Pathfinder Player Companion: Heroes of the Darklands (PFRPG)

It's always better to focus on the best parts of a book rather than what doesn't work well. The best parts are what will get used, after all! This book has enough fun stuff for a five-star rating in my book, although four stars would also be fair.

Fungal Pilgrim what pushed this from four to five stars for me, and I'll admit to some personal bias. First time I've seen a Wild Shape trade that I'd solidly consider. You could get a template on your summons, but modifying your animal companion is the really cool option. Lassie gets to host a brain fungus. At first, it trades movement and dexterity for strength, constitution, a ton of immunities, darkvision, and more natural armor. At tenth level, it now provides you with an unlimited supply of free scaling-DC poison (weak effect, but easy to hide in food and the like), and at fourteenth, it gets a fun poison AoE. As a capstone, it can make make temporary fungal zombie slaves out of weak enemies. Getting the immunities of plant type for yourself is gravy. I know that one review has limited influence, but I'd love to see more creepy fungal stuff!

Blightseeker Alchemist is a great archetype that gets debuffing bombs that stack with bomb modifying discoveries. This is nice design-wise, because it allows for much more flexible and enjoyable battlefield control and debuff builds. It's also a very stackable archetype, so you can mix and match!

Demon-Sworn Witch archetype is an evil-powers-for-(optionally)-good-or-neutral-ends deal, which we really haven't seen much of. Your soul may be toast after you die, but it's not going to screw with your alignment in the meantime to be using shady powers you don't understand. Throwing on some nontlethal damage to ALL hexes is a cool design touch to push towards the darker hexes, but it's low enough that you can still buff or heal allies if you need. Evil-but-subservient familiar that can be (expensively) raised with its internal spellbook intact is also a really nice perk. While it's not one I have a personal interest in, archetypes where you can immediately think of at least two players who'd love them are well worth mentioning.

Beastkin Berserker is a nice complement to Mooncursed Barbarian. It gives you a range of forms rather than focusing on just one, and focuses on the animal form rather than providing a hybrid form. While they each have pros and cons, between the two, players now have better choices.

Psychic Marauder is the last of my stand-out archetypes, and probably ranked second for me. Catches charisma-based up with wisdom-based when it comes to saves, and generates an aura of confusion that isn't always on (if anybody like Psychedelia, but didn't want to be responsible for a bunch of peasant deaths everywhere they go). While there's a non-lawful requirement, the penalties for becoming lawful aren't overly steep, and you can continue using taking levels in the archetype.

Speaking of psychics, Animus Mine is an amazingly fun spell. Booby-trap your own mind. Somebody tries to mess with it, and the mine goes off in their face. (Well, slightly behind their face.) The upgraded version can even protect you from whatever they were trying to do.

There are some good mundane items (like blasting jelly), a fun magical item to bend oozes to your will, and some traits that DO something rather than give numeric skill or caster level bonuses. Additionally, I've skipped over some archetypes for classes I'm not big on, so there may be more options that are worth five stars in your view!

(Grumpy rant time. The book has enough good stuff for five stars, and stuff that didn't live up to my personal expectations formed from half a sentence in the product description shouldn't take away from that.)

Since reviews are looked at for future work, I want to mention the Blightburner archetype for kineticist. I love the class, love the idea of element-specific archetypes, and I want to see more of both! I'm only including this bit because I'd love more kineticist material. But the archetypes should pay more attention to what's fun in the class and what it needs to keep to make it good.

Earth's kinetic defense is really cool for shrugging off damage, and pretty much the only reason I consider it over the more utility-focused elements like aether, water, and air. The archetype trades that away for a completely burn-dependent trivial retaliation damage setup. At minimum to seem about fair, that damage would need to be as high as the DR I just lost.

Kineticist also needs accuracy boosters for physical attacks and damage boosters for elemental attacks. The size bonuses to stats help with this, and also (equally importantly) offset some of the burn taken by boosting constitution. The class is pretty tightly balanced, and has few ways to use items to improve itself. The archetype trades those size bonuses out to provide scaling that its kinetic defense probably should have included by default.

Finally, make useful, fun trades. If I'm a radiation kineticist, I want to be able to shoot people with radiation! Apart from the aura mentioned above, the archetype allows me to… touch somebody for one nonlethal damage per minute as long as I keep touching them? Everything else requires radioactive materials to be present, which is at MOST 5% of the time in the <1% of campaigns that have it at all. And the net effect is that I can save burn by hanging out in radioactive areas, and spend burn so that I can hang out in radioactive areas. Super-specific abilities should also include general applications.

Lots of stuff in this Companion, both mechanical (which is normal) and story (which is a bit more unusual). Of particular interest are the new psychic tricks, notably the Animus Mine (trouble with mind-readers and enchanters? No more) and the Psychic Marauder archetype, first psychic archetype since the class was released.

Of course, plenty of other things, including the Demonsworn Witch (have a demonic pact without being evil) and the Beastkin Barbarian (turn into a Triceratops!). Good stuff all around.

As someone who does not subscribe to the PC line, as I do not play in person and thus have no use for physical softcover books in my cramped living space, I find this to be another disappointment in a long string of them.

The product page discussion hyped this book, and I bought it under those pretenses. I thought that the Vermin Rider would be useable, oe that the Darklantern wouldn't be absolute garbage which can leave you a drooling vegetable with Self-Inflicted Wis damage as a class feature.

I don't know why I thought that. Vigilante is such a horribly supported class - pretty much all of its archetyped are absolutely awful and its class featured are horribly situational. The Darklantern only compounds that.

The Vermin Rider is just plain awful unless you are a small creature and have the luxury of weighing ~22lbs. None, and I mean none of the allowed Vermin are strong enough to be used as a medium creature mount unless you are basically basically just boned but somehow have strength in the late teens to early 20s. Not even after their 4th level adjustment are they rideable.

It does nothing to adress this, or the fact that Vermin companions are absolutely awful since they have garbage stats on top of the fact that they get no skills, and no feats. You're basically forced to play Human (for Eye for Talent in order to make them useable). Don't pick this arçhetype. Play a Hunter instead where you basically have the same BAB when flanking and 6th level spellcasting.

I am not even going to go into how awful the Kineticist is (you are forced to take the WORST Elemental Defense, for starters) as it is basically a known fact that the Kineticist's first party support is plain awful. This does nothing to impress.

The Beastkin Berserker sounds good on paper, but don't be fooled. If you actually look at the Beastiary your options are basically Dinosaurs. You have only as much time in beast form as rage rounds, and the non-dinosaur options suggested by the fluff are awful. You're basically forced to pick the "best" form 2-3 levels before you can actually use it. What? You care about flavor, or you wanted a full BAB class to have meaningful utility? Too bad, because the archetype "doesn't trade much" for what it gets.

Save your money. Don't buy this disappointing Player's Companion, and maybe next year we will get some content that is better designed.