The Genius Guide to the Time Thief (PFRPG) PDF (based on
5
reviews)
Super Genius Games
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Time marches relentlessly onward like grains of sand falling through an hourglass, once each has passed the threshold, it will never pass that way again. But time precognition, chronomancy, and time travel are common themes in fantasy fiction, as are the notions of fate, destiny, and even the timestream itself. Yet such things are rarely dealt with in most games.
The reason is obvious time is a tricky, extremely powerful, wibbly-wobbly concept. Even in a game where players with modern day sensibilities are asked to put themselves in the roles of medieval characters and process the mechanics of magic, psionics, and infinite planes of reality, it seems beyond the pale to ask them to un-know certain sets of experiences simply because time travel has caused them to cease to exist, and to keep track of what is and isn't true when jumping back and forth between timestreams and potential realities.
Yet, there's a reason that chronomancy is one of the topics that fans most often request supplements for. The idea of playing with time is fun!
The Genius Guide to the Time Thief presents a new base class, the time thief a character whose abilities all focus on various aspects of swimming the wrong way up the timestream, if only for a little ways. She plays with probability, can peer into the future to avoid bad decisions, and steal time from her own (and others') futures to fuel her reality-bending powers. Most of all, she's just a lot of fun to play.
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This pdf is 10 pages long, 2/3 of a page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving 8 1/3 pages of content for the Time Thief, a class I should have reviewed a long, long time ago, so let’s remedy my oversight.
The new Time Thief base-class gets d8, 6+Int skills, ¾ BAB, good ref and will saves and no spellcasting. The basic signature ability of the Time Thief enables her to use slices of time, so-called time motes, to add a scaling bonus to rolls, a swift action or act in an surprise round. The basic pool is 3+ class level and additional usages of time motes are unlocked via the progression of the class, enabling her to lessen damage, use the motes defensively and even grant herself move actions. Every even level starting at second, the Time Thief also gets a temporal talent from a list of 9, which range from evasion or even steal the fate (i.e. penalize) an enemy.
The Time Thief has further options to customize the class in her usage of Aevum, e.g. offering the option to learn how to, like in the recent Prince of Persia games, rewind her personal time. High-level Time Thieves, of course, can learn powerful ways to deal with their enemies, be it the option to learn time stop or temporal stasis via Aevum. Where there are talents, there are advanced talents and the Time Thief is no exception – we are introduced to 8 advanced talents, including butterfly effect-like manipulations of the past, divination-like glances into the future and run between blinks of time, granting additional mobility.
The capstone ability Time Killer (Project Pitchfork, anyone?) sees her essentially immortal and freed of negative age effects and significantly expands her ability to use aevum and can spend it faster and use 2 of them per round.
The pdf closes with a whole page devoted to helping you integrate the Time Thief in your campaign and offers a great idea: Chronal necromancers who seek to reanimate dead timelines. Sold.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches, layout adheres to the three-column standard. The full-color artwork should be commended, as we actually get larp-style photos of a rather beautiful model who poses for the Time Thief in rather revealing, pseudo-oriental costumes without being gaudy or cheap – I like this experiment quite a bit. I really like modular classes that have a lot of options to choose from and the Time Thief serves as a prime example of excellent class-design. A complex concept that is hard to balance not only gets a balanced representation, but a rather cool one at that. To everyone who saw my personal top-ten-list of 2010 this will come as no surprise, my final verdict for this splendid class will be 5 stars and the Endzeitgeist seal of approval, my only criticism remaining that I’d love to see more love for the Time Thief and that there are no bookmarks.
Endzeitgeist out.
Once I managed to get myself to stop staring at the class art....
I finally read over the class thoroughly. There are a lot of things I like about it. There is a decent selection of quality class abilities, allowing for more customization. Combine that with the good skills(6+Int Mod) & you've got a decent class.
I do find it a bit lacking in the damage output department, though. All of the damage abilities use the same points you use for other abilities, while delivering sub par damage. That is the only weak point of the class, but it does weigh heavily on it.
That said, a few of the right feats(most of which are in the core book) can remedy the damage problem, as can playing strategically. So, all in all, I'd give this one a 4 out of 5. Definitely worth purchasing.
After getting my first experience with this class at my table this weekend I have to say this is really a great product. The player using this class is normally not the most inspired or descriptive, but in this session he couldn't wait to describe what he was doing. It helped that he is a prince of persia fan (both the films and all the video games), but that is the idea here, to inspire people looking to bring that kind of flavor to their game.
And this product definately does that, the mechanics and the flavor combine really well to provide a fun feel for the class. It fits neatly into the skills role in any party, and though it doesnt have the offense a rogue does with sneak attack, it isn't punchless, and has some fun special abilities providing solid debuffs.
The best praise I can provide for this product is the fact that the player had fun playing it, and I had fun dming it. So whether you are a prince of persia fan or just looking for a new take on 'theif' this products worth a look.
This pdf coonsists of 10 pages. 2/3 of the first page is the cover and one page is for the OGL.
The Time Thief is a skill-based character with medium BAB progression, light armour and 6 skill points. As you might expect, her skill list overlaps to a large extent with the Rogue's.
The Time Thief's abilities stem from an ability to borrow time from elsewhere rather than travel through time. This enables the Time Thief to redo actions, take move actions as if they were swift actions, take twenty on skills without a time penalty and, at high levels, age opponents or 'cast' time stop.
Like a Rogue, the Time Thief gets a talent at every even level to customise the character. These can be used to take thigns like trapfinding, allowing them to serve as a rare rogue replacement in this area, or to improve their time manipulaiton abilities. The capstone ability is immunity to aging effects, which is awesomely flavourful but will not be of much utility in most games.
As with all Genius Guides, it includes a one page section on incorporating the Time Thief into an existing campaign, which is always helpful.
This gets 5 stars as I can't think of a way it could be imporved within the confines of the product. That said, if Super Genoius decide to expand on the idea with a full fledged chronomancer I won't be too upset.