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.
Enh. The table of contents looks like I'm still going to keep advocating for an Ultimate Environment book. Looks like there's less than 10 pages in the entire book of wilderness hazards and traps.
Is there art of Yoon as the "towering juggernaut of strength in which he gets as much strength as possible while his burn mechanic damages the environment around him" archetype?
Is there art of Yoon as the "towering juggernaut of strength in which he gets as much strength as possible while his burn mechanic damages the environment around him" archetype?
Since people already posted the table of contents and are discussing what's in the book, I assume that they've gotten .... capes of invisibility, boots of elvenkind, broke into Paizo offices at night, evaded the cave raptors and made it away with copies of the book. I mean, it's the only logical explanation.
Is there art of Yoon as the "towering juggernaut of strength in which he gets as much strength as possible while his burn mechanic damages the environment around him" archetype?
Yoon’s a lady, just a head’s up.
And now I have “Yoon looks like a lady” playing in my head....
The table of contents was posted by one of the contributors and only discussion is about how the shifter isn't as good as the druid at shape shifting.
Though I should have said if anyone else has gotten their PDFs? At least other then one or a very few people on Monday I haven't seen anyone say they have gotten it on Tuesday.
Since people already posted the table of contents and are discussing what's in the book, I assume that they've gotten .... capes of invisibility, boots of elvenkind, broke into Paizo offices at night, evaded the cave raptors and made it away with copies of the book. I mean, it's the only logical explanation.
It's far away from some of us, but we scried on the staff members we met at cons as a workaround.
So can this Green Knight survive decapitation and casually walk over and pick up his own head and put it back on? Yes I've seen...most of that movie. ;)
So can this Green Knight survive decapitation and casually walk over and pick up his own head and put it back on? Yes I've seen...most of that movie. ;)
And that scene is straight out of the original story Gawain and the Green Knight as written several centuries ago.
How does the shifter's claws work, does it just get 2 claw attacks, does it gain additional natural attacks, does it have a flurry of blows type mechanic, etc.?
Is there art of Yoon as the "towering juggernaut of strength in which he gets as much strength as possible while his burn mechanic damages the environment around him" archetype?
Yoon’s a lady, just a head’s up.
Just copying Verzen's description of the archetype.
So can this Green Knight survive decapitation and casually walk over and pick up his own head and put it back on? Yes I've seen...most of that movie. ;)
And that scene is straight out of the original story Gawain and the Green Knight as written several centuries ago.
Cool. It's been a while since I saw it. I don't know much about Gawain...more about Galahad. :)
Have we finally gotten more vermin companions & plant companions?
I like the plant companions as well but am frustrated that they can't wear armor. I don't know how you could keep a Sapling Treant alive at lvl 5 or higher with a ~14 AC.
Have we finally gotten more vermin companions & plant companions?
I like the plant companions as well but am frustrated that they can't wear armor. I don't know how you could keep a Sapling Treant alive at lvl 5 or higher with a ~14 AC.
This is not entirely correct.
Plant Companions wrote:
Plant companions cannot gain armor or weapon proficiency feats, even as they advance in hit dice, and cannot use manufactured weapons at all unless their description says otherwise.
They can wear armor but suffer the non-proficiency penalties. The Haramaki and Silken Ceremonial Armor have no such penalties.
....the snail's pace at which this thread is updating is slowly driving mad. It either needs to pick up or I need to get my shipping notice, or I may well snap. :P
to those who have the PDF could we please get list of archetypes? also y information on how the first world interacts with environment would be most appreciated.
....the snail's pace at which this thread is updating is slowly driving mad. It either needs to pick up or I need to get my shipping notice, or I may well snap. :P
Indeed. This appears to be the slowest we have gotten any updates. Still waiting on mine or I would be telling you something...
