Sometimes, all you need to have fun with a class for another few months is a few new ideas to tinker around with. Class Expansions is a series of lightweight supplements for The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game that takes a base class and offers alternative class features that, handily enough, each fit on one page or less.
Following in this vein, Class Expansions: The Unhorsed Cavalier fixes one of the major problems of the cavalier class, the mount. Let's consider this for a moment. Back in the days of 3.5, one of the paladin's big class features was this superintelligent horse with all sorts of bells and whistles hanging off of it like some sort of gnome had cooked it up as a genetic engineering experiment. Awesome stuff! Until it took one look at the dungeon stairs and shook its head no.
And there was much complaining.
The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game comes out and the paladin gets the ability to swap out the horse for some sort of holy sword!
There was much rejoicing!
Fast forward a couple of years and an advanced guide comes out containing the cavalier, who has a horse.
See above.
This product features a quartet of cavalier archetypes, all of which throw away the mount for something different.
Attended Knight - Grab a peasant, slap heraldry on him, and treat him like a golf caddie for your weapons!
Longshanks - Glare at those with horses as though they are lesser individuals and show them you know how to hustle with your own two feet. Bonuses to movement while in heavy armor, the ability to hustle while in heavy armor with no penalties whatsoever, max dex and armor check penalties, and Endurance as a bonus feat await those who take this archetype.
Seeker of All Knowledge - An enhanced version of the Order of the Tome, give up your horse because you're too busy with the book your nose is stuck in.
Wind-kissed Knight - Arcane magic is a semisentient thing. Like gods, it goes around and picks out champions to do its bidding, which is quite simple. Read the meters. That guy with the arcane deathray? He's using too much magic. Shut it down. That wizard pulling all the pointless pranks? Poke him on the shoulder. Make him stop. In short, the cavalier becomes a sort of arcane paladin, serving the whims of a great, but nearly mindless cosmic force that really just wants the wizards to get off its lawn so it can get to sleep. In return, the cavalier gains access to potent arcane magic as well as defenses against the very wizards he will likely upset time and time again.
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The raison d’etre of Third Edition, and by extension Pathfinder, is “options, not restrictions.” That is, you shouldn’t be bound by (relatively) narrow design ideologies when trying to make the character you want to make. So if your character necessarily uses a certain type of animal, it flies in the face of that credo, making the Pathfinder cavalier something of a design throwback.
That’s the reasoning put forth by Class Expansions: The Unhorsed Cavalier, by Interjection Games.
The book offers four cavalier-specific archetypes that break the dependence a cavalier has on its horse (or similar animal). Unfortunately, the book stumbles almost immediately out of the gate on its quest to make the cavalier mount-free, largely due to not taking complete advantage of the nature of class archetypes.
This is fairly explicitly showcased in the first such archetype, the attended knight. This archetype trades in the cavalier’s mount for a squire, a low-level commoner who acts as the personal valet for the cavalier. I did admire how the nature of the squire was very well fleshed-out, insofar as saying what its class and levels are, what gear it has, what special abilities it gains by virtue of being a squire, and even how this interacts with the Leadership feat. Indeed, virtually everything was covered here, with one notable exception.
That exception is everything else that’s mount-based about the cavalier class. That is, while this trades in the class-based mount that the cavalier gains, the cavalier still has the class’s Expert Trainer ability, which is a lot less useful now. That can also be said for the cavalier’s charge abilities (Cavalier’s Charge, Mighty Charge, and Supreme Charge), which are still part of the class under this archetype, and yet have far less relevance when there’s no inherent mount granted to the character.
This is an issue that plagues virtually every archetype in this book. The longshanks, for example, gains a few level-based abilities that make using armor easier (though holding off Endurance until 11th level struck me as a fairly late time to gain such a minor benefit), all for trading in the mount. More could have been done in recognition of the need to also trade in the aforementioned class abilities.
The seeker of all knowledge archetype is perhaps the one archetype here that doesn’t fall prey to this. Indeed, this archetype doesn’t mandate giving up the mount at all, because it’s focused entirely around altering the benefits gained from a specific cavalier order (the Order of the Tome). This is an intriguing idea, as orders necessarily have an in-game presence, and so alterations to the benefits have built-in flavor changes, and likely could have been the basis for its own product (albeit with more such archetypes). Why it’s here is a bit of a head-scratcher, save for it being cavalier-focused.
The wind-kissed knight archetype is the last one, focused on the equally intriguing idea of reining in excessive use of magic. The focus of the class admits that there’s no real agreement on what exactly constitutes that, which offers more role-playing potential than I think is covered here. That said, it falls into the same trap, giving two abilities (staggered across a few levels) in exchange for the mount…abilities that I think are slightly too weak for what they give up (e.g. wind-kissed blade offering only a single spell that can be used once per day, changed only when gaining a level? Not very much at all).
Overall, there’s a great idea here that simply isn’t being executed as fully as it could be. This product’s heart is in the right place, but in trying to dismount from its horse, it ends up falling off the saddle.
Brilliant last line in the review: "This product’s heart is in the right place, but in trying to dismount from its horse, it ends up falling off the saddle."
Aye, this right here was part of a hideously flawed initiative I tried as an experiment - crowdsourcing ideas from the community. The chief problem with it was that, in doing so, I was essentially tasked with things I didn't fully understand. I find this product to essentially be an embarrassment and will repair it as soon as my financial future is a little more stable.
Needless to say, I shut down the crowdsourcing initiative, so everything from here on out is coming from my comfort zone and should be of much higher quality than this thing.
