Introducing the Stolen Fate Player’s Guide

That's the rub with rare backgrounds is that they typically provide more powerful benefits than common and uncommon backgrounds, thus have some alterations on what they provide. See the Wished Alive background for another one without a Lore

I am about to start running this in PbP and am looking at the unique backgrounds. Several of them do not grant a trained skill or lore. Is this intentional? For reference they are:

Bookish Providence: No skill training
Crown of Chaos: No skill training
Hammered by Fate: No skill training
Key's to Destiny: No skill training
Shielded Fortune: No skill or lore training
Writ in the Stars: No skill training

It may be that the bonus action each background gives was in place of the skill training but that leaves Shielded Fortune looking a little out of place with no Lore skill either.

For this one we tried something a bit different and gave these backgrounds a different take, giving them each a bonus action in place of skill training. For Shielded Fortune, if I recall correctly, we gave no skill OR lore training because the bonus feat it grants, Toughness, is a general feat, not a skill feat. Since general feats are earned less often than skill feats, giving it out as a bonus feat required a bit more give and take for that one.

THAT SAID: I really don't think it'll hurt your game balance much if you pick skill trainings for all of these feats, provided you let your players know what you're doing, and provided your players are only choosing these backgrounds. If they choose from the Core Rulebook, those backgrounds will feel lesser than these, which give everything a core background does PLUS a bonus action... so there's sort of a constant arms-race of option balance you might accidentally set up for yourself.

Is it intentional that the lump sum starting wealth is the value for level 12 and not level 11? Or is that a mistake?

Is it intentional that the lump sum starting wealth is the value for level 12 and not level 11? Or is that a mistake?

It's a mistake, but Adventure Paths tend to give out more treasure overall so it's likely that level 12 gear could end up being close to what a group that played through a 1 to 10 level campaign gathered, IF they scrounged everything and didn't sell or destroy of give away anything.

Treasure values are, in the end, suggestions, and it's a good thing for GMs to know their table preference; your group might prefer level 10 values, for example.

But yes, as written, it's a mistake and should say level 11.

Ricbau6 wrote:

Just from the player's guide I'm really hyped for this adventure, and I'm planning already in running it. Love the harrower archetype and the bloodline, anche can't wait to learn all the other cards abilities.

I was just wandering if in the Vengeful Spirit Deck feat, the DC being only expressed as a Class DC was intended for martial classes use only, or is just missing the "or spell DC" part.

This is absolutely the intent. The archetype should use your class DC or spell DC; it's the same thing, really–a DC set by your class (whether it's for spells or for class feats is irrelevant as far as the balance of the Harrower archetype is concerned).

Maybe a little slow to ask, but I realize this only covers the archetype - should we assume the same is true for cards that have listed DCs?

James Jacobs wrote:

Ricbau6 wrote:

Just from the player's guide I'm really hyped for this adventure, and I'm planning already in running it. Love the harrower archetype and the bloodline, anche can't wait to learn all the other cards abilities.

I was just wandering if in the Vengeful Spirit Deck feat, the DC being only expressed as a Class DC was intended for martial classes use only, or is just missing the "or spell DC" part.

This is absolutely the intent. The archetype should use your class DC or spell DC; it's the same thing, really–a DC set by your class (whether it's for spells or for class feats is irrelevant as far as the balance of the Harrower archetype is concerned).

Maybe a little slow to ask, but I realize this only covers the archetype - should we assume the same is true for cards that have listed DCs?

Yes.

Grankless wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

Ricbau6 wrote:

Just from the player's guide I'm really hyped for this adventure, and I'm planning already in running it. Love the harrower archetype and the bloodline, anche can't wait to learn all the other cards abilities.

I was just wandering if in the Vengeful Spirit Deck feat, the DC being only expressed as a Class DC was intended for martial classes use only, or is just missing the "or spell DC" part.

This is absolutely the intent. The archetype should use your class DC or spell DC; it's the same thing, really–a DC set by your class (whether it's for spells or for class feats is irrelevant as far as the balance of the Harrower archetype is concerned).

Maybe a little slow to ask, but I realize this only covers the archetype - should we assume the same is true for cards that have listed DCs?

Yes.

Thank you so much for the clarification!!

I have some concerns about the potentially overpowered nature of the Harrowing ritual, particularly when combined with the Experienced Harrower archetype feat. Starting at level 11, the ritual grants the target (i.e. each party member who undergoes it) six wild cards (due to the Heightened (+1) effect). The wild cards basically act like hero points but can only be used for a specific type of roll. At level 11, a character focused on Occultism has around a +22 skill check before any item bonus. The DC of the ritual is normally 33 (Very Hard skill check of level 11), but is lowered to 28 with Experienced Harrower.

This amounts to a 16-20 crit range to grant a boosted hero point with +4 to the reroll and a 6-15 range to grant a non-boosted hero point, without even considering any item bonuses to Occultism (which is likely a +2 at this level). And the harrower is giving out six of these to each party member (because it's free since the cost is removed entirely if the harrower has an 11 gp fine harrow deck).

And to top it off, all the wild cards can be refreshed once they're all used without waiting a month between readings (since the heightened language says that harrowing's duration ends as soon as the target spends all of their wild cards).

Am I misreading something or overestimating the power of this ability? Or could this use some revisions to bring its power level down? Does anyone who has played with a Harrower Dedication character want to weigh in?

BUT ALSO!

Page 83 of the first adventure does present a set of optional rules for you to use in your Stolen Fate campaign about "Manipulating Fate." These optional rules were originally part of the Player's Guide, and are based on a system I have used many times in my home games or at games I've run at conventions.

I'm really excited to propose these rules to my group when we run a session 0 this weekend. However, with the remaster, my group hasn't picked specific alignments. Do you have any recommendations on how to apply these additional rules with that lack? Thanks!

James Jacobs wrote:

BUT ALSO!

Page 83 of the first adventure does present a set of optional rules for you to use in your Stolen Fate campaign about "Manipulating Fate." These optional rules were originally part of the Player's Guide, and are based on a system I have used many times in my home games or at games I've run at conventions.

I'm really excited to propose these rules to my group when we run a session 0 this weekend. However, with the remaster, my group hasn't picked specific alignments. Do you have any recommendations on how to apply these additional rules with that lack? Thanks!

I don't, off the top of my head, but if you and your players are familiar with how alignment works, just go ahead and use those rules for this game. Just treat these as narrative devices without any real connection to any rules and you're good to go.

If we ever officially remaster this Adventure Path and republish it, we'll need to reword and rework a lot of the content therein, but since there's no plans to do so anytime soon and this one's not high on the "we should compile it some day" list at this time, just using alignment in your remastered home game is a perfectly fine solution.