The lost heir Pathfinder RPG campaign

The lost heir

The lost heir is a Pathfinder RPG campaign. It started out as a one-on-one campaign, just to get some roleplay going but after having finished the first adventure, we added a third player. Originally the purpose was to have two characters that are tightly linked to each other. Both of us would also be the dungeon master in alternating scenario’s, giving the spotlight for the adventure to the other player’s character.

The lost heir house rules

We generally tend to run story focussed and rules light games, regardless of the system we use. I just thought it would be nice to throw in a few ideas to try out.

• Awesome points: Awesome points are a neat little mechanic that I found in John Wick’s Play Dirty books. It’s basically a few tokens (poker chips come to mind) that represent different dice. The tokens can represent a D4, D6, or D8. They are given to the players (thrown in a bowl on the table) whenever the characters are doing cool things, when they roleplay their character really well, and so on. When the characters have rolled dice and have gotten a failed result, they can pick one of those tokens from the bowl and roll that die, and add it to their original result. The bowl can be used by any and all of the players as a joint resource. That’s not all however. Players can also spend awesome points to confirm a critical (instead of rolling a D20 again), they can spend awesome points to provide details about NPCs they meet (Example: “the bartender has recently lost his wife and is still clearly mourning”), they can also use awesome points to add small bits to the story (Example: “Wait, did I put item x in my backpack before we left the inn?” or “So we just arrived at the docks. *gives up token* I know a guy here who can …”. See awesome points in action in a game of Wicked Fantasy.
• Background scenes: Background scenes are used to fill out the history of a character by small tidbits of information thrown into a scene. At the beginning of the sessions, one of the players tells a small story about something that happened in the character’s past. This can be a childhood memory, an epic fight, a near-death experience, or even a small story about the day they met one of the other characters. The next session another player creates a background scene, and players just keep alternating every session and provide extra information on their characters. This is purely to create some kind of connection to the character and make them more than just numbers on a character sheet. The information told during the story is not necessarily known in-game by the other characters. And if you have a great group of players, you could even allow them to create scenes for any character in the game, not necessarily their own.

The lost heir characters

There are currently three characters in the campaign.

• Aylana Solistar/Dhorne: Aylana is a Dhampir sorcerer and daughter of Sheraya Solistar of House Asgavan. She has been in the care of Erasmus Dhorne for all of her 16 years, learning from him and joining him on his excursions from a very early age. Of what happened to her mother or who is her father, she knows only the vague tidbits that Erasmus told her. At the beginning of the campaign she is unaware of her lineage and of being the lost heir of House Asgavan, and thus a threat to the rule of House Thrune. She has gotten used to her hunger for blood and hopes to one day be able to cure this ‘illness’.
• Erasmus Dhorne
• Anwar Husam al Din
• NPCs: Here’s an overview of all the important NPCs of the Lost Heir campaign.

The lost heir sessions

Credit: Cover artwork by Alexander Alexandrov.