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Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Starfinder RPG

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Items / Relics

Adapting Scaling Items

Source Pathfinder #128: Songbird, Scion, Saboteur pg. 78
Relics work much like the scaling items introduced in Pathfinder Unchained, with the exceptions that they don’t cost a share of your treasure and they scale up due to story events rather than at certain levels. This makes it easy to adapt the scaling items from that book to use as relics, either to replace ones listed here that don’t suit your group in War for the Crown or to use in a different campaign. Doing so requires the following adjustments, in addition to adding thematic background elements to the items to tie them to the triumphs of your game.

Remove Cost, Price, and Scaling Category: Because relics can’t be crafted and aren’t typically bought or sold, they don’t have cost or price entries. Similarly, the scaling progression (bauble, prize, or wonder) is not usually relevant for relics. However, you might want to restrict yourself to only prizes and wonders when converting scaling items, since baubles aren’t as impressive as relics should be.

Determine Minimum PC Level: Since the abilities of a relic aren’t explicitly tied to character levels, it’s important to limit PCs’ access to relics that would be too powerful for their level. In general, PCs should not gain access to a relic until their character level is at most 2 levels lower than the lowest-level ability of the scaling item on which that relic is based.

Combine Lower-Level Scaling Abilities: Determine what level the PCs will likely be when they attain the relic. If this is higher than one or more of the item’s scaling levels, combine all those levels’ abilities into the base abilities of the item.

Turn Unlockable Abilities into Triumph Abilities: Any remaining unlockable abilities can be unlocked by attaining triumphs rather than reaching a certain level. Look at your plans for what events will count as triumphs, because you might need to combine multiple unlockable abilities into one. This can happen if there’s a long level gap between triumphs and you need to make each one stronger to catch up with the PCs’ expected level.