We're exactly one week until the campaign ends, so let's take a look at the twelve ancestries each day this week, from most to least popular on our poll. We'll start with a brief overview of the ancestry's current structure, and then move on to discuss whether the ancestry has more added content coming from this project or a stretch goal on the previous one, and if so what.
To start, we have dungeons and intelligent weapons, the two most popular and the two most unorthodox (as you're playing what would normally be a building and an item).
Dungeons are our big winner of the poll, and they're available totally free (I linked the version that gives both PF2 and 5e since it's free anyway, but you can click to get just one of them if you prefer). We originally launched them on a self-imposed April Fool's dare, where Stephen dared me to try to write a product entirely on March 31st, that he would lay out on March 31st and launch on April 1st, to play as a dungeon character. As usual, despite including humorous sidebars, I took the game design element very seriously, and the result was funnier in my mind, as it slowly dawned on people reading that it wasn't just a fake product or a gag but something they could really play. During the previous campaign, we expanded dungeons with new heritages (leviathan, where the dungeon is inside a giant creature you don't control and mausoleum, where the dungeon is a necropolis full of undead) and a section on different types of "dungeon within" that provide information and tips for the GM on how to handle dungeons of that type. Dungeons are already pretty long after their expansion, but they're expanding one more time for their Classic Creatures release, with just a bit of more content. It's not 100% locked in yet what that will be, so feel free to make suggestions in the comments!
Next up are intelligent weapons. There's a reason that one came out in December during the Year of Monsters; it's a difficult ancestry to design and needed the most proofreading and corner-case testing. That's because it's actually easier to design a character who is something larger and more abstract, like a dungeon, than it is to handle every combination of classes and other options for a character based on something more concrete and who you might usually bring along with you (but who is normally not a full character in the game rules). With options to play intelligent weapons who form an avatar to wield them, possess other creatures, work with an NPC partner, or float around on their own, you're covered for all sorts of shenanigans, and if you'd rather team up with another PC in exchange for some of your autonomy, there's rules to play an intelligent weapon more as an item instead. This ancestry is already so long just to pack in all that content that it outpaced expanded dungeons in length, and it isn't due for an additional expansion in classic creatures.
Check back in tomorrow for the amorphous and the shapeshifters: slimes, mimics, and doppelgangers!
~Mark Seifter, Roll for Combat Director of Game Design
