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.
It would have been nice especially since the release is only a couple of months away so revving up the hype train wouldn't hurt. Oh well there is always previews.
Actually, Idunn is sharing. She is required to do so, as her apples are the source of the gods' immortality, and they all have to continue to eat them at regular intervals or they revert to mortality.
As far as greek golden apples go, the only ones that I'm aware of are the Kallisti apple from the original snub, and the apples of the Hesperides. The Kallisti apple wouldn't really qualify as a magical plant, as Eris more or less made it herself, and while fruit do come from plants, they aren't really plants in and of themselves, so calling the Kallisti apple a magical plant is like calling a golden bull testicle crafted by Hephaestus a magical beast. And while I don't quite recall for certain what the apples of the Hesperides were supposed to do, aside from being the mcguffin for one of Heracles' fetch quests, but a niggling in my mind says it is similar to the apples of Idunn in Norse mythology, so the apple tree of the Hesperides would be a magical plant, but again the apples in and of themselves would not.
I'd love to see some Elf love in this book. Elves are always depicted as in tune with nature to a degree not really touchable by the other core races, and yet with their racial ability mods (+2 Dex, +2 Int, -2 Con), nearly any of the other Core races make for better nature-based classes (the Witch being the sole exception), as there aren't any Int-based nature-based caster classes. A racial archetype for Witch or Wizard that uses Druid spells would be awesome, or a racial archetype of Druid that uses Int as its casting stat.
Can anyone with inside information tell me if this is likely to be child appropriate? Before the campaign setting stuff started leaking over, every rules hardcover other than occult adventures, horror adventures, and bestiary 6 was OK, but much of the campaign setting stuff is not. (i.e. if it mentions Lamashtu or Zon Kuthon, it's not OK) My son would adore this book based on his favorite classes, but I don't want to buy it as a gift for him and then find it's not OK.
edit: If I have to, I can wait for it to come out and buy the PDF to preview it, but it would be better to get it as a subscription item.
I did not notice any questionable elements on my initial pass the other night, but I did only skim and was not looking for child-appropriateness. I will try to do a more indepth look for you Redelia.
Unfortunately, I am not allowed to give such answers. Currently only Paizo staff have that ability.
If this was directed at me, thank you very much for your willingness to help. I appreciate it, even if rules/circumstances prevent you from being able to do it.
Can anyone with inside information tell me if this is likely to be child appropriate? Before the campaign setting stuff started leaking over, every rules hardcover other than occult adventures, horror adventures, and bestiary 6 was OK, but much of the campaign setting stuff is not. (i.e. if it mentions Lamashtu or Zon Kuthon, it's not OK) My son would adore this book based on his favorite classes, but I don't want to buy it as a gift for him and then find it's not OK.
edit: If I have to, I can wait for it to come out and buy the PDF to preview it, but it would be better to get it as a subscription item.
Of course, the best way to find out is to take a gander before you buy it. I I don't fully know what your standards are for your child, but given what you've said on the subject, I think you will find this book suitable for your son.
I don't believe it mentions either Lamashtu or Zon Kuthon, or if it does Lamashtu may be mentioned in passing within an archetype description or its relations with the Green Faith. It adheres much more to the format and the tone of other books in the Ultimate line. If you judged those books suitable, there's a good bet you'll judge this one suitable too.
Can anyone with inside information tell me if this is likely to be child appropriate? Before the campaign setting stuff started leaking over, every rules hardcover other than occult adventures, horror adventures, and bestiary 6 was OK, but much of the campaign setting stuff is not. (i.e. if it mentions Lamashtu or Zon Kuthon, it's not OK) My son would adore this book based on his favorite classes, but I don't want to buy it as a gift for him and then find it's not OK.
edit: If I have to, I can wait for it to come out and buy the PDF to preview it, but it would be better to get it as a subscription item.
Of course, the best way to find out is to take a gander before you buy it. I I don't fully know what your standards are for your child, but given what you've said on the subject, I think you will find this book suitable for your son.
I don't believe it mentions either Lamashtu or Zon Kuthon, or if it does Lamashtu may be mentioned in passing within an archetype description or its relations with the Green Faith. It adheres much more to the format and the tone of other books in the Ultimate line. If you judged those books suitable, there's a good bet you'll judge this one suitable too.
Yeah, every parent is different. What I was hoping for was something along the line of 'some parents may think there is too much ___' followed by an issue that some parents might have, if there was any such topic. We have found all the Ultimate books to be appropriate, and among his favorite books to pore over, so that's helpful. Thank you very much.
I want this ASAP...so I subscribed! I love that option so very much. Thank you for offering it. Getting the PDF AND the book for the price of just the book is too good to pass up.
I will subscribe as soon as it is an option that has no other books before it in this product line.
Fourshadow, it sounds like you only discovered subscriptions recently, when did you first use the Paizo subscriptions?
Over a year and half ago. So, depends on your concept of 'recently'. Just excited is all. :) I've kept my subscription to PC the entire time but dropped and renewed several times with RPG and once with Campaign Setting.