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Ahem! We've long known that gnomes make great adoptive parents, even if their idea of child-rearing may include ideas like, "Let's move our entire village next to this volcanic area known for alien invasions and goblin wars. There'll be no danger of them bleaching there!"
But surely there are many sorts of adoptive families out there. I am the gnome Zendel of Oprak, and when my parents died, I was adopted by a hobgoblin merchant named Bradazig. Baba Bradazig has treated me well, got me educated, and made certain that I had the same military training all hobgoblins do. My fellow students made fun of my height and apparent weakness until they learned how my ability to calculate odds mid-battle makes me a formidable opponent. I am a creature of two worlds.
Tell me about your adoptive families and your cross-ancestry marriages, whether they have gnomes in it or not. What part of the world do they live in? What have you, the adoptee, learned from your adoptive culture? How has this affected your worldview? I'd love to hear your stories!
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Adventure hook, a successful Gnome adoption bureau "Flick-a-Family" used to flourish and took a lot of loans with Skeleton Crew Financing Inc. to help their business grow. But then a dramatic crash in gnomish adoptions leaves them unable to pay the mounting rates, and SCF CEO Boney Chilla comes to collect. With their last spare gp, gnomes hire the party to protect them from Boney's bone-crushing enforcer, Skullhead...
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"Skeleton Crew" is a great name for a adventuring party. I should have made all my Blood Lords player pick skeleton ancestry.
Boney M is both the bard that the party needs and the one it deserves.
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My newest character is biologically the child to a kitsune/elf pairing, although they are raised by a polyamorous triad. As lesser nobles, the forward facing pair is the kitsune (almost always wearing an elvish guise) and the elf, with a oread elf concubine; but behind closed curtains, the three are all genuine lovers. The character's kitsune identity is generally kept hidden; less because of any social fallout, and more because, like their sire, the form is used as an alternate identity to perform deeds they'd rather not have associated with the main family name... or just to run away and not be a lord for a time.
My adoption houserules are pretty easy:
-if you want one culture that isnt rooted in your ancestry, you can lose access to cultural ancestry feats from your own list and gain access to ones from another list; so an elf raised by dwarves couldnt get elven weapon Familiarity, but could get dwarven weapons, etc.
Currently I use best judgement, but I'm also making a cultural trait to tag feats that aren't tied to physiology to make it more obvious what can be taken this way, and well as Adopted. Later, this will develop into another houserule that will allow people to "build a bear" themselves a custom set of cultural feats; since many of my players enjoy making up new cultures for their character that don't mesh with the ancestry based cultural monoliths set up for most non human ancestries
-I also have two universal heritages; one is called multicultural, which gives you the benefits of adopted; the seconded is mixed ancestry which is basically like a generic version of half elf and half orc where you pick another ancestry and you're half that, half your base ancestry. Eventually I'll make a breeding compatability chart, but atm I'm content to say "it's magic, I don't gotta explain shit". Even when I do make the chart, it'll be common for compatible matches, and uncommon for anything else, with access being "let's talk together and find out how you got these two ancestries because it's odd and I think could be a cool hook"
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I haven't played around with Adopted Ancestry much because of a couple of problems with it.
My adoption houserules are pretty easy:
Probably my biggest problem with Adopted Ancestry. It only applies to the common ancestries.
The other problem with Adopted Ancestry itself is that most characters can't get it until level 3, so can't get their first ancestry feat from the adopted ancestry until level 5.
So because of those two problems, I really can't create a character that has their adopted ancestry be a character defining part of their backstory.
Being able to get a versatile heritage that gives half-anything would be fantastic. Sort of like adopted ancestry at level 1 without the restriction of not taking ancestry feats that require physiology.
I haven't played around with Adopted Ancestry much because of a couple of problems with it.
My adoption houserules are pretty easy:Probably my biggest problem with Adopted Ancestry. It only applies to the common ancestries.
The other problem with Adopted Ancestry itself is that most characters can't get it until level 3, so can't get their first ancestry feat from the adopted ancestry until level 5.
So because of those two problems, I really can't create a character that has their adopted ancestry be a character defining part of their backstory.
Being able to get a versatile heritage that gives half-anything would be fantastic. Sort of like adopted ancestry at level 1 without the restriction of not taking ancestry feats that require physiology.
I basically replace anything thats says "common [rarity]" with "anything you have access to", since at my table, I mostly use the uncommon tag as an excuse to make my player talk with me. I rarely refuse access to uncommon stuff, but I wouldn't mind a conversation about the nature of your tiefling's demonic heritage and whether or not/how much you want to explore it.
Also, almost all ancestries except rare ones are common in my game, and alls rare ones are uncommon (in practice, the default rarity gauges how many of them there are as npcs, but PCs are allowed to pick almost anything)
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I was able to be adopted by Hobgoblins because PFS has as an 'Adopted Ancestry I' boon that allows characters to be adopted by Leshies, Kobolds and Hobgoblins. This boon curates specific feats that they believe are not dependent on physiology and allows you to pick up those feats if you take the adopted ancestry boon.
Up until third level (when the adopted ancestry paperwork was finally finalized by me grabbing that feat, Zendel could point to the fact that I spent 20 ACP for the privilege of him being adopted by hobgoblins, and that he had scaling hobgoblin lore and a background as an Onyx Trader.
I wish that PFS would come up with more versions of that Adopted Ancestry boon for other ancestries, but I know it was work to curate which feats required the physiology of your adopted culture, and which didn't. They might not have issued another one since the first was so much work.
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After I played the adventure that allowed me to become part-dryad with a fey influence feat, I really thought about purchasing the Adopted Ancestry I boon to become adopted by Leshies. After all, I have tons of leaves twining through my hair and around my limbs now. However, I realized that Pip's gnomish family back in the Absalom's Westgate quarter might feel disappointed if she did, especially since they have been such a loving and important influence on her life. So, Pip is just a very feychild fey gnome with a lot of dryad in her.