Occult Adventures Class Preview: The Kineticist

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Illustration by Suzanne Helmigh

The kineticist is the odd girl out in Occult Adventures. All the other occult classes are spontaneous spellcasters, but the kineticist isn't a spellcaster. Instead the power of the elements surges through her, and she controls the fundamental building blocks of reality in her own way, using her own body as a conduit to unleash and shape raw bursts of power and to assist her in every aspect of her adventuring career. The kineticist class lets you play characters with strong elemental themes, just like those from all sorts of books, TV shows, movies, and other popular media. She can infuse both form (to change the shape and the delivery mechanism for her blasts) and substance (to add extra effects to her blast), making her blasts an extremely versatile weapon indeed in the hands of an experienced kineticist. The kineticist needs the Constitution to withstand those energies and the Dexterity to shape them, which also makes her an oddity among all the classes in the way she operates. She can use her powers at a baseline all day long, but she can also overclock them, pulling in more energy than her body can normally withstand to gain impressive short-term benefits and the lasting advantages of extra elemental energy coursing through her, but at a great cost to her durability.

In the playtest, I was lucky enough to have the most active playtesters for the kineticist, nearly more feedback than all five of the other classes combined, and I was able to work with those playtesters to refine the kineticist and add more options to open up more possibilities for each element. The final version not only has many more wild talent choices in her pages, she also gains about twice as many wild talents over the course of her career (split out between infusions and utility talents), as well as twice as many base skill points each level (4 instead of 2). This allows the kineticist to branch out and cover more areas instead of being super-specialized like in the playtest. In terms of what else is new, internal buffer grants her an ability to store a very small pool of extra energy to use instead of burning herself, and elemental overflow now provides more benefits than ever before, especially if you wind up taking large amounts of burn and begin taking on more and more elemental aspects within your own body. Infusion specialization now works on both types of infusion, so you don't have to pick between form and substance; whichever kind you use, it's reduced automatically. While the kineticist was always able to gather power in order to reduce the burn cost of her next blast, now she gains improvements at higher levels; a kineticist with the supercharge ability and a round to prepare can reduce the burn cost of her blast by a whopping 5! For reference, especially for those not involved in the playtest, that's enough to both empower the blast and double it, essentially shooting out two blasts for 1.5x damage!

Every single element has gotten something new and cool (and since there are new and cool universal talents that anyone can take, that adds even more options). Here's s little bit for each element (there are more for you to discover on your own!): Aether gains telekinetic invisibility, which lets you use strands of aether to dampen sound and refract light around yourself, potentially fooling sound-based blindsense like the echolocation spell. Air can gain evasion and can even haste the whole party by either spending your turn or taking burn to keep it active. Earth can create deadly areas of difficult terrain that cause reduced blast damage—and special substance effects of course!—to everyone inside everyone (pair with grappling infusion substance to make grasping hands of earth that hold them in place to take damage again and again). Fire can burn away an enemies buffs and has fan of flames, a cone-shaped blast available at 1st-level. Water can summon a tsunami to annihilate entire settlements.

Alright, whew! Too many goodies to describe them all, but let's move on to the archetypes. The kineticist archetypes are pretty high-impact, in that they can strongly alter the kineticist in a way that opens up whole new avenues of play. Much of that is thanks to the playtesters who desired alternate styles of play, allowing me to see what we needed most. In the end, I managed to fit five archetypes in there somehow, enough to cover many of the archetypes that playtesters wanted most of all. The blood kineticist gains mastery of blood and can injure a foe without an attack roll by twisting the blood within their body. Sounds good for a vampire, right? So I'll skip alphabetically to the overwhelming soul, which uses Charisma instead of Constitution and doesn't conflict with the blood kineticist; the overwhelming soul uses mind over matter to avoid burn, gaining some of the benefits of a kineticist who took a lot of burn through sheer focus. Overwhelming soul is perfect for a kineticist face character, or for players who don't want to handle the tactics and economy of burn, like a small group of the playtesters. Next up is elemental annihilator. This archetype is all about killing things with blasts, and she trades out all utility talents for increased combat boosts, free combat feats that ignore prerequisites, and a special form infusion that grants her a versatile stream of mixed melee and ranged attacks. The elemental ascetic combines monastic wisdom with elemental powers, adding elemental damage (and of course, the true power of the archetype: delicious extra substance effects like trip, entangle, stagger, and more) to every punch in his flurry of blows. Finally, the peaceful kinetic chirurgeon is the polar opposite of the elemental annihilator and the perfect archetype for a support healer kineticist, giving up infusions and blast-based metakinesis abilities to gain a large number of paladin mercies (1.5x as many as a paladin gets), metakinesis that affects her kinetic healer (like extra healing, healing that brings back a recently-dead target, and quickened healing), and a double size internal buffer that only works for healing. And remember, this healer heals a lot of hit points each time to a single target. Way more than a cure spell.

I hope you enjoy the kineticist and use her to make all the elemental-focused character builds you've only dreamed about playing until now, based on all sorts of books, TV shows, and movies. It's going to be a (kinetic) blast!

Mark Seifter
Designer

Meet the Iconics: Yoon

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Today, as part of our ongoing Meet the Iconics series, we introduce the next of the six new iconic characters featured in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Occult Adventures. This week we meet Yoon, the iconic kineticist!

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

Yoon always loved fire—the warmth, the color, the brilliant blaze. Fire always changed, and changed everything around it. Yoon could empathize. Fire was also always hungry—Yoon could empathize with that, too, as her family were immigrants in Minkai, and struggled to support themselves.

Not long after Yoon learned to walk, she learned to climb, and immediately took a shining to the rooftops of Oda. Her father only brought her to the city for the big festivals, and she wanted the best view to watch the fireworks celebrating the Lady of the North Star. Once, when she was climbing, Yoon fell, dropping into the river, and her father had to fish her out. Yoon coughed up a seemingly endless stream of water, and her grandmother scolded her, saying it would have been far worse if Yoon had hit the ground.

Yoon wasn't so sure. Just as fire had always been her friend, water had always been her enemy. All her life, it had taken her mother away on ships, for weeks or months at a time. And in the end, it refused to give her back.

Yoon's mother had been a brave warrior and explorer, and had told Yoon many fantastic tales of adventure and faraway places, primarily in the savage lands to the north. She also brought Yoon things, like the stuffed bear-owl creature named Gom-Gom, or the crooked stick used to play a strange northern game. Yet one day, her mother failed to return. Yoon and her father waited, growing more anxious as each week. When at last a messenger arrived and confirmed her mother's death battling siyokoys, a grief-stricken Yoon decided that no one else would ever call her by the same name her mother had. Forsaking her old name, she insisted on being referred to only by her mother's family name, the one her mother's adventuring companions had called her—Yoon.

Gom-Gom was the first to accept Yoon's new name. Eventually, even her grandmother gave in, though she continued to sniff at the impropriety. Yoon's grandmother had been a palace servant to the Shojinawa family once, and despite the fact that Yoon was determined to become a warrior like her mother, the old woman insisted on teaching her about things like poise, discipline, and self-control, arguing that they were just as important to a warrior as to a court scholar. Yoon didn't quite believe that, but did her best anyway, proving a quick and capable student.

Yoon's father fared worse. Still a loving, caring parent, he grew distant and sad after his wife's death, and spent more time muttering about things like imperial taxes and yakuza corruption. The new friends he made were constantly grouchy, and Yoon came to think of them privately as his Bitter Friends. They spent long evenings drinking and arguing in low voices, always careful to keep the windows closed and doors locked, even in the worst summer heat.

One night, as Yoon was once more watching fireworks in honor of the Lady of the North Star, her father went off to meet those friends. Yet even as the colored stars burst overhead, a new light blazed up to the east—a burning warehouse! Yoon went to watch the citizens fight the fire, but when she arrived, she found the place surrounded by imperial soldiers. Not only were they not helping put out the blaze, they were actively preventing those inside from fleeing. An uncomprehending Yoon wept to hear their cries, plugging her ears against the crunch of tetsubos on bone as the soldiers beat back burning men and women and their captain issued a proclamation about the punishment of Hwan rebels.

That's when Yoon saw her father.

He was in a knot of his Bitter Friends, blackened with ash, struggling to break through the ranks of soldiers. Even as Yoon called his name, she saw him fall beneath the soldiers' blows.

Screaming, Yoon raced for the line of soldiers. She might have gone unnoticed in the din, if not for the flaming board she scooped up and hurled at one of the soldiers, striking him in the helmet. As the man crumpled to the ground, several of his companions turned toward her. Yet as they advanced, truncheons raised, Yoon found her view suddenly blocked by her grandmother, wreathed in a snaking cloud of eerie black flames.

"Run, child!" the woman commanded. "If you listen to me only once in your life, run now, and don't come back!"

Yoon ran—through the city, out the gates, and into the surrounding fields. Only when she could run no farther did she finally collapse, exhausted, into the grass, listening to the night breeze and the song of insects. Behind her, the fireworks still continued, but the brilliant lines and stars no longer held Yoon's attention. As she held up a hand, little flickers of black flame flared into life around it. Her own tiny fireworks.

Her grandmother had commanded her to leave. Yoon understood that. She had struck a soldier, and no one harmed an imperial soldier and lived. But where should she go? She had always wanted to see Hwanggot, her family's homeland, but it lay across the water to the southwest, and there was no way Yoon was crossing that much water. In a sudden flash of inspiration, she decided to head north, up through the Forest of Spirits, then down along the mainland. She would be an explorer, like her mother. And she wouldn't have to be scared. After all, she still had her two oldest friends—Gom-Gom and fire. Between the two of them, they'd protect her.

Yet while a stuffed animal and a magical flame can handle a lot of problems, they weren't truly equipped to handle all Yoon's needs, and she might well have starved to death in the ensuing days and weeks if she hadn't fallen in with a mysterious traveler. Seemingly waiting for Yoon at a crossroads, the man spoke to Yoon of her powers, helping her come to understand them even as he taught her to scavenge and forage for food. Yet his greatest gift came on the slopes of the great volcano Kumijinja, where he called forth the spirits of the mountain's fire, presenting Yoon to them like a visiting dignitary. As the kami touched her, Yoon felt something inside her shift, and the flames that roiled inside her emerged, turning from black to a brilliant red. In that instant, she understood the fire she carried, and it understood her. When she woke from her trance-like reverie, the traveler was gone, leaving Yoon to continue her journeys alone—a child in age, yet armed with the courage of her mother, and the fiery wisdom of the mountain.

Mark Seifter
Designer