Champions of Purity is a good quality product with large collection of rules options for most classes along with a range of role playing advice for anyone interested in a playing a Good character.
Champions of Purity starts with an examination of good, trying to answer the general question of “Why to be good?” and then focusing in each of the three alignments individually. It provides generalized motivations for any sort of good character along with locations where characters with each motivation might originate. This provides a nice connection to Golarion in a book that is relatively light on setting details. The different alignment focuses provide examples of different types of philosophies that characters of a given alignment may fall into, along with some of the pros and cons of playing each good alignment. Golarion specific information about opportunities and allies that each alignment may be involved with round out the sections. The only concerns I have with these sections are the listing of the different philosophies, and with the included traits. I worry that players reading these, especially if they’re new players, may see the philosophy suggestions as more rigid limitations rather than just possible ways for characters of each alignment to be portrayed. The traits in each section are listed as complementing a given alignment, but having them listed in a section devoted to that alignment gives the impression that they’re only for that alignment.
The next section is entitled Paragons of Virtue and covers a range of setting information to make a completely Good character, what race to play, organizations to be a part of, and where to be from. Generally this is presented well though I was surprised that none of the good churches were mentioned under the good aligned organizations. The inclusion of countries in Tian Xia as potential character origins was nice, as Tian Xia is often underrepresented in most products. There’s also a list of potential Prestige Classes for good characters, which I appreciated because it’s often hard for players to know about what classes are out there, as they show up in a variety of products. One minor complaint I did have here was that in one of this sections traits they mention an empyreal lord; it seems like there should have been an explanation somewhere of what an empyreal lord is, as players may not know this.
This is followed by Good Characters in Bad Situations, which examines moral quandaries that good players may find themselves in, and shows how different good characters may react to the same situation in different ways. This is quite well done as it covers situations that may come up during gameplay, though a greater list of actual evil acts would have been nice. The list of how good characters fit within “evil” nations is nice, but all the different lists of where good characters come from makes me think that perhaps they all should have been together. It also seems like it could have been a good place to cover how good characters deal with worshiping neutral (or even evil) deities.
The center spread in Champions of Purity is devoted to Heavenly Virtues, creeds for players to live by that provide benefits when the associated feat is taken. All of the benefits seem to be reasonably balanced, but the creeds will require some DM work to keep track of, as breaking a creed means the character loses the benefit of the feat. Some creeds may not be appropriate in all campaigns as the situations they reference may not be present, making them impossible to violate. The art on these two pages is great, with a stained glass style that really works with the virtue theme. On the topic of virtues, I’m starting to feel like Virtue is becoming a bit of an overloaded term, now it may be because I’m running Rise of the Runelords where they come up a bit, but perhaps a different term should have been used.
Redemption is covered next, with a rules framework for an evil character to be turned from the dark side. It seems like a good system to me, though it will require a large amount of DM tracking; a lot of that could probably be avoided by combining it with in game story events. It does include rules for one or more characters helping a character seeking redemption, but I feel that some examination of how a PC could help an NPC seek redemption in a more role playing sense would have been good (and potentially more frequently useful).
The remaining sections of the book are a collection of character options, firstly separated up into Divine, Combat, Skilled, and Arcane characters, and then followed by new spells and items. The divine portion provides details of all the good deities which complements the inside front cover where all the deity’s Domains, Favored Weapons and the like are listed. A number of new subdomains are presented, with Cooperation and Redemption having the most interesting powers. For combat focused characters there are new rage powers and inquisitions, as well as a handful of new feats. There’s also a sidebar on taking enemies alive, going over the rules and options relating to subdual attacks and binding opponents. Some coverage of how to bind someone during a grapple and maybe a feat to go along with it would have been good fit here. For skill based characters there are new alchemical discoveries, masterpieces, and rogue talents, to go with a sidebar on character types for less straight forward good characters. The most interesting new options here are a couple of discoveries that can forcibly change the alignment of the imbiber. Included in the descriptions are the moralistic questions that arise from forcing an alignment change on someone. In the Sublime Spellcasting section arcane casters are the focus, with summoners getting new evolutions, witches getting new patrons and hexes, and wizards getting new arcane discoveries. The mechanics of the Celestial Appearance evolution are interesting, where it’s one 3-point evolution with an increasing point cost if you want to do more with it, so it can be up to a 7-point evolution if you so desire. Based on its name and effect I can see a devil/demon/etc. version showing up somewhere along the line.
In Spells of the Just there are 10 new spells, all with the good type, and a sidebar detailing a scroll that contains them all. I particularly like the Angelic Aspect chain of spells, and Burst of Radiance. For magic items there are a couple of new weapon special abilities and then 9 new magic items (which are said to be wondrous items, when only 2 of them are wondrous items). Surprisingly most of the items are new magic weapons or armor, with only 2 being not combat related. The neatest one is probably the Mantle of the Protector, a way to share some of a character’s armor bonuses. My only concern with all this new rule content is that a lot of it makes players very good at killing Evil things, which may make it on the high end of the power scale in campaigns with few neutral opponents. For instance I can see this material having a big draw in the upcoming Wrath of the Righteous AP.
The art in Champions of Purity is top notch, with good portraits of most of the iconics and a few others; I especially like the ones of Feiya and Kyra. The cover is also very good; however the two other larger pieces in the product are not really to my liking. On the topic of graphic design the font used on the cover and as the section headers is truly awful, I understand that its look probably matches the content of the book is some fashion but this is a situation where function is more important than form.
Champions of Purity is a great product which adds to the quality of the Player Companion line. There’s lots of interesting material here both for those looking for roleplaying ideas and suggestions and those looking for new mechanical tools to play with. A similar book for the neutral alignments would be good, as I find it harder to player neutral characters than good, though it may be hard to find as much neutral specific rules material as there’s fewer obvious things to build off of and because the core rules are written in a rather neutrally aligned way already.
