Who’s down for a rousing round of our favorite roleplaying game Heroes & House flippers? Last time, I introduced the Hideout archetype and gave you a way to form a home base with your closest friends. And since archetypes eat through a wordcount like I eat through S’mores flavored Oreos, I’ll need this second entry to add a few more feats to help your dungeon delving delinquents try a little less Home Invasion and a little more Home Improvement.
Hello and welcome to Eldritch Excursion, the blog that celebrates the intersections between flavor and mechanics from the comfort of the most tricked-out lair you could ever imagine. This one is the second half of a two-parter, so let’s get right to the feats!
Basic Hideout Security Feat 3
[Archetype] [Collective] [Skill]
Prerequisites Hideout dedication, Expert in Crafting, Snare Crafting
You’ve taken it upon yourself to safeguard the hideout with traps. You may craft up to three snares from your formula book at no cost. These snares can only be set within or right outside of your hideout, as they save in cost by making use of the hideout’s environment and natural features. Constructing a free snare above your maximum limit causes the oldest one to fall apart from neglect.
Collective Each member of your collective, as well as any resident of the hideout, know the location of your snares and can move through them without setting them off.
Special You may take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, increase the number of snares you can set for no cost by three.
Additional Space Feat 4
[Archetype] [Collective]
Prerequisites Hideout Dedication
You’ve learned how to be more efficient in construction of your hideout and piggyback off the resources of other projects to add additional expansions. Each time a member of the collective takes a feat in this archetype besides Additional Space, you may add one 10-foot cube to the hideout. This must go towards starting a new room or expanding upon a room that you have personally contributed to the hideout.
Collective Each member of the collective may take this feat once.
“Those heroes left me with this lovely footrest. Really ties the room together, don’t you think?”
Hideout Workshop Feat 4
[Archetype] [Collective]
Prerequisites Hideout Dedication, trained in Crafting
You’ve managed to set up a station dedicated to a specific craft. Choose one specialty from the Specialty Crafting feat. The workshop has all the basic tools you’ll need to practice that specialty, and an environment so well suited to it that you gain a +1 circumstance bonus to Crafting checks to Craft items of that type.
Collective Each member of the collective may take this feat once. For each additional feat, the hideout gains a new workshop with a different specialty.
Special If you have the Specialty Crafting feat, you instead increase that feat’s bonus to +2, or +3 if you are a master in Crafting.
The GM may rule that some forms of crafting (such as shipbuilding) may also require the Additional Space or Environmental Accommodations feats.
Guardian Animal Feat 6
[Archetype] [Collective]
Prerequisites Hideout Dedication, trained in Nature
An animal has made its home at your hideout and protects it from invaders. You gain a mature animal companion, chosen from any kind of animal that could survive in your hideout. It is obedient to your collective and friendly towards the residents of your hideout. It is an extremely territorial creature, and will not adventure with you outside of the hideout. You can command the animal to regard outsiders with indifference, to give a warning (in the form of barking or similar displays,) give warning and attack if the hideout is breached, or to attack on sight. It will follow this command while you are away.
Collective Each member of the collective may take this feat once. Each feat grants a different animal companion. Though your hideout can have several guardian animals, they often compete for space, so you may only have one “active companion” that defends the base while the others rest in their pens or roam nearby in search of food. As soon as the hideout gains a second guardian animal, all members of the collective gain the Beastmaster’s Call Companion ability, allowing them to assign an active guardian animal.
Esoteric Repository Feat 7
[Archetype] [Collective] [Skill]
Prerequisites Hideout Dedication, master in any Lore
You have a trove of knowledge stored with cryptic methods, be it coded language that reads like classical poetry, family portraits that speak in sign language when put in order, preserved skulls of ambitious necromancers that whisper dark truths, or something even stranger. Choose two skills, at least one of which must be a Lore skill you are a master in. You may spend one hour to do research and make a recall knowledge check using one of those skills. If you do, you gain a +1 circumstance bonus to the roll and may add your level, even if you aren’t trained. If you are a master in the skill, this bonus increases to +2.
Only members of the collective (and their hirelings, if they allow it) know how to use the repository correctly. Anyone else must first identify the repository’s function by spending an hour investigating and succeeding at a check using one of its related skills against your class DC or your spell DC, whichever is higher.
Collective Each member of the collective may take this feat once. Each additional feat beyond the first adds two additional skills using the restrictions above. They may also expand the repository’s room with a 10-foot cube of space.
See, they were -supposed- to beat the mimic in a rap battle to learn its secrets.
Mobile Hideout Feat 10
[Archetype] [Collective]
Prerequisites Hideout dedication
Your hideout is built in such a way that it can be relocated with relative ease, be it a traveling circus, merchant caravan, or built within a seaworthy vessel. Choose whether your hideout can travel by land or by sea; by spending 8 days of downtime preparing your hideout for travel, you grant it a travel speed of 30 feet by land or 60 feet by sea. While traveling, most of the hideout’s functions are unavailable, though the GM may allow for some basic accommodations and defenses. When traveling is done, you may spend another 8 days of downtime reestablishing the hideout to sacrifice mobility to restore its other functions.
Collective Each member of the collective may take this feat once. They contribute to the same means of travel, with each additional feat increasing the travel speed by 10 feet (or 20 feet by sea.) Each additional feat also reduces the time required to prepare for travel and reestablish functions by one half, down to a minimum of one day.
Okay, a solid count of eleven feats should be enough to allow for some collective base building in a campaign. Do I have more ideas? You bet! Luxury rooms, teleportation networks, environmental controls that simulate outer planes, making the whole thing fly… I could get another article or two out of it, but I’d like to move on for now.
All that talk earlier about S’mores and Oreos got me hungry. Hungry on a deep, metaphorical level. Join us next time and I’ll indulge in my favorite kind of tabletop RPG junk food. And don’t worry, I’ll bring enough for everyone.
