This is our character for the playthrough, Sylvina, the Nature Godlike rogue. She's a pirate raider from the Deadfire Archipellago, and means to kick ass.

Pillars of Eternity (PoE) has no alignment, but she's basically going to be lawful evil as I see it - the ends will always justify the means for her own personal goals. She has a moral code of her own, but it doesn't mean that killing is wrong, just potentially another tool for her to use.

PoE also uses the basic 5e statblock, so with her dex of 20 she's insanely fast, and gets big bonuses to dodging enemy attacks, and gets 30% more actions than a characters with standard dex.

In PoE, rogue backstab damage works against any incapacitated enemy, as opposed to purely a 'you must do this from sneak/stealth', and the priest class has many ways of generating incapacitation, so that's my first real goal: recruit a priest to make life easy.

Here she is, decked out in her starter gear.

So there’s an interesting thing with loot in PoE; randomisation happens with containers as well as enemy loot tables.

Not every container has randomised loot, but some do, and the way it works is pretty interesting.

There is an example item that I know I want for my rogue, the Gloves of Manipulation. It’s a great magic item that gives bonuses of +1 to dexterity, and +2 to mechanics, a secondary skill that is really useful for picking locks and disarming traps, but also determines the distance from which traps can be observed.

These gloves can spawn in 5 specific containers only.

Easy, get to a container that can have them and save/reload until I get them right? Oh sweet summer child, if only it were that easy...

These containers also have their loot drawn from a table that is determined by the day of the month in-game. So we just wait for the correct day and go get our loot right? OH SWEET SUMMER CHILD.

The loot table for these containers is also offset by a random number of days!

Overall it just means you can find one of the correct containers, see what’s inside, figure out the offset and then reload and wait until the correct day, but this mechanic means that without using a guide of any sort you can go through multiple playthroughs without ever seeing some items, even if you loot every possible container.

Pretty neat! I haven’t done much research into other items like this, the Gloves of Manipulation were just one that popped out as useful due to the desire to have an utterly overpowered rogue, but I’ll keep an eye out for others!