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.
This is the book that could persuade me to run another wilderness exploration game with Pathfinder. My last hexcrawl was a pretty good ride I think, and there already are a lot of options for players to engage wilderness adventures, but still... damn. Instant must-have.
I'm jumping in late, and freely admit I haven't read all 850+ posts, but I wonder if there will finally be a druid archetype that ditches shapeshifting altogether, or an arcane archetype that can be as nature-focused as the Druid.
I'm jumping in late, and freely admit I haven't read all 850+ posts, but I wonder if there will finally be a druid archetype that ditches shapeshifting altogether, or an arcane archetype that can be as nature-focused as the Druid.
Shifter class
New Archetypes
Environment related rules
New companion/familiar/mount related rules
New Feats
New Spells
First World stuff
Race rules(new and old)
Other
Companions: It's going to be nice to get some expansion in this category, and I'm delighted to see that plant companions will become more widely available. Hearing that you can train venomous animal companions to milk themselves to provide free (albeit temporary) poison and other things along those lines is nice too.
Magical Plants: This sounds like a cool new category, though I think it will be primarily useful for NPCs and adding to magical forests unless you can cart around various magical plants in pots and such, or perhaps a cart (such as a traveling garden?), though I also think it would be very cool if phytokineticists got some wild talents allowing them to create temporary ones, or create temporary plant creatures.
Natural Hazards and Strange Terrains: The Environments section of Horror Adventures was my absolute favorite, and I have hopes that equally interesting elements will show up like the locations, hazards, and domains of evil elements in Horror Adventures.
Shapeshifter: I like shapeshifting, I've been playing a metamorph in Pathfinder Society and having fun even if it isn't the most optimal thing, so I'm looking forward to this and its archetypes, especially the ooze one, because it sounds hilarious.
I'm most excited for more/better weather information. More specifically, a better breakdown of different degrees of weather. The Core Rulebook has fog, for example, but only the classic "pea soup" fog where you literally can't see anything more than 5' away. I'd see to see some more finely-tuned rules for lighter fogs and mists. Similarly, there's "rain" but not any distinction between "oh god the skies have opened" and "drizzly, but you don't really need an umbrella."
I'm also kind of hoping that since the shifter looks to primarily use natural attacks, that there will be some more fun feats that work well with creatures that use natural attacks.
Edit: Plus some new rules for animal companions, so that might help support them. I wonder if there could be an expanded list of applicable feats animal companions can take without having 3 Intelligence, though even if not, plenty of people do just to open up the feat possibilities.
I always love to see new classes and new class options like bloodlines, wild talents, hexes, discoveries, etc. When it comes to feats, spells, and magic items I am a lot more picky. As for archetypes it depends on the class, theme, and what abilities are replaced.
Last I heard we will get fey polymorph spells, I also believe will get ooze based one(s) as well or at least a shifter archetype that focuses on oozes.
I would love to see those alternate/additional form of the dragon ones make it in.
im really hoping the shifter is another SLA class, it would be interesting to have one whos SLA all take the form of various mutations and new body parts
The shifter is a martial class with wild shape wich is a supernatural ability. Supernatural abilities are much better for martial classes since they do not provoke attacks of opportunity.
You know what would have been a great way to spend the time until this comes out in November? Slowly revealing little, tiny tidbits like what's going on with Starfinder.
