstrous members for your games.

Of course, I can tell you all the cool things you can do, but it’s more fun to show you! I’ve taken some of the theme templates and monsters from the Bestiary to show you the final results. Each of the following stats has had both the theme template and elite adjustment applied to them. For the most part, they should look the same as the stats you’re used to seeing in the Bestiary, but they each have some tweaks here and there to accommodate the template. The centaur has swapped from a longsword to a halberd and learned Infernal as part of her Hellknight training and I spell out some of the new abilities on the dragon’s stat block.

Hopefully you get a lot of mileage out of these stats and the theme templates themselves! I’m a big fan of the templates and I’m sure they’ll show up here and there in the Lost Omens line where they make sense, so keep an eye out for them! And with that, we can finally close the book on the Lost Omens Character Guide. If any of what you’ve seen here has looked interesting, I recommend checking it out. Keep an eye on this blog, though, as there are always more books on the way! I hear the next one is going to be divine. So, without further ado, let’s look at those monsters!

Gwynimar Altiraan

Taken in at a young age by Maidrayne Vox, the Mistress of Blades at Citadel Vraid, Gwynimar recalls very little of her youth. What memories she has are of grueling hours training on the crags of the Mindspin Mountains. Maidrayne remains the only person she maintains any kind of relationship as the rest of the Order of the Nail look upon Gwynimar with disdain. It’s of no matter to Gwynimar, however, as the Measure and the Chain come first and stand above all. Gwynimar’s training will soon be complete and once the Mistress of Blades unleashes her from Vraid, Gwynimar will be swift in bringing order to frontier beyond.

Illustration by Firat Solhan

Philannia

Philannia’s search for the greater secrets of life soon led her to seek out the means of achieving immortality. In this search she found herself following Urgathoa, as the Pallid Princess’s promises of eternal indulgence through undeath sang to Philannia’s heart in ways that nothing else did. During one of her prayers, Philannia caught sight of a great explosion to the north. She soon learned that the explosion caused the creation of countless undead and saw it as a sign form Urgathoa. Philannia struck out toward the sight of the omen and found agents of the Whispering Way. Here were the agents of Urgathoa herself, ready to take her in and teach Philannia their secrets…

Illustration by Emile Denis

Karthival of the Vibrant Wave

Even into his older age, Karthival was always on the lookout for more opportunities to revel and delight in the joys of the world. Unfortunately for him, the sight of a dragon typically puts off most that approach him. When the Vibrant Wave, a Firebrand ship, sailed neared his lair in northeast Rahadoum, Karthival reached out to the curious ship. While there was some initial fear with Karthival’s appearance, the crew quickly took a liking to him and invited him to tag along in their adventures. Now Karthival flies alongside the ship on its countless journeys, joining them in their escapades and reliving the excitement of his younger years.

Illustration by Miguel Regodón

Luis Loza
Developer