Step beyond reality as we know it! Pathfinder Player Companion: Plane-Hopper's Handbook offers new tools for explorers brave enough to venture into the unknown—whether to abandoned cities created by dead gods, worlds where the ground is made of forsaken souls, or even stranger realms. Add planar allies, magic, or heritage to your adventures and infuse them with the power of the planes!
Inside this book you'll find:
Five new eidolon subtypes for the unchained summoner, including dualistic aeons, radiant eidolons from the Positive Energy Plane, and ever-shifting storykin eidolons!
Alternate racial traits, favored class bonuses, and racial feats for races with origins tied to the Great Beyond, such as aphorites, duskwalkers, and ganzis!
Player options and equipment for characters who walk the planes, from hellish style feats to spell-enhancing planar shards to the planar rifter gunslinger archetype!
This Pathfinder Player Companion is intended for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Pathfinder campaign setting, but it can easily be incorporated into any fantasy world.
ISBN-13: 978-1-64078-071-2
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The Plane-Hopper’s Handbook is a 32-page softcover companion to the Planar Adventures hardcover that Paizo released as the final “big” book for Pathfinder First Edition. Since Second Edition had already been announced, Planar Adventures was intentionally “crunch-light”. But The Plane-Hopper’s Handbook is full of options like new archetypes, feats, traits, spells, and more for players interested in having their characters adventure on other planes. Not everything in the book nails a perfect landing, but overall it’s a solid product and worth purchasing if a campaign looks headed in an off-Golarion direction.
We’ll start with some general notes. The cover isn’t my favourite, as it puts something uninteresting in the foreground (a character looking at their hands, and another tugging on them) and the really cool thing (a gate to another world!) in the background with a colour scheme that makes it hard to make out. This cover art is reprinted, sans text, as the inside back cover. The inside front cover is . . . Well, I’m not really sure—I guess some sort of artistic representation of how some of the planes relate to one another. The full-colour interior artwork is fantastic though—Paizo’s interior art is better than a lot of companies manage to get for the cover of their books. The book has a page for the table of contents and two pages for an introduction. The introduction is a sort of series of one-sentence overviews of each of the planes, and isn’t particularly useful. However, it does have three new traits, and they’re pretty good in that they help characters acclimatize or navigate the planes. The body of the book is divided into nine sections—and yes, I do have all day, and we will go through them one by one!
PLANAR TRAVELERS (6 pages): This section starts with a good explanation of various ways to reach the planes (and get back home), and then moves on to summaries of two planar organisations: the Blackfire Adepts and the Riftwardens. The section has, of all things, a new archetype for gunslingers (“Planar Rifter”)—it’s really cool in that their bullets can open interdimensional portals! The section also includes an occultist archetype (“Planar Harmonizer”—looks okay), several new arcanist exploits, and then a set of really powerful style feats.
PLANE-HOPPING EQUIPMENT (2 pages): This section starts with a couple of different equipment packages for planar adventurers, which is a clever idea. It then introduces several new material power components for spellcasters. My favourite thing in the section is a new vehicle, the planar carriage--a vehicle capable of travelling through the planes, but with a set of specific limitations that makes it a great plot convenience without becoming overpowered. I could envision a whole campaign centered around low-level PCs gaining access to a planar carriage but being given responsibilities across myriad dimensions.
PLANE-HOPPING MAGIC (2 pages): This section contains a couple of good general utility spells. It then provides some aasimar- and tiefling-specific spells, which I’m not a huge fan of as those races are already overpowered to begin with, and don’t exactly need more game support.
APHORITES (2 pages): New to me, aphorites are a sort of free-willed, more individualistic versions of axiomites, and a playable PC race. This section provides them with alternate racial traits, several new feats, and some favoured class options.
DUSKWALKERS (2 pages): Another new playable race, duskwalkers sound interesting—souls given a single, second chance at life because their first life ended too soon. As with aphorites, this section has several new options. I really like the set of origin feats.
GANZIS (2 pages): Ganzis are mortals infused with chaos. The section includes a (somewhat incoherent) new archetype for paladins (“Chaos Knight), some “expanded oddities” for the race (fun flavour, but mechanics are small, forgettable flat bonuses), and some favoured class options.
PLANAR SCIONS (4 pages): This section is a bit of a grab-bag. It introduces alternate elemental heritages for oreads, ifrits, undines, and sylphs, but I’m not a big fan--a lot of complication to the setting for little gain. Gathlains gets several new feats representing titles in the court of the fey--they have story prerequisites, which is relatively rare. Finally, shabti (no idea) get a set of alternate racial traits and favoured class options.
PLANAR ALLIES (4 pages): Several new eidolon subtypes are introduced here; I’ve never played a summoner, but many of these looks really cool. Next, new elemental-themed archetypes are added for animal companions. There’s then some “planar mentor feats” that offer up some interesting story possibilities if selected with the cooperation of the GM.
DEMIPLANES (4 pages): Demiplanes are more specialised or unique off-shoots of the major planes. In this section, some new character options related to demiplanes are introduced. There’s a series of spells tied to the Akashic Record, which I like in concept but they all end up pretty underpowered. Worshippers of Desna get a series of feats related to the demiplane Cynosure, and these are pretty cool: they allow non-spellcasters to teleport and plane shift! For the Dimension of Dreams, we get several new lucid dreaming feats. Pathfinder Society devotees will note some feats and a spell related to the Hao Jin Tapestry, and anyone who has played through the very well-regarded module The Harrowing will find a new eidolon archetype. Some fun stuff in this section.
To sum up, The Plane-Hopper’s Handbook is like most Player Companions in that it offers a mix of really good options and a few clunkers. But overall, there’s more gold than dross here, and the writing and artwork are strong. I’d recommend it.
Time to Hop, Skip, and Jump Your way Through The Planes.
A good solid book with some great options for the plane-touched races. Though I really wish the kineticist wild talents didn't require the planar infusion feat since the class is already strongly connected to the plane that you get your power from.
Woo hoo! I'll take all of the planar books that I can get. This must mean there are some heavy multi-dimensional shenanigans going on in an upcoming adventure.
While I deeply appreciate that folks like my work and want to see more of it, I don't have any input in how freelancers are solicited for books (beyond occasionally obnoxiously asking to write on certain topics, which sometimes works but not always).
The book may already have authors selected (and Paizo has a veritable stable of super talented folks both in-house and freelancers), or it may even be written already and well into development. Of course if it isn't, sure I'd be open to it, but let's please steer talk here back to the book itself and what might be in it and what you want to see therein potentially, rather than talking about me.
I have been quite pleasantly surprised by the content of recent Player Companions in spite of their dreadful titles and apparently boring themes. This one's title gives me great hope :-D
Also, everyone should read Bogleech's Awful Hospital. Like a lot of webcomics, it started as half-random silly doodling. Both the art and the writing ramped up fast and now it's grown into this amazing, brilliant, gross, funny, moving, bizarre, surreal... thing. (And, to keep it on topic, the main character is absolutely a plane hopper. Just a super involuntary one.)
I wonder if this book will have a truly planar paladin archetype. Don't get me wrong, Faithful Wanderers are a great archetype, and work well in the Abyss (or the Worldwound, for that matter), but are bit to focused on one plane to function as a more generalist planeswalker.
I wonder if this book or planar adventures will have a time traverser. We saw the chronomancers from legacy of the first world, but I want to see a machine, item, or class option that can explore or cross the vast dunes and sands of the dimension of time. Use technology or magical energies to enter, harness, and explore that uniquely hazardous realm of reality. Note that navigating the dimension of time and going back in your own timestream should not be easily possible. Landing in a different timeline is more likely, or making a quick quantum leap to evade danger is more likely to happen in game, but still.
While unofficial, Adam Daigle has been kind enough to take a stab at what Fear-baby-blooded tieflings would look like, in case the book doesn't include them.
Maybe this book will have expanded rules for those planar-infused feats from Planar Adventures:)
Hopefully as more than "get an SLA once a day" they were in PA. I'd like to see more conduit feats (which actually did interesting things a reasonable number of times per day), particularly would like to see some meta ones that interact with how many conduit feats you have (though I understand it's far too late to do more than hope for them)
AWESOME! a positive energy based summoner archetype, now if I could only get a positive energy based sorcerer bloodline and kineticist archetype. I would be fine with loosing the benefits of elemental overflow and only getting a positive energy blast if I could get channeling, lay on hands, and mercies.
Also new alternate racial traits and racial feats are always welcome.
People of the Wastes has the Elysiokineticist archetype, my personal favorite. Positive energy kineticist, that one.
Wood has a positive blast, though I was certain you knew that already...you did, right? If so, sorry to be Captain Obvious.
Ah, this has been updated!
RADIANT Eidolons?! FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!