SilvercatMoonpaw's page

Somehow this one feels lacking in comparison to ones like Unicorns and Wights. Maybe it's because as shapeshifters doppelgangers don't have the same kind of identity to hang more than "changes a lot" on them.

The base race goes about changing by reading someone's mind (you likely won't be able to do this more than once a day, unless you get a source of Psychic Energy). The paragon class then takes this, and adds making a check to determine if you can mimic one or more of the target's various racial, class, or other features based on how much you beat the check by. A lot of the document is taken up by telling you what happens to various class features when mimiced, which kind of falls flat for me because there's no guarantee I'm going to be using some or many of these classes: wish the traits had been made genericised versions.

If you could find a way to give the mind-reading/shape-assuming race power to anyone you could use the paragon class as a good "master of disguise" class.

Not quite as good as Wights:

While vampires are more iconic, the need to keep track of blood, which is either going to require some awkward feeding arrangements or doing not-so-nice-stuff, plus my feeling that some of the family curses aren't as bad compared to others, knock this down a star for me.

To explain:
Vampires have to deal 2 Con damage per 8 hours they're active. You can't overfeed unless you have a feat; you can store blood in containers, but not forever. The paragon class requires reasonably-common blood feedings because pretty much all of its features require spending blood-derived points.
There are several different "families" of vampires, each of which has one part of the full bestiary's or myth's aversions or weaknesses: can't enter a place that has some thing they don't like, need to rest on a bit of home soil, seem "off" or "creepy", have some kind of aversion to light or daytime, can't stand mirrors, and have a weakness to wooden-stke-like weapons. The need for dirt to sleep on seems very awkward for an adventurer, whereas aversion to mirrors doesn't seem too bad.

The book does recommend that at least low-level vampires should stay in a city, and provides a way to abstract hunting humans, but compared to how the Wight race only had to do that if they went a little nuts it feels restrictive for my tastes.

It should be noted that this is about wights only and not general undead. That's my fault for expecting too much, but I wanted to mention it so it doesn't happen to anyone else. The product does seem a little light compared to some of the other offerings in the "In The Company of" series.

It's a great product otherwise: I think the modification of the undead type is good for use in homebrew, and the cavlier archetype makes me smile after having rode skeletal horses in World of Warcraft.