One of the customization options available to a Starfinder character is a theme. This can range from being an ace pilot to an athlete, cultist, icon, priest, street rat, and more. While theme benefits are generally modest, and are only granted four times over the course of a character’s career, they can be an important part of what defines a character’s background, goals, and methodology. Even when most other large-scale choices between two characters are the same, themes can help set them apart. There is a big difference between a human soldier priest, and a human soldier bounty hunter.

Sometimes, even though you you have a theme that’s perfect for your character, it turns out there are some abilities from other themes that are also great matches for your character. There’s no way in the core Starfinder rules to pick up abilities from multiple themes. That’s a weird limitation, actually, given that there’s nothing to stop a character from taking multiple character classes, and in some cases it’s easy to take two or even three different archetypes.

But, at the same time, you’d never want to have someone dipping a tow in a second theme to be better at it, at any level, than a character who selects it as a primary theme. Luckily, with the archetype rules available as a way to add new abilities to a character (at the cost of giving up some normal class features, to keep things balanced), and the highly-regimented nature of themes, it’s easy enough to create a balanced option for characters who really want to access some of the things locked behind a second, or perhaps even a third, theme. Unlike ThemeTypes, a set of options I created that combine theme and archetype into a single additional powerful concept you can add to a character, the InterThemed archetype is a way to use the archetype rules to access parts of multiple themes.

(This of course leads to the question: “Could you use themes to access some archetype abilities?” Come back Wednesday to see the answer!)

InterThemed Archetype

The narrative of your life is too complex (or, some might claim, muddled)

Dual Theme: At 2nd level, you select a theme other than your own. You gain the benefits granted by that theme at 1st level, except you do not gain any ability score increase, and if the theme grants you an untyped bonus to a skill you have already received an untyped bonus to, you do not gain the additional bonus from the selected theme. You are considered to have the selected theme for purposes of prerequisites.

Complex Theme: At 4th level, you may select an additional theme and receive benefits from it’s 1st level, as with the dual theme archetype ability. This is an optional ability, and you can choose to receive the normal class feature your class gains at this level, rather than take this archetype benefit.

Deep Theme: At 9th level, you gain the benefit granted at 6th level by the theme you selected with this archetype at 2nd level.

Emergent Theme: At 12th level, if you selected a second theme at 4th level, you can receive the ability granted at 6th level by that theme. If you did not select a second theme at 4th level, you may do so now, as outlined in the complex theme ability. This is an optional ability, and you can choose to receive the normal class feature your class gains at this level, rather than take this archetype benefit.

Developed Theme: At 18th level, you gain the benefit granted at 12th level by the theme you selected with this archetype at 2nd level.

Patreon

Writing things like this is work, and it takes time from my other paying projects. If you got any use out of this article, or have enjoyed any of my content, please consider supporting my Patreon to cover the cost of my doing it. You can join for the cost of a cup of coffee a month.