Iconic Heroes Set 4, Part 1

Friday, July 17, 2015

Last week, WizKids announced the release dates for the next two Pathfinder Battles Iconic Heroes boxed sets of premium-quality prepainted plastic figures for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game or the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. This week, I'd like to take a closer look at three of the figures from Iconic Heroes Set 4, which features familiar faces from the Advanced Class Guide and Ultimate Combat.

I want to start with Lirianne, Half-Elf Gunslinger today, because I had a chance to review the paint master for this figure in-hand last week, and I was really impressed with the overall improvement since Lirianne's first miniature, which appeared in the Skull & Shackles set.

The original Lirianne is a perfectly acceptable miniature, even a good one when you consider the amount of detail on her outfit. But I was never completely thrilled with the way her face came out, and overall the pose wasn't terribly exciting. With the Iconic Heroes Set 4 version, Lirianne appears to be aiming or even firing her gun, and overall the pose is much more dynamic and interesting. Coupled with the superior paint jobs that are the hallmark of Iconic Heroes sets, this figure is well-positioned to end up looking really spectacular.

The iconic skald Hakon has always held a special place in my heart. I had a chance to write his "Meet the Iconics" backstory, where I not-so-subtly made him the brother of my long-running character in Paizo Creative Director James Jacobs's office Pathfinder campaign. So, in a way, Hakon is family, and it's been very important to me that he get an amazing miniature!

I'm pleased to report that WizKids definitely delivered on that score. Of the six paint masters we reviewed in-hand last week, Hakon was my second favorite (after Shardra, whom we'll see up close next week). Hakon definitely works as a skald, as a barbarian, as a ferocious villain, or really as just about any axe-wielding maniac.

Last up this week is our iconic swashbuckler, Jirelle. When Wayne Reynolds's original art first came in to Paizo I was thrilled and terrified, all at the same time. Thrilled, because here we had a fully clothed, fully ass-kicking woman warrior. Terrified because her costume was so complex I wondered how we were ever going to do justice to it in miniature form. I shouldn't have worried. That was before the advent of WizKids's super-premium Iconic Heroes sets, which are more than up to the challenge. Once again, the paint master for Jirelle looks wonderful, and is a great representation of the character and the digital sculpt revealed above.

"Hey," I can hear some of you asking. "If you've already seen paint masters, how come we only get to see digital sculpts? Why are you holding out on the real thing, Mona?"

That's a fair question, and the answer is that the final figures in all cases have sooooo many tampos—stamped-on details like face tattoos, clothing adornments, and so on—that the paint masters wouldn't reveal an accurate look at what the final figures will look like. They're very much a part of the process, in this case, and I want to wait until I have samples with the tampos finished before we show off actual minis. In the meantime, the digital sculpts I've revealed today do a very good job of showing what we're shooting for.

Iconic Heroes Set 4 hits stores and ships to subscribers in November. I'll reveal the last three figures in the set next week, and after that we're deep into Gen Con territory, and to see new Pathfinder Battles figures you'll have to track me down personally on the convention floor, get them as a $50+ sales incentive at the Paizo booth, or play one of the Pathfinder Society Specials.

Until then, I remain,

Erik Mona
Publisher

Unchained Skills and Feats

Thursday, April 9, 2015

If classes are the main chassis of a character, skills and feats are its nuts and bolts. When they let us designers loose in Pathfinder Unchained, it's only natural that we wanted to play around with how the nuts and bolts attach, and even try changing the shapes of those nuts and bolts entirely! In Chapters 2 and 3 of Pathfinder Unchained, there are not only several daring subsystems that play with feats, there so many different options for restructuring skills that it's easy to lose yourself in all the possibilities. I've gathered some of the coolest tidbits from all those options to share with you today!

Starting with skills, the three major skills options each serve a different goal.

Illustration by Géraud Soulié

I Need More Skills to Flesh Out My Character
The background skills variant separates out certain skills as background skills as opposed to adventuring skills. It also adds some new background skills to the game, such as Lore, a very specific version of the Knowledge skill. To round it out, everyone gains 2 extra skill points to spend on background skills, no matter your class!

There Are Too Many Skills
The consolidated skills variant serves a somewhat opposite goal, combining current skill functionality into only 12 skills.

Assigning Skill Points Can Be Tough
The grouped skills variant makes it easier to assign skills, speeding up the level-up process. It also gives characters a middle tier of skills that they are pretty good at, rather than most characters having mostly max ranks, 1 rank, or no ranks.

As cool as the skill sections are, the sections involving feats are the showstoppers of today's blog!

Variant Multiclassing
Have you ever wanted to multiclass your character for flavor reasons—maybe pick up some bardic performances and versatile performance to represent the time you unexpectedly spent studying music one adventure—but then you realized that your character would be pretty significantly handicapped by taking those two levels in bard? It happens all the time, and it requires you to sacrifice something whichever choice you take. With the variant multiclassing option, you can choose a secondary class and trade out half your feats (3rd, 7th, 11th, 15th, and 19th) to instead gain a progression of special abilities based on which class you pick. Want to be a fighter who dabbles in divination magic such that he always acts on the surprise round or vexes his foes with hexes? You're covered. Want to be a druid who specializes in taking out dragons as her favored enemy or flies into a rage when the natural world is in danger? You've got that too. With variant multiclassing, you can open more combinations than ever before, without delaying your access to your main class's cool new features!

Stamina System
The stamina system offers new powers for every combat feat in the RPG line. Yes, you read that right: it specifically lists every combat feat in the whole line and then grants each feat new powers. Right from the start, the system offers options for you to just give the system to fighters or to give it to all martial characters, depending on your preference. Stamina is a new resource that allows martial characters to boost themselves and use their feats in new and exciting ways. It regenerates relatively quickly between battles, allowing you to enjoy an entirely new mindset to your daily exploration; a party of stamina-users benefits from hit and run guerilla tactics, emphasizing the value of mobility, stealth, and timing (as opposed to the mindset of "buff, buff, buff, speed through!"). Stamina lets you boost your effectiveness or change the rules of the feat in your favor. These special stamina powers are called combat tricks. While I'm sure that the ways to use stamina to boost your effectiveness will be quite popular (like Critical Focus, where under certain conditions, you can increase your critical multiplier, potentially multiple times if you roll high enough), I'm a fan of the combat tricks that let you retroactively apply an effect (like declare a Stunning Fist after you already know your attack connected), and my absolute favorites are the ones that let you trick your opponent through devious tactical play. For instance, the Combat Style Master combat trick allows you to spend stamina to switch your styles as an off-turn free action. So you can lure people into attacking you and then suddenly be in Snake Style before they can even call off the attack! In the same vein, I also really enjoy the combat tricks that let you use your powers when you normally couldn't, since that has two cool psychological effects: not only can it present great "gotcha" moments, but once your enemy knows you can, say, spend stamina to take a second attack of opportunity against them from the same opportunity, it changes the way they view your threat, and it might allow you to control their actions without even spending your stamina!

Tune in next time to learn more about magic—specifically, the new scaling magic items in Pathfinder Unchained that grow with your character!

Mark Seifter
Designer

Meet the Iconics: Jirelle

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

Introducing the first of the Advanced Class Guide's new iconic characters, Jirelle the swashbuckler. While the complete rules for making your own swashbuckler characters debut in the Advanced Class Guide this August, Jirelle herself features in the our upcoming Free RPG Day adventure, Pathfinder Module: Risen from the Sands, available at participating game stores Saturday June 21st. Jirelle is also a playable character in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Skull & Shackles Base Set due in August.

Jirelle may have been born and raised on a ship, and she might call the Shackles her homeland, but she never considered herself a pirate, even if only to distance herself from the darkest part of her childhood: her mother.

Today, Jirelle is a friendly sort with a biting wit and a charming personality. She makes new friends as swiftly as she strikes with her rapier, and while she has a flair for the dramatic (why merely attack a foe when you can make a show of it with a twirl of the cape or a somersault or two?), she never favors ostentation or glory over the opportunity to help a friend in need. Jirelle understands that the strength of one's relationships with friends, allies, lovers, and family make one strong. It was her mother's failure to forge such bonds that allowed a young Jirelle to escape from a life that would have likely seen offered as sacrifice to the shark demon Ovonovo before the close of her thirteenth birthday.

On the subject of her mother or her ship, the Bloodcrow, the typically light-hearted half-elf grows serious. Jirelle does not share the secrets of her childhood with just anyone. As such, few know how she engineered the sinking of the Bloodcrow and the death of her wretched elven mother off the coast of Tempest Cay. Jirelle often jokes that she befriends for life, with the playful, only slightly malicious glint in her eyes implying what might happen to those who would betray such friendship.

After escaping the Bloodcrow, Jirelle spent some time surviving as a street rat in the alleys of Drenchport. Armed with a fine rapier and clad in her her mother's magical cloak (the only two things she managed to escape the Bloodcrow's wreckage with), Jirelle kept every coin and bauble she earned in a thrice-locked chest she keeps well hidden and protected. At first, she'd hoped to save enough money to afford a move from the Shackles to distant Taldor, drawn by tales of a land where duels and extravagance and civility promised a better life. But when rumors of a strange, ghostly ship plying the sea-ways of the Shackles reached her—fearful stories of a vessel commanded by an imperious banshee and bound by undeath—Jirelle realized that in sinking the Bloodcrow she'd done the exact opposite of what she'd intended. Rather than spare the Shackles of a brutal pirate queen, she'd unleashed an even deadlier scourge upon the Fever Sea.

Today, Jirelle seeks the funds to someday finance a ship and crew of her own. She plans not to become a pirate—for a life of plunder and cruelty holds no appeal for the daring swashbuckler—but to finish the job she started on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. Jirelle knows she can't do this on her own, though. So she seeks true and able allies, knowing that only with bravery and trust will the Bloodcrow's days be numbered.

James Jacobs
Creative Director