How ancestries work

Rifts' Racial Character Classes (RCCs) become ancestries in Riftfinder. You pick an ancestry and a class, the same as any Starfinder 2e character — your ancestry is who you are, your class is what you do.

The framework

Ancestries use the standard SF2e framework:

• Attribute boosts at character creation (no flaws).
• Ancestry Hit Points (6 / 8 / 10), added to your class HP.
• Size and Speed (25 feet baseline).
• Traits, languages, and any senses (low-light, scent, and so on).
• Heritages chosen at level 1 (two per ancestry for now).
• Ancestry feats at levels 1, 5, 9, 13, and 17.

The Rifts flavor lives in each ancestry's signature abilities and feats — a Houndkin's supernatural scent, a Psivore's energy-feeding — not in inflating the chassis. An RCC's specialness is expressed through its feats, the same way the classes capture the Rifts feel without breaking the encounter math.

Keeping RCCs balanced

Rifts RCCs run from near-human to outright monster. SF2e ancestries are balanced against each other, so a literal conversion would seat a monster next to a humanoid at level 1 — the ancestry-side version of the megadamage problem the classes solve. SF2e math takes precedence:

• Human-tier RCCs become standard ancestries. Houndkin, Psivore, True Atlantean, and the like are built as ordinary ancestries balanced against the Human baseline. This covers the great majority of playable races.
• Monster-tier RCCs are a special case (below) — not seated as ordinary ancestries.

The dragons: an ancestry fused to a class

A dragon isn't a humanoid with a strong heritage — playing one is a whole-character commitment. Riftfinder handles this by making the Dragon a fused ancestry-and-class package:

• The Dragon ancestry is locked to the Dragon class, and vice versa — you can't take one without the other.
• That lets the dragon's growth (size, breath weapon, flight, supernatural resilience, shapeshifting, megadamage durability) be paced across 20 levels by the class, while the ancestry carries the immutable draconic traits.
• It keeps the table honest: a dragon player spends both their ancestry and their class on being a dragon, rather than getting a dragon's power plus a full class on top.

The dragons are a dedicated future build — ancestry and class together.

Sensing the supernatural

Several RCCs sense magic, psionics, and the supernatural — Houndkin were engineered for it, Psivores do it innately. Those detection abilities carry the psionic trait per Magic & Psionics: they're psychic senses, distinct from arcane detection, and interact with anything that keys off psionic.

Available now

More core human-tier RCCs (True Atlantean and others) and the dragons are on the way.