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.
Love what I am reading regarding the Shifter...and the Perform check ritual vs...well, that would be a Spoiler! But it is cool. Thanks to those who are answering questions.
I do not yet have mine...which is unusual. In the almost 2 years I have subscribed I cannot fill one hand with the times I have waited as long as this. Sigh.
Love what I am reading regarding the Shifter...and the Perform check ritual vs...well, that would be a Spoiler! But it is cool. Thanks to those who are answering questions.
I do not yet have mine...which is unusual. In the almost 2 years I have subscribed I cannot fill one hand with the times I have waited as long as this. Sigh.
I feel ya buddy hang in their we will get their together (you'll probably actually beat me still but that is ok.)
How much of a nerf did the plant races get? Are they just page filler now or still worth playing?
Hopefully not too much for your taste! One of my contributions to this book was the ghoran section, and I think they came out looking absolutely delicious in Ultimate Wilderness.
Berserker comes in at 5th level now instead of 4th, but the fighter level is considered the barbarian level for effects instead of fighter level -3. It replaces weapon training completely.
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
nighttree wrote:
On the Ooze shifter Archetype....does it replace your race making you an ooze that "appears" as human, elf, etc...?
Nope. You remain your race but add the ooze type to your character for purposes of effects targeting types. This shifter gains their abilities from contemplating oozes rather than druidic tradition.
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
NewXToa wrote:
Do druids get access to any worthwhile/notable domain/domain equivalents?
New Druidic Domains:
Erosion: Connect with the slow destructive forces of nature and cause rapid decay of metals and stone. Spells include rusting grasp and sympathetic vibration.
Vermin: You're really good with bugs. Your wild empathy works on vermin and you get a sting attack at 8th level. Spells include swarm skin and creeping doom.
On the Ooze shifter Archetype....does it replace your race making you an ooze that "appears" as human, elf, etc...?
Nope. You remain your race but add the ooze type to your character for purposes of effects targeting types. This shifter gains their abilities from contemplating oozes rather than druidic tradition.
It is easily the archetype I'm interested in the most. How does it fare in combat and exploration, Feros? Does it get debilitating attacks and things like compression by any chance?
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
The Fool wrote:
Feros wrote:
nighttree wrote:
On the Ooze shifter Archetype....does it replace your race making you an ooze that "appears" as human, elf, etc...?
Nope. You remain your race but add the ooze type to your character for purposes of effects targeting types. This shifter gains their abilities from contemplating oozes rather than druidic tradition.
It is easily the archetype I'm interested in the most. How does it fare in combat and exploration, Feros? Does it get debilitating attacks and things like compression by any chance?
Oozemorph:
You get compression automatically, no replaced abilities attached (!)
The character retains their race, but their natural form is that of a formless ooze. They can take their old humanoid form for one hour a day for every shifter level they possess a number of times per day equal to 1/2 their level (minimum 1). Each hour beyond requires effort to maintain or they revert. They have to revert to ooze form to rest.
As an ooze, the character cannot be flanked and is immune to precision damage or critical hits. They can't use weapons, armor, cast spells, use magic items, speak, etc. This ability replaces a LOT of the shifter's normal shapechanging abilities.
Instead of claws, they make their weapons out of their bodies. They can be slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning as desired.
Their wild empathy only works on oozes with Int scores of 2 or lower...but it WORKS ON OOZES.
They get damage reduction/slashing that goes up as they level starting at 2nd. This replaces the AC bonus that most shifters get.
At 4th level they get a climb speed of 10 which replaces woodland stride.
On the Ooze shifter Archetype....does it replace your race making you an ooze that "appears" as human, elf, etc...?
Nope. You remain your race but add the ooze type to your character for purposes of effects targeting types. This shifter gains their abilities from contemplating oozes rather than druidic tradition.
It is easily the archetype I'm interested in the most. How does it fare in combat and exploration, Feros? Does it get debilitating attacks and things like compression by any chance?
** spoiler omitted **
That's AMAZING! I never cared for wild empathy as it was, animals are for eating anyway is what the ooze would think.
The compression and the climb speed makes for an awesome infiltrator/assassin. Now if only there was a way emulate acidic touches the way oozes do you could be a great saboteur as well.
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
The Fool wrote:
...
That's AMAZING! I never cared for wild empathy as it was, animals are for eating anyway is what the ooze would think.
The compression and the climb speed makes for an awesome infiltrator/assassin. Now if only there was a way emulate acidic touches the way oozes do you could be a great saboteur as well.
I should note that the humanoid form can appear as any humanoid as per the alter self spell and that your ability eventually includes beast shape I (at 8th level) and beast shape II and giant shape I (at 15th level).
Someone has to be the negative nancy and I elect myself to be that person. I have to say, The Shifter is rather disappointing. I don't know who designed this class but it must've been the same guy who did The Hunter which I found to be poorly done class. I'll agree the aspects feature is pretty cool but I hate how it's limited to minutes per day when the the Hunter gets to keep them all day when his animal companion is dead, and the shifter doesn't get a animal companion. I hate how wildshape is limited to a single animal related to your aspect. Why not just copy over the druid's wildshape ability. Why can't he wildshape at first level? The monk wisdom bonus is odd, why wisdom bonus instead of a scaling natural armor bonus? This class is mind-boggling bad and fails to meet all expectations of a wildshaping melee class could be.