Shisk Lore Update

[Ravingdork]

Should the Shisk Lore feat give Additional Lore four times, similar to the other Ancestral Lore feats post Remaster?

[Finoan]

It should certainly give Additional Lore for Lore(Shisk). That is definitely in line with the other Ancestry Lore feats.

Much more questionable is the other Lore skills. Spot checking, Goblin Lore only gives Trained proficiency in the other skills that the Ancestry Lore feat specifies. So only getting trained in Lore(Ancestry1), Lore(Ancestry2), and Lore(Ancestry3) from the Shisk Lore feat could be seen as being equivalent to getting Trained proficiency in Nature and Stealth from Goblin Lore.

[QuidEst]

It's a skill feat to become trained in a skill.

It's a skill feat to get a scaling Lore.

The (Ancestry) Lore feats normally give the equivalent of three skill feats, but with the options all pre-selected.

Giving Shisk the equivalent of four skill feats with only one option pre-selected seems potentially stronger than the others.

Now, are skill feats all actually balanced with each other? Obviously not! But I'm willing to use that as a point of comparison to start with.

As a GM, what I would probably do is handle it based on what the player wants. If it's lores that are campaign-based things that seem useful, that should probably remain trained (except Shisk Lore). If it's three interests of the character that are iffy on whether they'll come up more than once, I'd let them get the full Additional Lore treatment on all of them.

[Ajaxius]

Having recently brewed up a Shisk that will forever sit on the "Some day" shelf, I was pretty disappointed in how her special interests wouldn't stay special interests without significant investment. One the one hand, I dislike the common homebrew of "Your background lore gets Additional Lore for free" because it doesn't make sense to me that you would continue to get better at the life you left behind to become an adventurer. On the other hand, Shisk are unique in that they have this knowledge-hoarding obsession. That being said, getting Additional Lore 4 times seems like it might be a bit much.

As a middle ground, you could have them scale sequentially. Shisk Lore benefits as per Additional Lore, but then Lore 2 scales one behind it (becoming Expert when Shisk Lore becomes Master), Lore 3 scales 2 behind it (becoming Expert when Shisk Lore becomes Legendary), and Lore 4 stays at trained.

You effectively get two Additional Lores worth of total skill boosts split across four lores for your ancestry feat, which seems reasonable to me, especially given the limited scope of Shisk Lore outside of a particularly-relevant campaign.