Variant Rules: A

Aftermath Feats

Aftermath feats, which are always rare, represent new powers causes by dangerous encounters with the weird and deadly. The prerequisite of an aftermath feat can be met only at a dramatic moment in your story—slitting the throat of a drowsy drake in a random encounter likely won't awaken any latent abilities, but defeating a mighty dragon at the end of a long, heroic journey just might. A fool who runs around dousing themself in the blood of every dragon they slay is more likely to contract some sort of disease than manifest a new power.

Every aftermath feat is a class feat but can be taken by a character of any class, provided the character has gone through the unlikely ordeal that unlocks it. The feat gains the appropriate trait for the class of the character who selected it. If an appropriate story event occurs that fits the prerequisites of an aftermath feat of your level or lower, the GM might permit you to immediately retrain a class feat into the appropriate aftermath feat. An aftermath feat isn't something you can typically remove once you have one, so you can't retrain it in the normal manner. The GM might determine a specific quest or other procedure you could use to remove the aftermath feat.

• Devil's Eye
• Echo of the Fallen
• Lingering Chill
• Elysium's Cadence
• Jelly Body
• Gift of the Hoard
• Siphon Life
• Petrified Skin
• Dormant Eruption
• Sink and Swim
• Fey Life
• Walk on the Wind

The ability boosts and flaws listed in each ancestry represent general trends or help guide players to create the kinds of characters from that ancestry most likely to pursue the life of an adventurer. However, ancestries aren't a monolith. You always have the option to replace your ancestry's listed ability boosts and ability flaws entirely and instead select two free ability boosts when creating your character.

The classic ability scores aren't of equal value in the rules. Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom tend to be more important unless a character requires a particular ability score from among the other three for a specific purpose. If you'd prefer ability scores to all be of roughly equivalent value in character building, this variant creates six ability scores that are in much closer balance with each other.

Make the following changes.

• Strength does everything that both Strength and Constitution do in the Core Rulebook, and Constitution is gone. A character uses their Strength for melee weapon and unarmed attack rolls, damage rolls, Athletics, Hit Points, Fortitude saves, and so on.
• Dexterity splits into two ability scores. The first, still called Dexterity, represents manual dexterity and applies to ranged weapon and unarmed attack rolls, attack and damage rolls with finesse attacks (if better than Strength), and Thievery checks. Agility, which represents footwork, applies to Armor Class, Reflex saves, Acrobatics checks, and Stealth checks.
• Charisma applies to Will saves instead of Wisdom.
• Wisdom is otherwise unchanged.
• Intelligence is unchanged.

You'll need a small number of gameplay tweaks. Anklets of alacrity become an Agility apex item, both the belt of giant strength and belt of regeneration become Strength apex items, and so on. The rogue's thief racket is obsolete, so you might allow rogues to choose a different racket but still gain Thievery. For anything else that references an ability score, such as feats with a Dexterity prerequisite, decide with you group whether Dexterity or Agility makes more sense as the prerequisite. For instance, Agility would make sense for Feather Step since that feat involves footwork. Prewritten NPCs and monsters can just use their Dexterity modifier when their Agility modifier is necessary.

Most characters have some elements that connect them to their ancestry but identify more strongly with their class or unique personality. Sometimes, though, a character is the embodiment of their ancestry to the point that it's of equal importance to their class. For a game where an ancestral background is a major theme and such characters are the norm, your group might consider using the ancestry paragon variant.

Apocryphal Domain Spells

The GM might allow a character who comes from a strange sect or worships an underground aspect of a deity to select an apocryphal domain spell in place of the standard initial or advanced spell for that domain. These characters are typically clerics with Domain Initiate but can include other characters with domain spells, like champions with Deity's Domain or oracles with Domain Acumen.

This variant removes the item bonus to rolls and DCs usually provided by magic items (with the exception of armor's item bonus) and replaces it with a new kind of bonus—potency—to reflect a character's innate ability instead. In this variant, magic items, if they exist at all, can provide unique special abilities rather than numerical increases.