Wild, untamed lands hold a wealth of mystery and danger, providing the perfect backdrop for heroic adventure. Whether adventurers are climbing mountains in search of a dragon's lair, carving their way through the jungle, or seeking a long-lost holy city covered by desert sands, Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Wilderness gives them the tools to survive the wilds. A new 20-level base class, the shifter, puts animalistic powers into the hands—or claws—of player characters and villains alike, with new class features derived from animalistic attributes. Overviews of druidic sects and rituals, as well as new archetypes, character options, spells, and more, round out the latest contribution to the Pathfinder RPG rules!
Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Wilderness is an invaluable hardcover companion to the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. This imaginative tabletop game builds upon more than 10 years of system development and an open playtest featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time best-selling set of fantasy rules into a new era.
Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Wilderness includes:
The shifter, a new character class that harnesses untamed forces to change shape and bring a heightened level of savagery to the battlefield!
Archetypes for alchemists, barbarians, bards, druids, hunters, investigators, kineticists, paladins, rangers, rogues, slayers, witches, and more!
Feats and magic items for characters of all sorts granting mastery over the perils of nature and enabling them to harvest natural power by cultivating magical plants.
Dozens of spells to channel, protect, or thwart the powers of natural environs.
New and expanded rules to push your animal companions, familiars, and mounts to wild new heights.
A section on the First World with advice, spells, and other features to integrate the fey realm into your campaign.
Systems for exploring new lands and challenging characters with natural hazards and strange terrain both mundane and feytouched.
... and much, much more!
ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-986-8
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
Ultimate Wilderness is a much better book than some reviewers might lead you to believe. You get the new shifter class - which has had some basic errata since release - along with great archetypes for most of the other classes to help them fit into a wilderness-based campaign.
It's a great book to help players prepping to play something like Kingmaker or Ironfang Invasion. You get new spells, feats and a new exploration mode.
The book itself maintains the high quality of work that most Paizo products exhibit. The art in this book is some of my favorite in any of the hardback collections. There are a few updated spells that needed errata, such as snowball.
As a fan, I really like that several of the archetypes convert the flavor of many Game of Thrones characters into Pathfinder mechanics. What more could you ask for?
I was extremely excited for this publication, so it's rather depressing how disappointing the books contents turned out to be.
The shifter class was an interesting idea, but when put down on paper is just druidic wild shape with hunter focus, in the form of aspects. It, unfortunately, never surpasses the druid in the wild shape department, and is, in fact, rather limited, and the temporary nature of all the aspects means that the shifter isn't terribly impressive in that regard either. The archetypes, both for the shifter and other classes, are interesting, but several suffer from massive drawbacks, for little to no gain. Like taking on druidic weapon/armor proficiencies and restrictions, including losing abilities for wearing metal, but don't gain any significant power to mkae up for it.
The new rules expansions are, for the most part, only thrown off by some conflicting skill applications (survival to harvest poison, but heal to take internal organ trophies?) but these are easy to ignore, or fix by homebrew. So these chapters are the most stable and useful of the lot.
One of the most exciting discoveries was the Cultivate Magic Plants feat, allowing you to grow plants that copy spell effects, but the price tag attached to them, especially when attached to something with the considerable disadvantages of being an immobile magical item, makes it entirely useless next to the crafting cost of regular magical items, especially if you have a GM that's willing to allow players to use the rules on creating new magical items. Just for an example, a goodberry bush can fully feed 2 people per day forever... for 4000 GP to craft. While you could make an item to infinitely cast goodberry for 2000 gp if you have to wear it, or better yet create food and water (for about 30000).
In conclusion, the book has a lot of cool stuff in it, but only for GMs. Players won't be able to make good use of many of the archetypes and feats as they revolve too much around staying in a single environment or working with nonsensical restrictions. While many of the feats are just too focused (or expensive) to be useful except to an NPC. GMs, grab it, it's got good stuff, but players will (and should) probably stick to what they've already got.
Great race write ups, a fun new class (that doesn't require a ton of source books to play) and tons of information and systems to run a wilderness adventure or spice up the wilderness sections of any game. Definitely happy to add this one to my bookshelf.
First off, I'm a huge fan of Pathfinder. But I'm not a fan of "Ultimate Wilderness." There are a number of issues with the content in the book, mostly the clarity of language. A lot of the rules seem unclear and not straightforward. The shifter is the biggest example of this.
To be honest I was looking forward to the shifter, being far more robust than it actually is. And I understand that this is my issue with what I expected from them, but what built up my anticipation of the shifter was the quality of past classes released by Paizo: summoner, alchemist, witch, bloodrager, investigator, brawler, spiritualist, medium (even if it isn't harrowed), magus, ninja, hunter and so on and so forth.
Past that, I'm not a big fan of the reprinted material because I buy the smaller books. If I'm buying the smaller books why would I want to buy them again with a hardcover?
That being said, I'm still a big Pathfinder fan, but I'd like for future releases to take a different developmental cycle than what "Ultimate Wilderness" received. This book seems like it lacked editing and playtesting.
lycanthropy, baleful polymorph, cursed magic items, many witch hexes, linnorm death curses, etc. are all curse effects.
And I very rarely run into any of those. Lycanthropes are only used on occasion, same with linnorms, there aren't that many witch NPCs I've ever fought, if any (not that that many witch hexes are curses, most of the ones that are aren't that dangerous), cursed magic items are also rare, and baleful polymorph is something I don't think I've ever had cast on a character of mine...usually I've only seen PCs use it. If anything, immunity to lycanthropy seems more convenient for the GM, since they don't have to worry about the player gaining a template.
Lycanthropy only applies to humanoids anyway. Even Planetouched are immune to that, since they're Outsider type.
The fact non-humanoids are immune doesn't change the fact it is a curse effect. Also elves are immune to sleep effects and paralysis effect from ghouls.
I have gone entire campaigns without being targeted by sleep, paralysis, and stunning but I have always seen ability damage, ability drain, energy drain, petrification, death effects, and some kind of curse effect and/or cursed item.
The fact non-humanoids are immune doesn't change the fact it is a curse effect. Also elves are immune to sleep effects and paralysis effect from ghouls.
I have gone entire campaigns without being targeted by sleep, paralysis, and stunning but I have always seen ability damage, ability drain, energy drain, petrification, death effects, and some kind of curse effect and/or cursed item.
Ghouls with coup de grace are still the easiest source of low level TPK since 2000.
The fact non-humanoids are immune doesn't change the fact it is a curse effect. Also elves are immune to sleep effects and paralysis effect from ghouls.
I have gone entire campaigns without being targeted by sleep, paralysis, and stunning but I have always seen ability damage, ability drain, energy drain, petrification, death effects, and some kind of curse effect and/or cursed item.
Not sure how elves are relevant to the topic, but that is certainly true.
Very interesting, in almost every campaign I've been in I've had to deal with paralysis and stun effects from at least some monster, they are quite common, usually more so than petrification, though you usually run into at least one or two of those. Curse effects are much less common for me, sometimes cursed equipment has appeared in a rare game or two, but it usually doesn't inconvenience anyone since the curse gets discovered and no one uses it.
A little funny you point out ability damage and ability drain, though, since the main source of that I've run into is poison, which creatures of the plant type are also immune to...
Ghouls with coup de grace are still the easiest source of low level TPK since 2000.
Ooh, I do not miss the 3.X critters with eight paralyzing attacks, like the Grell and Carrion Crawler...
Mmm, still excited by;
Quote:
•New and expanded rules to push your animal companions, mounts, and familiars to wild new heights.
Hopefully it's more than just 'some new tricks that you won't ever be able to take, because you filled up all your trick slots with the required core ones.'
Yeah, I'm definitely excited about this book and finding out the details of what's inside. The shifter, magical plants, rules for milking or harvesting poison, and I hope the natural hazards will be as interesting as some of the environmental rules in Horror Adventures. Greater access to plant companions is also definitely welcome.
The more I hear about the shapeshifter class, the more excited I am for this book. I have been wanting a full-bab shapeshifting class for a long time.
I just hope that it has archetypes or options that make it possible to create themed shapeshifters (dragons, werewolves and such) that feel like they're gaining something for sticking with a theme, rather than limiting themselves for no reason.
Matrix Dragon, you are hardly the only one that has been waiting for a martial shapeshifter class.
Since they said we will finally get fey form based polymorph spells I would be very surprised if we didn't get a fey based shifter archetype. I also would really love a dragon based one as well.
Since they said we will finally get fey form based polymorph spells I would be very surprised if we didn't get a fey based shifter archetype. I also would really love a dragon based one as well.
I just hope those archetypes don't suck, and don't need 16 levels to come online.
Well barbarians at level one wouldn't get flight, swim, climb, darkvision, scent, low-light vision, etc. combined plus turning into a small or smaller animal can get you out of situations that you normally might not be able to otherwise.
Feats that build on Multiattack could be useful. Perhaps one feat completely eliminates the attack roll penalty while another lets you apply full rather than half strength to the damage.
Feats that build on Multiattack could be useful. Perhaps one feat completely eliminates the attack roll penalty while another lets you apply full rather than half strength to the damage.
I wish they'd ditch the "Ultimate X" type titles. It keeps them from making more books about stuff like this. They don't want to make "Ultimate X 2” because it makes the first one not the ultimate one anymore. Seems silly to me.
I wish they'd ditch the "Ultimate X" type titles. It keeps them from making more books about stuff like this. They don't want to make "Ultimate X 2” because it makes the first one not the ultimate one anymore. Seems silly to me.
I wonder if we will get more Multiattack and/or Multiweapon Fighting feats?
If we're lucky, there will be feats that give some much needed support to characters/creatures that have only 1 or 2 natural attacks. It has always seemed a bit weird that wolves are so weak because all they have is a bite with no iterative. Meanwhile, cats and raptors go around shredding everything with pounce and five attacks.
When I scroll past this title, I usually read it as Ultimate Weirdness. So that book needs to happen now.
Hell YES!
Matrix Dragon wrote:
Nutcase Entertainment wrote:
I wonder if we will get more Multiattack and/or Multiweapon Fighting feats?
If we're lucky, there will be feats that give some much needed support to characters/creatures that have only 1 or 2 natural attacks. It has always seemed a bit weird that wolves are so weak because all they have is a bite with no iterative. Meanwhile, cats and raptors go around shredding everything with pounce and five attacks.
If we're lucky, there will be feats that give some much needed support to characters/creatures that have only 1 or 2 natural attacks. It has always seemed a bit weird that wolves are so weak because all they have is a bite with no iterative. Meanwhile, cats and raptors go around shredding everything with pounce and five attacks.
+1 to that as well.
Yeah, for Dogs and Wolves and stuff, having to buy Improved Natural Attack and Vital Strike to try and catch up to where the Big Cat and Deinonychus/Velociraptor already started is annoying.
Don't even get me started on those Small Bears and Large Wolves. Ugh.
Still, for non-companions, a T-Rex with Vital Strike and Improved Vital Strike is fun. 12d6 worth of fun (half that for a T-Rex animal companion). :>