Your Personalized Armory

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

I had the pleasure of working on this month's highly anticipated Pathfinder Player Companion release, Adventurer's Armory 2. It had been a few years since I developed a player companion, and I was excited for the chance to tackle the follow-up to the most popular product in the line to date, Adventurer's Armory. No pressure, right? Luckily, I wasn't going it alone. As discussed last week, the inimitable Ron Lundeen did a thorough pass on the book before it ever hit my desk, leaving me that much more time to really delve into the most exciting elements of the project.

My favorite is the armor and weapon modifications system that appears in the Implements of War section. This system allows a player to customize his or her weapons and armor in more versatile and less expensive ways than adding magical enhancement bonuses and plus-based special abilities, and first appeared in Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Faction Guide back in 2010.

We expanded on the handful of modifications that appeared in that book, with six weapon modifications and eight armor modifications, allowing a player to increase a suit of armor's maximum Dexterity stat, treat a weapon as belonging to a different fighter weapon group, or grant a weapon a new special quality like brace, disarm, nonlethal, or trip, among many other customizations.

Each of these modifications comes with a drawback in addition to the cost of adding the modification to the piece of equipment. A modified weapon requires a level of proficiency one level higher than normal to wield, turning a simple weapon into a martial weapon and a martial weapon into an exotic one. This means that characters with automatic proficiency with all martial weapons will get the most out of the system, and it further lets fighters, cavaliers, rangers, and paladins customize their load-outs to fill more specialized narrative and tactical niches. Each armor modification comes with its own unique drawback, such as increasing the armor check penalty or adding extra weight to already heavy armor.

In both cases, however, a variety of new feats allow player characters to ignore drawbacks, more quickly apply modifications on the fly, or add more than one to the same piece of equipment.

What weapon or suit of armor are you most excited to apply a modification to? What new weapons and armor from Adventurer's Armory 2 do you think will lend themselves best to this new subsystem? Let us know in the comments below, and maybe if we ever do an Adventurer's Armory 3 we'll take them to even finer levels of customization.

Smiths the world over are prepared to customize your favorite gear.
Illustration by Benjamin Widdowson

Mark Moreland
Developer