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Yeah, what the others said. If predators can tell the difference between black and white, yeah, color matters. In a fantasy darkvision world, being dark-colored is actually highly advantageous in dark areas.
I still don't like dark-skinned drow and am glad Golarion did away with it.
...and "dark-skinned with stark-white hair" was just loopy.
Also, presumably different rocks would be different shades as well.
I also really like them being blue and purple because, like, it gives more options, and helps differentiate ancestry from, well, race! You want to be a Mwangi/Ekujae-style drow? You can have darker violet skin. You want to be some savage Ulfen? You can be a pale lavender. It doesn't always have to be realistic, and honestly, blue/purple elves just look more interesting than "they're all pitch black and white haired with no variation because Darkness Equals Evil definitely isn't an idea with any troubled history attached".
Plus, less blackface cosplayers. Big, big fan of that one.
Honestly, from the beginning, "evil" was code for "sufficiently not of the tribe that you can kill them without repercussions under the law". Sure, various systems have tried to gussy it up to justify that no, really, these ones are evil, and it really is morally okay and encouraged to kill them. Still, though, it's all just trying to find ways to plug into the old tribal/pack morality where those inside the tribe were (ideally) respected peers and those opposed were such that the world would be a better place if they were all either dead or beaten into submission and thoroughly exploited by the "good" people and possibly thus integrated into the tribe in some fashion. (Hi, dogs!)
So on the one side this has some results that are obviously problematic, and on the other side it's one of the fundamental conceits of the hobby - if you're going to have morally good packs of murderhobo then you need a regular supply of targets that it is morally good for hobos to show up and murder.
The real question isn't whether or not there should be a pool of acceptable targets, such that players should feel free to murder them and feel good about it. The question is who and what should be in that pool... and that answer keeps shifting, bit by bit. That's not to say that today's answer is not a good one. I rather like many of its implications and what it does to the narratives, and hopefully it's the sort of thing that will actually have positive effects on the world at large. That would be nice. It's just saying that this is an ongoing process, and that the answers today are quite different from those of ten or twenty or forty years ago, and that we should expect that the answers of one or two or four decades hence will likewise have moved on in their own fashion, likely in ways that we can't fully predict.
So... I suppose I have sympathy for the RPG designers who are trying to keep up while also building a world that maintains some level of consistency with its history.
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Oh, gosh, "should we still have monsters that are born evil" is a whole other can of beans. We should not even approach that topic or this thread is never getting back on track. X3
Oh, gosh, "should we still have monsters that are born evil" is a whole other can of beans. We should not even approach that topic or this thread is never getting back on track. X3
Someone! Quick! Crave an ancestry!
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This is just me reaching for an idea, but it'd be cool to get a plantkin heritage to match beastkin. Sort of an option for people who want to play dryads/plantpeople.
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You know there is a race of plant people very popular in Guild Wars 2 and I played one too. Although I don't know if Leshy fully covers it, for they were as tall as a human and had the same proportions. They weren't small. Haven't looked at leshy enough to know if small is normal or special for them.
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You know there is a race of plant people very popular in Guild Wars 2 and I played one too. Although I don't know if Leshy fully covers it, for they were as tall as a human and had the same proportions. They weren't small. Haven't looked at leshy enough to know if small is normal or special for them.That sounds like it'd be closer to a ghoran then.
A cool aspect of PF2E's system that I don't think gets enough praise is how it did away with many of the innate bonuses and immunities creature types get in the previous edition. Yeah it means you don't feel as tanky when you can ignore things like poison clouds and mind control or whatever, but ancestries that are plants, or undead, or constructs, or oozes suddenly become much more viable as player characters because they come with less attendant mechanical baggage.
Yeah it's exactly like that. I want that book now!
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Yeah, we have plenty of specific plant ancestries, but no plant heritages! What if I want to play a flower goblin?
Personally, I'm not a fan of blue and purple elves. They just look like cartoons to me at that point (or more like cartoons rather, as Paizo's art style is not exactly realistic). It just makes it harder for me to take them seriously.
At least it allows us to see more detail in the artwork. So there's that silver lining I guess.
Well, yeah, basically any request on this thread could be half-assed with existing mechanics (want to play a faun? Just play a beastkin!), but the point of this thread is to talk about fully developed heritages and ancestries. :P
You might be thinking of leshies?
Yeah, we have plenty of specific plant ancestries, but no plant heritages! What if I want to play a flower goblin?I suppose you could always drink one of these, go from goblin to ghoran, and be a smoll, goblinoid-looking plant person?
Looks like you can rebirth into every published ancestry except leshy, automaton, conrasu, skeleton, or sprite.
Looks like you can rebirth into every published ancestry except leshy, automaton, conrasu, skeleton, or sprite.Yeah, we have plenty of specific plant ancestries, but no plant heritages! What if I want to play a flower goblin?I suppose you could always drink one of these, go from goblin to ghoran, and be a smoll, goblinoid-looking plant person?
Yeah, being reborn as a skeleton is an entirely different process... ^‐^
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Yeah, we have plenty of specific plant ancestries, but no plant heritages! What if I want to play a flower goblin?
This makes me want a versatile heritage were you are technically playing a parasitic plant that used [base ancestry] as their host.
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Ah, so a flesh dryad.
This is just me reaching for an idea, but it'd be cool to get a plantkin heritage to match beastkin. Sort of an option for people who want to play dryads/plantpeople.
There's the Ardandes that'll be coming in Rage of Elements, who are a geniekin heritage tied to the Plane of Wood.
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Dose 1e include Starfinder 1e? I'd love to be able to play a shirren in PF2e. The lore would be tricky since shirren didn't arrive in the pact worlds until 83 AG. Pre-gap, a shirren would likely still be part of the swarm. So the best explanation for how a shirren would end up on Galorian would be if they were part of a small group or a solo survivor of a scouting ship that crashed. The crash leaves them disconnected from the swarm, letting them experience choice for the first time. This awakening might also create a gap in their memory about the swarm and where they came from, and how advanced technology works. It's a lot of fun playing a species that is obsessed with choices in a game built around making choices.
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This is maybe really out there and is maybe better suited for something like starfinder, but we would be interested in an ancestry that is a colony(in the biological sense). So like Coral or a Man-O-War, where the ancestry is made up of multiple conspecific indvidual creatures.
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This is maybe really out there and is maybe better suited for something like starfinder, but we would be interested in an ancestry that is a colony(in the biological sense). So like Coral or a Man-O-War, where the ancestry is made up of multiple conspecific indvidual creatures.
What would be the Copaxi in Starfinder
Copaxi .
Dose 1e include Starfinder 1e? I'd love to be able to play a shirren in PF2e. The lore would be tricky since shirren didn't arrive in the pact worlds until 83 AG. Pre-gap, a shirren would likely still be part of the swarm. So the best explanation for how a shirren would end up on Galorian would be if they were part of a small group or a solo survivor of a scouting ship that crashed. The crash leaves them disconnected from the swarm, letting them experience choice for the first time. This awakening might also create a gap in their memory about the swarm and where they came from, and how advanced technology works. It's a lot of fun playing a species that is obsessed with choices in a game built around making choices.
Would playable Formians scratch the itch at all? Insect-folk, hive minds, and we know they're on Golarion and two other planets during PF2 times.
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Dose 1e include Starfinder 1e? I'd love to be able to play a shirren in PF2e. The lore would be tricky since shirren didn't arrive in the pact worlds until 83 AG. Pre-gap, a shirren would likely still be part of the swarm. So the best explanation for how a shirren would end up on Galorian would be if they were part of a small group or a solo survivor of a scouting ship that crashed. The crash leaves them disconnected from the swarm, letting them experience choice for the first time. This awakening might also create a gap in their memory about the swarm and where they came from, and how advanced technology works. It's a lot of fun playing a species that is obsessed with choices in a game built around making choices.Would playable Formians scratch the itch at all? Insect-folk, hive minds, and we know they're on Golarion and two other planets during PF2 times.
Formain is playable in Starfinder too. It's less about being insectoid and more about playing a species obsessed with choices in a game with so many choices. I guess that could be an individual personality quark for any ancestry in PF2e. Choice is such a big deal to shirren in Starfinder we have shirren run option bars.
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I think the best approach would be to make it vague enough it could be all of the above--not unlike beastkin themselves.
I'm just not sure how you run "I am a mind-controlling parasite who is infesting a human" and have them not be strongly biased towards evil.
Would a "plantkin" heritage basically be the upcoming wood (I hope, along with metal) elemental heritage in Rage of Elements?
I'm just not sure how you run "I am a mind-controlling parasite who is infesting a human" and have them not be strongly biased towards evil.
What if it wasn't so much parasitic as symbiotic. Something akin to a Borais where the host would already be dead were it not for the symbiotic taking one the host and giving it a life force.
Otherwise, yes Mind Controlling and taking over someone's life would have an inherent Evil take to it unless it involved the host being an otherwise willing sacrifice... but that might bring up a question of a potentially evil aligned society pushing a potentially marginalized group to sacrifice themselves. (However it presents an odd situation where a privileged subgroup that sacrifice themselves to elevate themselves further. Although that gets into distinct question of why being this other joined ancestry is inherently better, which seems a realm Paizo doesn't seem to want to go with their own material.) I don't see Paizo going down the road of a Trill like species, despite the interesting aspects that could be considered controversial. (I'd be happy to be wrong, as I find Trill like situation has some definitely interesting aspects.)
At least the Borais like situation, one can readily accept that if the alternative is death, and there is an aspect of choice included in the joining, that continued life in 'cohabitation' is generally better that termination if it is chosen willingly, and so the Symbiant need not be considered 'taking' the life.
I suppose that it need not be seen too much different than something like Lycanthrope. However, it is frequently considered a curse, and as so the aspect of how it forces change to one's life can bee viewed as 'evil' but being directed to the 'disease' not to an particular parasite, and the modified life generated can be treated as a victim, not as needing to be inherently evil because of being 'joined' to something potentially seen as evil.
I'm actually working on a mind-controlling parasite right now that is very morally ambiguous, but also needs to possess people to survive, so it's meant to be an innate source of conflict. It's honestly one of the weirder ancestries I've worked on, though. A symbiotic relationship is probably better--or you make the parasite mindless except when it's claims a host, so it's really not responsible for what it's done.
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I love that idea haha
It’s like the twilight vampires who only drink cow blood of mind controlling parasites
or you make the parasite mindless except when it's claims a host, so it's really not responsible for what it's done.
In the latter case, you still have a situation where you've got a species who predates on humans and human-equivalents, and who would therefore have strong evolutionary biases towards perceiving them and considering them to be food. Like, if such a creature exists, it exists because hundreds of generations of its forebears have done what it took to implant the next generation of mindless parasite.
I suppose, though, that at some point this wraps back around to the whole "acceptable targets" thing that we skipped past last time. Like... is consuming someone's brain and riding their body around for a while *really* any worse, morally speaking, then killing them with an axe? Because some of these adventures might have you killing a whole *mess* of people with an axe.
Yeah, we already have orc and goblin ancestries, I have no problem with "this ancestry has historically been a baddy but is changing its stripes now".
Yeah, we already have orc and goblin ancestries, I have no problem with "this ancestry has historically been a baddy but is changing its stripes now".
Not really what I meant?
Basically, if your ancestry is an obligate sapivore, then there are very few paths to being non-evil.
- You can decide "I am going to turn from the evils of my ancestors." This may involve starving to death, and/or coming into opposition with the vast majority of your own kind. Regardless, it means not having any kids.
- You can decide that you're only going to eat *evil* people, who *deserve* it. This still leaves you with some pretty terrible moral incentives, should it ever come to pass that you run short on appropriately evil targets. Other than that, though... if you were going to kill them *anyway*, then eating their brain and riding them around as a flesh puppet is way creepier, but not necessarily any more evil.
Regardless, it still seems like the sort of thing that Paizo might prefer to avoid.
Well, I did say that you're mindless when you make the "decision" to possess someone. It's not a matter of having to choose to keep eating people after you're sentient.
Well, I did say that you're mindless when you make the "decision" to possess someone. It's not a matter of having to choose to keep eating people after you're sentient.
The "they only have to do it once, and it's not their choice when they do" attenuates the moral calculus, but doesn't get rid of it. At best, it offers an alternate path - effectively arguing for the voluntary extinction of their own species. After all, even if they don't need to kill someone to live, they still need to kill someone to generate progeny. They basically turn into the moral equivalent of those wasps that lay their eggs inside live spiders, except for thinking people.
It also makes the character into someone for whom sex fundamentally *is* an evil act (assuming their species reproduces sexually), and you might not want to go there.
/*********/
Now the more interesting one to my mind is the one where they can *choose* to be "lethal parasite" or "helpful symbiote", but the parasite route has notable advantages for the critter. So... it means that there *is* a way that their species can survive and thrive and still be moral, but it requires hosts that trust them, and there is a temptation to betray that trust in horrible ways. Of course, the symbiotes who are trying to get along with their hosts would be highly motivated to hunt down and kill anyone who *did* host-betray, but it might not be easy to tell. Worse yet, that gives incentives for anyone who goes parasite-path to try to force some of their peers to betray their hosts as well, so as to have backup if and when the truth comes out.
...and, to try to drag it back towards the topic, yes I would like to see that last one as an ancestry, if you could make the crunch implications interesting enough. I don't expect it, but it would be cool.
You're making a lot of assumptions about how this parasite works that I didn't actually specify. It doesn't really matter, but like, no, that's not how I was thinking it would work. I don't see any need to go on a tangent, though.
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Yeah, I hate it when coworkers show up sick not wearing masks.
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Orcwort ancestry when?
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I'm imagining a kingdom where the parasites have come to live with humanity in mutual harmony; only infesting those who have committed grave crimes against the kingdom. Parasites are taught all their lives that it is morally depraved to infest a non-evil or unwilling host.
But then the heroes come along and uncover the terrible and inconvenient truth: there are not enough criminals to support the parasite species in the long term.
A select few parasites have also secretly taken over the Kingdom's nobility and are using moralistic propaganda to keep both parasites and non-parasites perpetually under their control. They consider themselves above the very laws they set, secretly infesting whoever they wish.
The heroes must find a way to remove the corrupt dictators and free the kingdom from corruption while also avoiding bringing about the doom of an entire ancestry.
Edit: Cool. My idea got the 1,000th post. lol.