In brief, a character is on a secret, personal quest to change their gender. They have discovered what they would need to do in order to obtain their objective and are on their way to the adventure site.
It's an Arctic tribal game, with an emphasis on spirits, the next world and the difficulty of surviving in this one.
I need the transition to occur because of some kind of talisman or artefact, so the character can potentially lose it or cast it aside.
With that said...what should it be, and what else should it do? I'm kind of thinking it's a slotless charm; a small black stone or the like. Gives a few defensive bonuses and boosts caster level, etc.
Also, any discussion about the inherently muddy waters/thin ice/shaky ground this whole idea represents are welcome.
Have it be a slotless token that is socketed like an Ioune Stone, probably using a similar procedure.
Not sure on what sort of ramifications it would have, honestly. Can't reincarnate roulette change your gender?
Curse and curse items can change the gender. Polymorph also can do the trick
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When you say "can lose it", do you mean that they can choose to end the change to their sex? (I'm assuming their gender currently matches the sex they're intending to change their body to).
Definitely don't make it a curse.
Speaking as a trans woman, I think you're doing perfectly fine. Definitely go for the slotless magic item. Either a normal charm sort of thing or even an Ioun stone.
A gem socketed into the chest, between the collarbones... right where a medallion on a necklace would be.
Probably a morphic fluid coloration that changes and flows like liquid inside the gem... just don't make it stereotypical pink for girls, blue for boys.
Give it the HP and hardness of an Ioune Stone, and if it is Sundered, the person reverts back to their previous gender, and are Staggered for a number of rounds equal to their HD.
It can be replaced like a Familiar.
An Elixir of Sex Change would work except that it induces a change that is permanent until another elixir is voluntarily consumed.
Maybe look at items with Alter Self in their construction requirements for inspiration?
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One of my favorite setting details in Golarion is how Dwarves invented HRT: Anderos salve and Mulibrous tincture.
Apoligies, allow me to clarify: I don't need help finding an existing item or anything of the sort. I've got enough system mastery to make whatever I need from scratch, as I do with the vast majority of my other magic items, monsters, traps, feats, etc.
My request is purely a creative one; in your imagination, what would a talisman that causes you to be reborn as a sex that matches your gender look like, and what else would it do?
@Grankless Am I right in assuming now that the term "sex" would be used to categorize physical characteristics, where as the term "gender" is part the individual's inherent identity?
A little more info:
The characters are looking for a means to banish an evil spirits that posses bodies, breaks minds and devours souls. They have the worst sort of time restrictions, with every day they take resulting in the spirit causing more death, madness and woe in it's wake and winter coming fast. If they don't banish the spirit soon, they will only save the remainder of the tribes long enough for them all to starve and freeze to death.
The character in question wants to claim their proper birthright as their mother's heir and shaman of their people (their mother died in childbirth, and the tribe's shamans are always women).
They have been given guidance from one of the great spirits, told where they can find the power they seek, but warned that the journey is perilous and they will not be able to find their way alone. So the shaman-to-be has lied to the other characters, convincing them that their current course will lead them to the eventual banishment of the evil spirit.
The character who tricked the others will most likely get a chance to redeem themselves by using this talisman to trap the evil spirit, but will lose it as a result.
At that point, the guiding spirit that's led the character this far will sort of reveal that they don't need any sort of outside force to bring about this change?
The shamans sometimes wear the skins of others as their own, so they can borrow the gull's wings or the seal's fins. But if they wear the skin for too long, they can forget they're wearing a borrowed skin in the first place, and become what they seem to be.
This character was born in the wrong skin, so now that they know the proper rites, it's just a matter of taking it off...?
Where I'm struggling is that the player behind this bitter, enigmatic character is not trans or non-binary, and neither am I, as far as I know. But one of the other players is. So I really don't want to handle this in a boorish or ignorant way if at all possible.
I've talked to the other player and gotten as much of their opinion as I can without spoiling the game for them.
Really, I would have just told the first player "let's try something less potentially offensive", except...well. This game is kind of for this player. They've got some issues they want to escape from and some demons they want to wrestle with. They came to me with some information about their past that they've recently discovered, and it's pretty much the worst thing I've ever heard, ever. Identity-shattering, life-ruining stuff that has me seriously concerned for this person's well-being, mental health and long-term survival. So...I'm basically like "whatever you want, brah."
if you have a creation myth for people of this tribe, pull imagery from there to incorporate into an item.
Like if man was formed of the brittle ice of the frozen waters edge and woman from the hard snow of the peaks, a medallion of swirling ice and snow might do.
Yeah, sex refers (generally, turns out biology is hilariously complicated) in biology to the actual like. Physical body. This is the utmost of layman's terms given the complexity of the subject matter, but yeah.
Okay, yes. That makes sense.
It's kind of crazy how hard it is to convince some people as to how complicated and non-definitive something like that can be, right down to the genetic level. But the idea that sex is a spectrum is a hard one for many people to swallow, for now anyway.
I hope my previous post was comprehensible; I want to give enough information without drowning the audience in text.
It would have been a difficult issue to handle in-game just by itself, let alone coupled with the druid's wildshape and the implications it could potentially have regarding the identity of the self, etc. So far, none of the players have felt the issue was handled poorly, though the one player does sort of wish it was handled differently.
These days sex refers to the observed dimorphism in species and gender less as an identity of a sex but role. The whole gender role thing seems untenable to me as calling something a woman's or man's role seems inherently sexist (genderist?). I imagine you and your players are adults and can work through this development without calling each other bigots.
A simple way to handle the appearance of what the reborn player will look like is to say that he (now she) has a striking resemblence of his mother, which he already may have had but now even more taking dimorphic characteristics into account.
The other option is that the player looks the same but has a vagina. This is where your other-kin player might take offense as he/she might claim that a person with a penis can be a woman and were back to square one. If anything, the village is sexist for only allowing woman shamans and you cant really blame anyone for that, a story without bigots only leaves virtuous people to kill each other.
I will suggest that the rebirth talent can also give you the filling that you was another person or another sex in your past life and in one point of your life this past memory start to grow in you, mixing your past with your present.
That artifact talisman that you mentioned can be a intelligent item that search people who have this talent and change him to become her.