Introduction
Have you ever looked at Pathfinder 2 and wished they had something like the Dragonborn from D&D? Then this is what you’ve been waiting for: the Dragonkin. All the way from planet Triaxus, dragonkin are Large and have a fly speed from level one, letting you be large and imposing on the battlefield. Perhaps you’ll even gain a breath weapon by following that line of Ancestry Feats to buzz the battlefield like the dragons of old Golarion.
In addition to size and mobility, the dragonkin has a special feature to create a permanent bond with an ally, enhancing or enabling certain Ancestry Feats. Ranging from protecting each other to sharing an initiative check, the partner bond is a very unique and flavorful option. Keep in mind, though, that a bond is permanent until the partner dies. No divorce in space dragon marriage.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Understanding RPGBOT’s Rating System
- Dragonkin Ancestry Traits
- Dragonkin Heritages
- Dragonkin Ancestry Feats
Understanding RPGBOT’s Rating System
RPGBOT uses a 4-tier rating scheme which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.
- : Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
- : OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
- : Good options. Useful often.
- : Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.
Dragonkin Ancestry Traits
- : 10 is above average but this gets less important than your class HP after a few levels.
- : LARGE. Being Large can be good, but it can also be bad depending on where adventure leads you. Almost all of the drawbacks of being bigger stem from the Squeezing rules. The only drawback in combat is that you can technically be flanked by more creatures, but this rarely matters.
- : While 20 feet land speed is below average, 20 feet fly speed is 20 more than most ancestries.
- : Every ancestry can choose to have two free boosts instead of their fixed boosts and flaw, so this is nothing special. It’s orange because there’s no option to have 3 boosts and a flaw.
- : You get Common, Draconic, and Triaxian. The usefulness of specific languages will depend on your campaign, but getting three before Intelligence bonuses is nice.
- : Darkvision is fairly useful and for many ancestries is the most you’ll get for just showing up.
- : Spend an hour to choose a permanent best friend and share 60-foot telepathy.
Dragonkin Heritages
- (GG): Resist cold and cold environments. It’s solid, if basic.
- (GG): If your class doesn’t get save escalation on Will saves, this is very useful. Many Will saves have the Emotion trait, especially anything with the Fear trait. If your class does get Will escalation, skip this because it’s redundant.
- (GG): Instead of forming a permanent Partner Bond, you can form temporary bonds that only last 1 day. Great for Westmarches or SFS play since you’ll have new and different friends every game.
- (GG): Lose Large, become Medium. And then also be even better at Squeezing down further.
- (GG): An additional 5 feet to fly speed is probably going to serve you well in adventuring scenarios.
Dragonkin Ancestry Feats
Level 1
- (GG): Gain one of four 1d6 unarmed attacks with various traits. Grab the Horn if you’re primarily ranged but want a finesse melee option. Jaws and Tail have the Grapple and Trip traits respectively, allowing you to perform those maneuvers with your hands full. The Claw is only for if you want an Agile and lethal unarmed attack, so it’s the least useful of these options.
- (GG): While there are Area Fire and Autofire weapons that can also give a martial character area damage, the damage on the breath scales much higher and the following feats improve the use of it dramatically.
- (GG): Athletics and Society are two wildly different skills that are not usually taken on the same PC. Other things on this list are probably better uses of your precious few ancestry feats.
- (GG): The hidden gem in this feat is familiarity with the Skyfire Sword, an Advanced Weapon that is 1 handed and does 1d10 fire damage with versatile Piercing. That’s quite a high damage die for a 1-handed weapon. The feat also makes machine guns and flamethrowers into simple weapons, which might be useful for a Mystic, a Witchwarper, or potentially a PF2 caster. Machine Gun Wizard gives me Magicka: Vietnam vibes.
- (GG): Trained rank in Intimidation and the feat tax most people need to make Demoralize work better rolled together into one Ancestry Feat. It’s not bad if you don’t want anything else on this list.
- (GG): Needing to be at less than one quarter of your hit points to activate these Temporary Hit Points is thematic, but also very dangerous. The amount you gain is so small and it can only happen once per day.
- (GG): A pair of ally buffing Cantrips so you never have to worry about saving throws. Both of these Cantrips are incredibly useful in the right situations. Even though they are just +1s, that helps quite a bit in the math of Starfinder.
- (GG): This is the exact same effect as, and does not stack with, the Heartbroken Dragonkin heritage and the same things apply: If your class doesn’t get save escalation on Will saves, this is very useful. Many Will saves have the Emotion trait. That said, it has more to compete with here than as a Heritage.
- Spirit’s Protection (GG): What this amounts to is an extra Hero Point each day that can only reroll a failed save, but cannot make it worse. That’s pretty strong, but this can only be taken by Heartbroken Dragonkin. This makes it great to use against failed Emotion saves to fish for that escalation into critical success.
- (GG): If you can manage the positioning to make this work reliably, it amounts to +1 AC for you or your partner. That’s quite difficult to pull off for little benefit.
- (GG): Ignoring the difficult terrain of upward flight is a considerable advantage in any form of aerial combat.
Level 5
- (GG): Adopted Ancestry with your permanent bonded partner’s Ancestry. Normally, Adopted Ancestry is restricted to Common Ancestries, but, depending on your bonded partner, this could do some odd things. That makes it very hard to rate because it entirely depends on whomever in your party becomes your bonded partner.
- (GG): Incredible action compression for Flying. Even stronger for Stormriders.
- (GG): Augments are great, but they are limited by your Constitution modifier. Having additional Augmentation capacity is great.
- (GG): Become a powerful flying mount for your bonded partner.
- (GG): It’s like raising a buckler so long as you’ve got allies sticking adjacent to you. Unfortunately, being that close together is just asking to get hit by an AoE.
- Dragon’s Tenacity (GG): Minor bonus to a handful of specific dangerous saves.
- Hero’s Perseverance (GG): It’s an upgrade to Heroic Last Stand, which was a bad feat.
- (GG): A free Action to Trip immediately following a Shove. Be careful with this: The Trip has and contributes to MAP. However, if you happen to have a feat like Shoving Sweep or Aggressive Block, you can trigger this off of those off-turn Shoves as well.
- Two Minds, One Soul (GG): While getting what is essentially Advantage on a save is nice, the conditions of what kind of save are too narrow to take this.
Level 9
- (GG): You cannot go wrong with additional Fly speed.
- (GG): Imprecise Scent is only very occasionally useful if something is undetected within 40 feet.
- Hero’s Edge (GG): If you insist on using Heroic Last Stand, you might get one or two Strikes of bonus damage before a Strike at this level strips your Temporary Hit Points.
- (GG): A couple of protective spells to aid an ally. No saving throws, either, so anyone can use these effectively.
- (GG): Unlimited distance two-way telepathy telepathy and status monitoring for your Bonded Partner.
- (GG): If you have the prerequisite feat, then this is a must-have upgrade to being a flying mount.
- (GG): If you’ve chosen to go down the breath weapon route, this is a very good upgrade. Doubling the length of the cone is the real star here, but the d6’s and Critical Failure effects are nothing to scoff at.
- (GG): Unfortunately, it’s another Innate Spell with a saving throw, making it hard to use or build around unless you’re a Charisma-based spellcaster. The ability to cast it as a Reaction on your boned partner is kinda cool at least.
- (GG): It’s very niche but in a fun way. Become a cargo plane.
Level 13
- (GG): If you’re playing the big beefy frontline protector type, this is a great way to protect your ally. Bonus trick: If your bonded partner is a Champion and the enemy targets them to avoid their Reaction, you can swap places to force the Champion’s Reaction to trigger.
- (GG): Mechanically advantageous polycule. Change all of those bonded partner only feats to target anyone in your party.
- (GG): For your ally it’s free out of turn movement that doesn’t trigger Reactions. If you want some silly positioning tricks, this is quite useful. It doesn’t even require you to be strong. You could be a +0 Strength Witchwarper throwing your equally sized Minotaur Soldier partner 40 feet.
- (GG): Donate 6 (or 8 if the target is your bond) hit points to the target each round. Depending on relative health bars and defenses, this could be useful.
- (GG): Change it from being an extra Hero Point each day to an extra Hero Point every hour.
- (GG): So long as you’re rolling the same skill as your partner, this can be used to greatly improve your initiative. Note that this is used after rolling, so you can see if it’s helpful before using it. More importantly the trigger is not “when you roll initiative” so it also does not interfere with any Free Actions that trigger at that time.
- (GG): Add Persistent Damage to your breath weapon. Note that if you have Powerful Exhalation and your weapon is Acid or Fire, then the persistent damage of those Critical Specialization effects stack.
Level 17
- (GG): A once per hour teleport to your bonded partner so long as you’re on the same planet is pretty good as long as you’re spending enough time planetside to get use out of this.
- (GG): Huge size once per day. It’s Enlarge without the Clumsy debuff. Shame it takes so long to be available.
- (GG): Assuming you took every breath feat, this creates a 30-foot cone of area denial that lasts a minute and recharges in 1d4 rounds. At worst you can place down three zones at a time if a fight drags long enough.
