bittergeek's page

I'm looking for archetypes for NPC characters - the staff, the support crew, even beloved workers and owners of favored PC businesses. We seem to have lost the NPC classes, so how do we build characters who take and develop abilities for downtime, not combat? Craft, Performance, and Lore gets you blandly through level 5 or so, but someone who is experienced and gifted should have something special.

Any of the bright and prolific 3rd party writers have anything like that? Sure, the Prophets of Kalistrade should eventually have plenty of support for trade and paper wars, but I want some famous smiths that you need favors to even see for a consultation, a barrister who can see right through the deception feats of the rogues and bards, and a terrifyingly competent butler who keeps the whole manor ticking despite the owner being a drunken embarassment.

Suggestions appreciated.

I was playing with a multi-classed Ranger/Horizon Walker and ran into a quirk with favored terrain. At Horizon Walker 1, you choose a favored terrain. Fine, makes sense, just like the Ranger. At several other levels the Horizon Walker gets favored terrain again, with the option to increase a previously chosen terrain.

My question is - if the character already had one or more favored terrains from the Ranger class, could he choose to increase a previous favored terrain by +2 at Horizon Walker 1? He explicitly can with every other improvement to favored terrain granted by the prestige class, but there is no guidance for level 1. Admittedly it's a corner case, but I was building a character to test what the highest achievable bonus is by maxing out a single favored terrain all the way to level 20.

I've been looking at the ranger's guide archetype, but I don't see what ability replaces Master Hunter. Clearly the base ranger version won't work for the guide, since the guide doesn't have Favored Enemy. Should the save or die ability be applied to Focus? Or was the guide supposed to have a different capstone ability that didn't make the book?