N. Jolly's followup to Legendary Vigilante is much the same in terms of my excitement, and also my hesitation to wholeheartedly embrace it. Legendary Villains: Vigilantes offers some really, really cool stuff, but I have to acknowledge that a lot of it are things that I would not allow in my own campaigns for players, although I would use them for enemies in a heartbeat (funnily enough, given the dark theme of the book), and while the technical issues of the last book are no longer here there are still a few kinks in the wording of some options that give me pause.
The Alchemical Scoundrel has the typical setup of a casting archetype, although it gains alchemy instead of casting, preventing it from gaining the superior Extra Talent feat from the Legendary line. Its talents are twofold, gainining the ability to choose either an Alchemist discovery or one from a selection of talents. The AS also qualifies for Extra Discovery, and treats some of its unique talents as discoveries allowing it to parlay that into a pseudo-Extra Talent feat. And already we're off to a rocky start on balance. For instance, after grabbing Bombs for a talent the AS can take Extra Discovery to pick up the a discovery talent that is the Frost, Acid, Shock, Concussive and Force Bomb discoveries all at once (this suffers from the aforementioned wording issues, as if combined with one of those discoveries the talent deals both the talent and the discovery's damage type, without clarification as to whether the full damage is treated as both, or split 50/50 as is normal). The mutagen discoveries grant things such as free Enlarge Person, access to class features from the master chymist prestige class (normally not available until level 8) as early as level 2 by taking Extra Discovery at 1, and unlocking the Brute's insanely good talent list without any of its drawbacks. and NTD Supernova, while it is a level 20 talent, literally doubles the number of damage dice being rolled by increasing the damage dice by 2 steps (bringing each one from 1d6 to 1d8 to 2d6), though if that was the intention or a misunderstanding of damage steps, I don't know. In addition, there are a number of talents that are straight up core Alchemist discoveries made better, leading to the question, with this archetype legal, why would you ever play an Alchemist?
The Consumed Vigilante is much simple and much less broken. It trades away Dual Identity for The Nameless One and a free hit point per level, and its social talents for the ability to go without food, water or sleep, the effects of renown without having to actually spread it yourself, and a bonus on saves against mind-affecting. Very solid option if you don't care about your social identity, and what you replace talents with would be worth talents themselves (particularly healing from rest in a quarter of the time).
The Dread Champion is an antipaladin, plain and simple. It's very much equivalent to the Noble Soul from Legendary Vigilante, though without the option to heal, and gains the ability to inflict Cruelties on the targets of their smite, which I particularly like. However, while I've come under fire for my severe criticism of Magical Child trading half of its talents for what I consider a mediocre spell list, I severely protest the Dread Champion trading the same for the antipaladin's spells. No one, and I mean no one in history, past present or future, has ever cared about a 4 level caster's spells, to the point where Ranger and Paladin alike have archetypes that give them up entirely without a care in the world, and yet somehow the worse, NPC as hell antipaladin spell list is worth half of your talents? No. Nuh-uh.
The Fortune Thief is a really cool concept that takes an underused tool for vigilantes of taking another class's feature and changing it for a different end entirely. In this case, we gain a single witch hex. Any time an enemy fails their save against our hex (which, let's be real here, is probably Sleep, given that we can't take Cackle), you gain a point of luck, which can be consumed to reroll a skill check or gain a scaling luck bonus to attack and damage rolls (well hello there Fate's Favored). I think there may have been an error here, given that the bonuses last for rounds equal to your Charisma modifier, and a talent exists to make them last rounds equal to your Charisma modifier, which just seems like a weird overlap of wording where "twice the duration" would probably have sufficed, leading me to believe that it may have originally been one round for the bonus, which let's be honest, is probably a better idea anyway. Other talents offered give you bonuses for hoarding your luck points, the ability to add luck to your AC, and several hex improvements. Definitely on the strong side and ripe for abuse cases, but those are forgiveable for the fun involved in the flavor of this.
Plague Scions are... somehow not evil despite being literally all about spreading plague. You trade your 1st level social talent for the antipaladin's plague bringer, which makes you immune to the effects of disease while still letting you carry them, and in exchange for unshakeable you get to have diseases with increased potency. You can effectively make your disease injury based when you get a surprise Hidden Strike on an enemy, or just straight up prick someone with a concealed blade to disease them, and further class features further improve the diseases you pass on. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the epitome of an NPC class, but as an NPC class it makes for an interesting concept.
The Protean Prowler draws on those embodiments of pure chaos, the proteans, gaining evolution points as an eidolon and trading them for polymorphing spell like abilities. There's some wording strangeness, making it unclear if one is locked into the evolutions they already have when they polymorph, but overall an interesting archetype for sure.
The Shadow Savant combines what every GM hates about divination specialists with what every GM hates about illusion specialists. You gain the ability to create shadow clones of yourself, and send them running around, with your talents giving them incredible range and the ability to scry through them. It also offers a number of illusion spells as SLAs, trading uses of your shadow clones to utilize them. This archetype gets a bit of an extra bump for, in addition to being super cool, also having unique social talents, something that vigilante archetypes haven't really treaded into yet. However, I'm still getting used to the new LeBlanc ultimate in League of Legends, I don't need it in my Pathfinder too, so probably banned at my tables.
The Symbiotic Slayer is complex, but basically boils down to: congratulations, you're Venom. You gain a symbiote that can meld with your body to grant you fighting prowess, although it can totally take over your mind if you spend too much time in that form so try to avoid doing so. That being said, it serves as the second best part of Synthesis Summoner, effectively granting you a massive chunk of bonus HP as the symbiote takes damage before you do, and you can feed your hp to the symbiote to keep it from retreating back into your body. I won't go into the talents, as they're, again, complex, but while there's some overly strong stuff (like at will move action Invisibility that renders you immune to blindsense and blindsight at level 4), it's mostly balanced and unique enough to warrant a rating of Cool.
The Social Talents section isn't as robust or interesting as the last one, but there are a few cool choices, like Accomplished Duelist, which lets you use some vigilante talents in your social identity without arousing suspicion; Unbound Ethics, letting you get your identities' alignments farther apart from one another; and Identity Thief, which lets you take your enemies faces... off. And... well make a mask of them I guess, which isn't as cool as the movie but still a reference I approve of.
The Vigilante talents are much more interesting. Advanced Grip gives you two-handed strength bonus when you have a weapon in one-hand, and no penalty for Power Attacking while using TWF, leading to some frankly terrifying potential static damage between this, Double Slice and Lethal Grace. Beast Brethren gives you Animal Ally as a bonus feat, Brutal Bulwark lets you make the area around you difficult terrain, and Critical Violence gives you a bigger critical range that stacks with Improoved Critical at the cost of reducing it to a x2 weapon, likely to keep it out of the hands of falchion and tetsubo wielders. Somewhat terrifying is the Death Dealer talent, which gives a stalker the assassin's death attack feature and, at level 16, lets them get away with spending only one round studying the target. Combined with sniper talent, a stalker could be a force of deadly reckoning. Magical Limit Break, however, is my personal favorite, allowing a casting vigilante to push beyond their normal 6 level casting limit and get level 7 and 8 spells. On the more useless side is Lone Survivor, which depends on your allies going down, Panache Pool, which gives you exactly what it says but nothing to spend it on, and Stylish Combatant, because Performance Combat is terrible. There's also another writing snafu here, in the Superb Blade talent, which grants the Weapon of the Chosen line with no regard for your character's deity, but doesn't actually elaborate on how you determine your "deity's" alignment for Improved Weapon of the Chosen.
The feats here that are worth talking about give a lot of love to the casting archetypes and go a long way to fix problems with both the Warlock and the Zealot archetypes. The Charismatic Caster feat changes your class's spells to be spontaneously cast with the bard table and based on Charisma, and changes the Zealot's inquisition abilities to scale off of Charisma instead of Wisdom, solving its MADness problems. I'm insanely biased against prepped casters, so I approve of this change. Likewise, the Genius and Wise Vigilante feats change all of the vigilante's class features, spells included, to scale off of Int and Wis, respectively, instead of Cha. Helpfully, these can also be taken as level 1 social talents. There are also several feats dedicated specifically to improving the Warlock, most importantly Mystic Accuracy, which add half your Int as a static damage to Mystic Bolt, allow Deadly Aim, Power Attack or Piranha Strike to apply to their touch attacks, and allow Clustered Shots to overcome energy resistance, a number of quality of life improvements that are sorely needed.
Next up is a 5 level PrC called the Crimson Dreadnought. It reminds me a lot of the Faceless Enforcer, being tied to a set of armor, but unlike the Enforcer, Crimson Dreadnoughts are bound to their armor completely, granting them bonuses in exchange for being incapable of getting out, free Iron Will and Improved Iron Will, and the ability to say screw the hell out of death. It's not a particularly strong or compelling PrC, to be sure, but it's not terrible, and I could easily see a number of enemies making use of it; I myself will probably include some in my upcoming Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign as Gray Maidens, since what's described is literally how the Gray Maidens are made.
I won't comment much on the Vigilante variant multiclass. VMCs, by and large, suck, and this isn't much of an exception at early levels, though if I'm being perfectly honest access to a vigilante talent at 11 might just be worth wasting your 3rd and getting a mediocre 7th level feat.
There are only three items included here, probably to make room for all of the talents and feats. First are the Bracers of Mystic Power, which oh my god yes. They're wrist slot items that serve as an Amulet of Mighty Fists for mystic bolts, also allowing you to ignore a pretty high amount of energy resistance when using them. I have exactly one problem, though, and it's the same as my problem with the handwraps from Legendary Vigilante, and that's the N. Jolly, for all his positive qualities as a designer, doesn't seem to understand the value of freely given enhancement bonuses. The Bracers cost less than a +1 weapon, factoring in weapon and masterwork cost, but between Rapid Shot and Two-Weapon Fighting can attack at a much higher clip, plus while they're very welcome, the fact that mystic bolts are by their very nature magical means you don't need to worry about piercing DR, only energy resistance, which it's already very helpfully doing. Definitely underpriced.
The Dastard's Smoke Pellets are a fairly cheap 250 item that can be thrown on the ground to make people forget the last minute ever happened. It's a cool item, with one particularly amusing side effect that you yourself are not immune to the effects of the smoke, meaning if you aim it wrong, you could fall prey to it. The smoke pellets, and the False Friend Gloves below it that let you Charm someone with a touch, can also be attuned to by vigilantes, increasing their DC, which is a really cool incentive to use an item as the class that it was intended for without preventing others from using it that I particularly like.
The villainous sample NPC on offer here is the terrifying Red Love, the villain teased in Legendary Vigilante as its NPC's great rival, and I'm going to break my neutral reviewer voice completely here to say, holy crap, I love her. I love everything about her. She's arguably the coolest archetype in the book, the Symbiotic Slayer, she makes good use of the Symbiotic talents, her backstory is compelling, her stat block quote gives me proper chills, and don't even get me started on the art. Her art is god damn gorgeous. Seriously, if nothing else go look at her on the cover art, it's amazing. Okay, back to neutral reviewer voice.
Ultimately, what I've taken away from LV:V is a lot of feats that I'm officially making legal to all vigilantes in all campaigns I run, a lot of talents I'd allow on a case by case basis, and a lot of archetypes that are just too overpowered, headachey, or abusable to let through without serious assurances from the player. Ultimately, I rate a very solid 4/5: worth picking up, but still flawed.
Legendary Vigilantes has a lot to like. I cannot stress this enough. That being said, my idea of reviewing third party content goes as follows: would I allow it in a campaign, would I point players in a campaign I’m involved in towards it, and would I myself use it if it fit my concept thematically. A bit complicated, I know, but it’s worked when looking through 3pp before for keeping my sanity. And for this, my first official review, I will say it’s a mixed bag. There’s several things that I think are absolutely delightful, that I would use or encourage others to use, that I think are fun and well balanced. And then there’s things that give me a headache reading through, things I would be a bit concerned about the health of a campaign allowing, and in one instance that I will force myself to avoid ranting on, something that actually caused my temple to throb a bit with irritation. So let’s dive in.
Arsenal Summoner is a cool concept, an archetype mixing the Black Blade magus and some of the fighter’s coolest tricks into something that actually reminds me a bit of Iron Man. In essence, you get a weapon and a set of armor that you can call to you at a moment’s notice. The talents revolve around these, and include weapon and armor training. Also included is a magus’s arcane pool, renamed to anima pool. The only problem that I have with this is that it gives access to advanced weapon trainings at roughly the same rate a Weapon Master fighter can get them, and the frankly terrifying interaction between anima pool and the advanced weapon training Warrior’s Spirit, which grants the same thing in a separate pool. Recommend banning that interaction if an Arsenal Summoner joins your party.
Beast Born is a druid without spellcasting, gaining an animal companion and animal-only wild shaping. Compared to the first party wild shape archetype, Agathion, I think I prefer this one. A full level animal companion beats out at-will but significantly neutered beast form in my eyes, and it gives up half its talents.
Dynamic Striker felt weird to me. It grants two specializations in place of the Avenger and Stalker, but unlike the later example, it seems more like N. Jolly wanted to make two different unarmed strike archetypes, but in the name of word count they were put into one. I’ll look at them individually accordingly. Brawler (a pet peeve of mine, by the way, is giving something a name that something else in 1st party Pathfinder already has) is essentially Avenger with free improved unarmed strike and wisdom focus instead of charisma. I like the emphasis on raw damage, but it’s actually tarnished slightly by having access to both Avenger talents and its own unique pool, granting it significantly more flexibility than any other specialization gets and making it a tad overpowered for my tastes. This especially so when vigilante already had a niche for the hard hitting unarmed strike, a Fist of the Avenger… Avenger.
Technician, on the other hand, brings a sort of weird hybrid of swashbuckler, monk and investigator to the table, gaining studied combat and a sort of focused opportune parry and riposte. It definitely looks to play like a tactical fighter, something we don’t see much of outside of sneak attackers, and I really appreciate that as a concept.
The Exposed Vigilante is built around not having dual identity, instead just acting in the social one, and… it kind of irks me. Not because I don’t like the vigilante with no secret identity, to be perfectly honest that’s been every vigilante I’ve played or theorycrafted so far save one. But, it gives up dual identity and seamless guise, two class features that in 90% of campaigns are mostly flavor, for an extra skill rank and social talent, which is actually mechanically very good. Considering how you can already play a vigilante normally without ever using dual identity and not feel bad or like you’re not getting bang for your buck already, it just seems like unnecessary extra gravy.
Focused Hunter is another archetype that doesn’t give up specialization, which I generally approve of already. It gives up the Appearance line of class features for favored terrain, hide in plain sight in that terrain, and eventually swift action displacement. Not much to say here, except that I dislike the Appearance features and would much prefer these on the base vigilante so we’ll give it a nice big thumbs up.
Masked Grappler is a bit of a complicated beast at first glance, but looked at closely is actually a really, really cool overhaul of grappling. The unique talents offered include several new options for maintaining grapples, all inspired by professional wrestling moves: submissions, which continue the grapple with minor penalties, and techniques, which end it but deal much more massive ones. My only issue here is that using a submission or technique also does normal damage, possibly adding just a bit too much. Considering how effective a dedicated grapple specialist can be at getting a hold of someone and squeezing the life out of them, it makes submissions like the anklelock (reducing the enemy’s speed) and armbar (reducing their attack modifier) much weaker overall, while others like the bearhug (making the enemy fatigued) pretty much only serve to help maintain the grapple. Techniques, however, are the bee’s knees for how cool they are.
Paladins are my favorite class so I’m a bit biased towards the Noble Soul. Like Dynamic Striker, it’s two specializations wrapped up in one. The Crusader is a smiting fiend, putting more power into their smites and even gaining the ability to smite neutral enemies. The Healer does exactly what it says on the tin, gaining lay on hands. Interestingly, the Oradin has already been wrapped up into this, gaining Life Link and Charisma to AC as talents (a better version, even, than Lore and Nature Oracle get). Here seems like a good time to mention one of the best qualities of this book: the archetypes do an excellent job of replicating classes without replacing them. Despite having, ultimately, better versions of smite evil and lay on hands, their inability to access both and not gaining any auras means that paladins still easily have a place alongside the noble soul, with neither likely to outshine the other.
And then there’s the Outrageous Lyricist. I love the Outrageous Lyricist. I don’t even like bards, which this is, and I love it, for no reason other than the talent names are amazing. Which would you rather do as a support character, declare that you’re playing the Dirge of Doom, or the Black Metal Medley. I know which one I pick. Some of the talents are also incredibly fun, allowing you to do things like challenge opponents to a battle of wits mid-fight or turn 5’ steps into 10’ steps by moonwalking. But, while I love this archetype, I can’t like it, for the simple reason that it’s grossly overpowered. Being able to constantly effectively heal allies every round in conjunction with those performances and turning the party’s weapon damage into sonic damage, the single least resisted damage in the entire game, is inconceivably strong. If these were performances in and of themselves, I’d probably be all for it, but the fact that you’re granting these abilities on top of a regular inspire courage, already an ability of such value that I automatically ignore any bard archetype that gives it up, is just too much.
Lastly is the Sentai Soldier, or Power Rangers meets Avatar: The Last Airbender. It gets a kinetic blast as a kineticist, and the talents are all piecemeal kineticist class features. I don’t particularly see a reason to play a Sentai Soldier over just being a Kineticist with the new Masked Identity feat, but otherwise I’m mostly neutral on it.
This brings us to the talents section. The social talents offered are about what I expect from social talents, interesting, flavorful and generally very useful in social encounters. The vigilante talents are also what I expect from there, providing viability for a lot of otherwise mediocre builds and putting new twists on existing feats. Of particular note is the emphasis N. Jolly seems to have placed on Vital Strike. I want to call special attention to the Grit Pool talent, which instantly fixes the garbage that is the Gunmaster archetype by allowing it to actually use its class features a reasonable number of times per day.
Coming to the feats section, there’s a fairly tame selection, the bulk of which is made up of expanding access to talents and granting Dual Identity to non-vigilante characters. Of particular note, I really, really liked the solution to the problem of the Extra Vigilante Talent feat being untenable due to Vigilante Talents being mostly objectively better than ordinary feats. Vigilante Savant has a prerequisite of 7th level, and allows you to pick a talent you would qualify for at half your level. But, on the flipside, Vigilante Casting Savant is available at 5 and has no restriction for what you can take, but you have to be a casting archetype, allowing it to be taken to make up for losing half of them. You can only take the feat once, and you can’t take both of these. I’m gonna take a moment to commend a really nicely thought out set of feats for this.
The magic weapons section is actually very light on things that primarily benefit vigilantes, although special mention has to go to creating Clark Kent’s glasses as a mechanical item. I hate the Martial Wraps, you should not have a slotless item that does the exact same thing as a neck slot item while costing half as much, but I already promised I wouldn’t rant about them.
The book’s new mechanics end with a prestige class called Scion of the City. Entered as early as level 5 due to the low requirements of a +3 BAB and 4 ranks in a few skills, plus the Renown social talent, it takes the vigilante’s dependence on staying in one place up to the next level, granting a large number of social talents and a handful of regular ones as well with early access or improved benefits (such as Loyal Aid doubling as Leadership, though with no cohort). It also effectively doubles as vigilante levels, though with reduced speed in gaining talents normally to compensate. If playing a campaign that doesn’t leave your home city ever, this is without a doubt the prestige class for you. Interestingly, though, I noticed something while reading it. Because the Extra Social Talent feat can be taken by a non-vigilante starting at level 5, it can technically be accessed by non-vigilantes. Because of the wording of some of the class features, I think this was unintentional, but it does open up a really interesting way to create PCs and NPCs alike that have no secret identity, have no heroic identity either for that matter, who are mechanically rewarded for the flavor of being very involved in the campaign city’s goings on.
N. Jolly’s traditional example character is Rashid Zill, or Dark Star, a heroic Sentai Soldier with void powers. Even before reaching the bottom of the book, though, Dark Star’s story unfolded in blurbs at the beginning of every section, giving you a look ahead of time. It’s actually a very interesting story for a very interesting character, although it disappointingly makes no use of anything in the book aside from the Sentai Soldier archetype.
For the book as a whole, I only have one note about the editing. N. Jolly’s final draft, to my understanding, was apparently about twice the size, and got split into two books. There are a lot of references to what’s in the other book. When it comes out, I’ll probably take less issue, since there will be context for the things being referenced, but for right now, there’s a lot of references to feats, talents, and even an archetype in the introduction that simply do not exist in published form yet, and it detracts a little bit. Now I don’t know the behind the scenes, when the decision was made and what kind of time crunch the editors were under to get the split sorted out, and I’m not going to put a lot of fault on them for it. But I am going to put a bit of a black mark on this specific product as a result.
So I probably came across as pretty harsh. I want the record to show, it wasn’t out of a dislike for the book. Overall, I liked what it had to offer. Make no mistake, if you’re interested in the vigilante as a class, this is a book worth purchasing and using, because there is a ton of amazing stuff in here, things that I already plan on using in my urban campaigns from now on to be certain.
