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Alter Egos, Aliases, and Secret Identities

Source Ultimate Campaign pg. 185
Throughout the course of your adventuring career, your public persona and your true personality might drift begin to drift apart or become notably disparate. When this occurs, you may change your name and adopt an alter ego or alias in order to rid yourself of your prior reputation. In this case, your Fame and Prestige Points remain with your former name, allowing you to shed your former life and start a new one.

With an alter ego, you create an artificial persona to show the public. You wear a mask or costume to hide your true identity. When performing deeds as your alter ego, you develop its Fame instead of your own. Only when presenting yourself as the alter ego can you use its Fame and Prestige Points to your advantage. In this way, a seemingly weak or unassuming character can adopt the identity of a famous masked vigilante, relying on her fame to persuade commoners and strike fear into villains while remaining unknown in her secret identity.

If it’s revealed that your two identities are actually the same person, your Fame and Prestige Points may change when dealing with those who have found out. For example, a notorious bandit changes her name and becomes a humble village healer. If her former life is made public, the villagers react to her according to her (larger, negative) Fame as a bandit, but she also loses face with bandits, who don’t respect her choice to live peacefully and react according to her (lower, positive) Fame as a village healer.

Archives of Nethys

Rules Index | GM Screen

Alter Egos, Aliases, and Secret Identities