Claim what’s rightfully yours with Pathfinder Player Companion: Champions of Corruption! Summon monsters from the blood of your enemies with twisted Sarkorian magic, lord over your minions to further the causes of your dark masters, and use any means necessary to achieve your despicable goals. With Champions of Corruption, everything is fair game as long as you prosper and your enemies suffer.
Inside this book, you’ll find:
Detailed explorations of the lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil alignments, including example personas for your vile character.
New archetypes: the sanguinary blood summoner, the godless dread vanguard, and the bloodthirsty raging cannibal.
Savage new traits for characters who hail from dark lands, and rules for wicked ones who seek to lord over Golarion’s most debased nations and organizations.
Cruel new options like Vile Leadership and damnation feats, which let you use coercion and violence to compel your cohorts and allies to commit even greater atrocities.
Brutal new spells, magic items, and other sinister options to sate your bloodlust and strike fear in the hearts of heroes who would oppose you.
This Pathfinder Player Companion is intended for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Pathfinder campaign setting, but can easily be incorporated into any fantasy world.
Written by Paris Crenshaw, Jim Groves, Sean McGowan, Philip Minchin.
Cover Art by Claudia Schmidt.
Each monthly 32-page Pathfinder Player Companion contains several player-focused articles exploring the volume’s theme as well as short articles with innovative new rules for all types of characters, as well as traits to better anchor the player to the campaign.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-679-9
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
Champions of Corruption does not disappoint. While I would consider it my least favourite of the three alignment books, it's still a very good book, offering an in-depth look at what it means to be evil and providing interesting options for evil characters. And just because it's a Player Companion doesn't mean that it's just for players. GMs can get a lot of use out of this book to flesh out villainous NPCs.
This gives good advice on different types evil characters under different evil alignments and how to play them with other characters whether they are off same alignment or not. Even if you don't plan to play as evil characters, this seems pretty useful for creating villains as well.
However, I think this could have gone farther than this. Most of examples are just "evil for evil/selfish reasons" types of personalities, while motivations list in beginning had potential for more different types of evil. Would have been interesting to see example of tragic villains, like vengeance driven evil character who is ready to do anything to accomplish his revenge.
There also wasn't any mention of playing good or neutral characters turning to evil, fallen hero would have been interesting character example as well.
So yeah, if you are interested in trying out evil characters, sure go for it, but if you aren't that interested, this won't convince you to play evil character nor probably would convince your GM to let you play as one if they are against it.
Paizo’s September 2014 Player’s Companion release is Champions of Corruption. The final book in the Champions of series, this guide is focused on helping players develop evil characters and ground them in the evil organizations that plague the Inner Sea. From the beginning, you can see that the designers took this task seriously. On the front cover, Seltyiel is killing a unicorn. I kind of like that the unicorn doesn’t look all that good though. It would be a lot harder to see Seltyiel killing something that looks super sweet. Rather, it’s milky white eyes make you think that perhaps the unicorn is the corrupt one and the iconic is trying to defend himself. In fact, throughout the entirety of the book, the art makes it clear that these are not characters to trifle with.
Gods & (Summoned) Monsters
The guide’s inside covers feature familiar material to other readers of the Champions of series. On the front inside cover we have a chart detailing the evil gods. This could actually be really helpful during character creation. I think I may pull out the ones from Champions of Righteousness & Champions of Balance next time the party has to make characters. I’m hoping this will be helpful both for world immersion and for reminding them that it would not hurt to have an actual healer in the party. Much like the previous two Champions of books, this one closes with a feat improving the character’s ability to summon evil monsters. Like the other two, when a character with this feat summons a creature off the evil monster list, the summoning takes only a standard action.
Moral Uncertainty
Normally the “For Your Character” and “Rules Index” two pages seem like waste to me that could be much better filled with world-building or crunch product. Here Paizo has introduced ideas that are interesting about how they frame evil—certainly ambiguous. They’ve included a “Did You Know” box about Hermea and the inherent disagreements about how to characterize Mengkare’s alignment. Newsflash: Paizo staff can’t even agree as to whether or not Mengkare’s experiment is interesting to him or actually among the most diabolical things happening in the Inner Sea region. Adopting this viewpoint makes sure that any game taking place in Hermea is that much more interesting by giving us a rationale on how a character’s complex motives could make it evil or not in the eyes of some beholders.
I just noticed that the Everwake Serum has two different Fortitude DCs. The New Poisons table on p. 27 lists the DC as 17, but the actual write-up on the same page lists the DC as 16.
Would anyone care to issue an (un)official clarification on this point?
I just want to add that this book has the quality i hope to see in the future of player companions. The pages about aligments have 80% fluff text and 20% rules. I know that not everybody appreciate that, but i do and this book was really worth buying to me and my players.
That doesn't work. Betrayal feats say "Characters with class abilities granting allies access to teamwork feats (such as cavaliers or inquisitors) can select these teamwork feats normally, but allies who are granted these teamwork feats can use the feats only as initiators, not abettors." The way they restricted the feats, your pet gets to betray you, but not vice versa. So Sparky can use you as a human shield, but you don't get to pull Sparky between yourself and the incoming attack.
Actually, the text you (correctly) quote here is, in itself, faulty. It says (italics are mine):
RAW wrote:
Characters with class abilities granting allies access to teamwork feats (such as cavaliers or inquisitors) (...)
This does not make sense: the inquisitor has no ability granting allies access to teamwork feats. He only has the class ablity solo tactics, granting himself teamwork feats.
If it hasn't happened by now I think it's safe to say nothing is ever going to be legal for PFS from this book.
Not necessarily true. There are some items in here that work well within PFS that need to be considered. One example, level 12 Curse bomb discovery.
"Need"? I imagine reviewing an evil focused book published three years ago to see if they want to pull out one or two usable options would be somewhere in the 600s on the PFS team's priority list.
Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
The PFS leaders could close out this discussion by adding to the next release of Additional Resources a statement that nothing in this book is usable. I could have sworn that at one point I saw a statement from somebody in PFS leadership to that effect.
The PFS leaders could close out this discussion by adding to the next release of Additional Resources a statement that nothing in this book is usable. I could have sworn that at one point I saw a statement from somebody in PFS leadership to that effect.
