Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Wilderness

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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Wilderness
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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:

Hero Lab Online
Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
Archives of Nethys

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Another Great Hardback Update Collection!

5/5

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?


Lots of ptential, but none of it really sticks

2/5

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.


Everything I wanted from Ultimate Wilderness

4/5

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.


Reprinted material, lack of clarity

1/5

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.


4/5


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Alexander, I think you meant "sage" not "saga" familiar archetype though a "sega" familiar archetype sounds interesting as well;)

Designer

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Dragon78 wrote:
Alexander, I think you meant "sage" not "saga" familiar archetype though a "sega" familiar archetype sounds interesting as well;)

You can only take that familiar archetype with a hedgehog, flying fox, or echidna familiar.


Mark Seifter wrote:
Dragon78 wrote:
Alexander, I think you meant "sage" not "saga" familiar archetype though a "sega" familiar archetype sounds interesting as well;)
You can only take that familiar archetype with a hedgehog, flying fox, or echidna familiar.

I think a later source allowed bats, too, but the master had to be evil.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

I'm just kind of amused by how polarized the reviews have been. I grinned a bit when I saw the 1-star and 5-star reviews had balanced out perfectly to give it a 3-star rating (though the scales have since tipped slightly).

Designer

6 people marked this as a favorite.
Almonihah wrote:
I'm just kind of amused by how polarized the reviews have been. I grinned a bit when I saw the 1-star and 5-star reviews had balanced out perfectly to give it a 3-star rating (though the scales have since tipped slightly).

As a scientist before being a game designer, I'm a hardcore data nerd, so I couldn't help but see the parallels with the intriguing and unusual movie review split on An Inconvenient Sequel (fivethirtyeight link).

The similarities include the polarization but also the fact that it built up lots of reviews before full release (it already has almost as many as some much older books, and more than others).


Mmmm... Noob question: can I apply Improved Natural Attack to the shifter's claws?


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Riccardo Olivieri wrote:
Mmmm... Noob question: can I apply Improved Natural Attack to the shifter's claws?

Hopefully, since at least one of the shifter's animal forms gets Improved Natural Attack as a bonus feat. (unless I am mistaken)


Mark Seifter wrote:
As a scientist before being a game designer, I'm a hardcore data nerd

[Quick Thread Hi-Jack]

Now I'm curious...what field of science?

[/End Thread Hi-Jack]

Designer

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Lemartes wrote:
Mark Seifter wrote:
As a scientist before being a game designer, I'm a hardcore data nerd

[Quick Thread Hi-Jack]

Now I'm curious...what field of science?

[/End Thread Hi-Jack]

PhD candidate in the sciency side of computer science (AI, language, cognition and such). Even after these years of game design, it still seems that the videos of my lectures from MIT are still just as popular as my paizo stuff. But no more threadjacking!


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Rysky wrote:
Actually I went digging some more into this because I've never actually seen any rules for allowing Bluff to imitate voices, and that's because there isn't.

You're correct. There were no hard rules for this mechanic before UW, but that's what I'm lamenting.

Paizo has a tendency to take corner cases with no clear rules interactions like these and introduce rules for them, but do so in the form of feats. This takes something that may have in the past been a very niche issue you'd adjudicate with your GM and now locks it away behind a wall that I wager most people won't be willing to pay given how limited a commodity feats are these days.

Which is a shame in my book, because this feels like something that doesn't need to be a feat in the first place.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

I was looking at the elementalist shifter and noticed it doesn’t replace the 20th level ability of final aspect. That seams like it is an oversight as I don’t know how it works with the archetype.

Edit: looking more into it this applys to all the shifter archetypes.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
swoosh wrote:
Rysky wrote:
Actually I went digging some more into this because I've never actually seen any rules for allowing Bluff to imitate voices, and that's because there isn't.

You're correct. There were no hard rules for this mechanic before UW, but that's what I'm lamenting.

Paizo has a tendency to take corner cases with no clear rules interactions like these and introduce rules for them, but do so in the form of feats. This takes something that may have in the past been a very niche issue you'd adjudicate with your GM and now locks it away behind a wall that I wager most people won't be willing to pay given how limited a commodity feats are these days.

Which is a shame in my book, because this feels like something that doesn't need to be a feat in the first place.

It's not like adding new uses for skills is impossible or something too, this book alone adds several. Plus previous player companions (the one that sticks out to me is Spymaster's Handbook) added a bunch of handy skill uses that were only locked behind being in a PDF not everyone might read.

Almonihah wrote:
I'm just kind of amused by how polarized the reviews have been. I grinned a bit when I saw the 1-star and 5-star reviews had balanced out perfectly to give it a 3-star rating (though the scales have since tipped slightly).

Does make me wonder how many of the 1 and 5-star reviews are being made just to counterbalance the 5 and 1-star reviews.

Silver Crusade

1 person marked this as a favorite.
swoosh wrote:
Rysky wrote:
Actually I went digging some more into this because I've never actually seen any rules for allowing Bluff to imitate voices, and that's because there isn't.

You're correct. There were no hard rules for this mechanic before UW, but that's what I'm lamenting.

Paizo has a tendency to take corner cases with no clear rules interactions like these and introduce rules for them, but do so in the form of feats. This takes something that may have in the past been a very niche issue you'd adjudicate with your GM and now locks it away behind a wall that I wager most people won't be willing to pay given how limited a commodity feats are these days.

Which is a shame in my book, because this feels like something that doesn't need to be a feat in the first place.

I’d say what it’s capable of qualifies it for a Feat, since you could only readily replicate the sound of a T-Rex with a spell otherwise. The flavor of the Feat is that you’ve spent so long among certain areas that you can perfectly mimic the sounds of all the animals there in.

As for finally nailing down a rule I can’t really fault them for that either, especially when it’s not an unwritten rule that everyone agrees on, but a “come up with a rule when it occurs” situation that there wasn’t a consensus on.


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Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Or you can just buy an Animal Call (from the ACG) for 1 sp, keyed to a T-Rex. If you really need to be able to get an animal call at-will, spend the feat on Brilliant Planner to be able to pull an appropriate call out when you need it, and the feat does other stuff too.


Mark Seifter wrote:
Lemartes wrote:
Mark Seifter wrote:
As a scientist before being a game designer, I'm a hardcore data nerd

[Quick Thread Hi-Jack]

Now I'm curious...what field of science?

[/End Thread Hi-Jack]

PhD candidate in the sciency side of computer science (AI, language, cognition and such). Even after these years of game design, it still seems that the videos of my lectures from MIT are still just as popular as my paizo stuff. But no more threadjacking!

Ha cool. Found some of the vids. Might have to watch a bit. Thanks. :)

On another note to officially end the thread jack...who was involved in the Rage Shifter archetype and what was the overall goal with that archetype? How did it perform in play testing? Thanks to whomever. ;)

Silver Crusade

Alchemaic wrote:
Or you can just buy an Animal Call (from the ACG) for 1 sp, keyed to a T-Rex. If you really need to be able to get an animal call at-will, spend the feat on Brilliant Planner to be able to pull an appropriate call out when you need it, and the feat does other stuff too.

*looks up item*

Not the same thing, since all that item does is give you a +2 to Survival to track the animal it is modeled after (what?) or “get along in the wild” (what?).

The Feat would let you mimic a T-Rex roar and scare the everliving shit out of some guards. Or goats.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Rysky wrote:
Alchemaic wrote:
Or you can just buy an Animal Call (from the ACG) for 1 sp, keyed to a T-Rex. If you really need to be able to get an animal call at-will, spend the feat on Brilliant Planner to be able to pull an appropriate call out when you need it, and the feat does other stuff too.

*looks up item*

Not the same thing, since all that item does is give you a +2 to Survival to track the animal it is modeled after (what?) or “get along in the wild” (what?).

The Feat would let you mimic a T-Rex roar and scare the everliving s#+! out of some guards. Or goats.

Which the call also does, since the call generates the same noise as the feat. The feat just has a failure possibility, while the call doesn't

The feat's actually kind of weird, since yes you can generate the sound, but it doesn't actually give you any use out of it. Like being able to mimic an animal to throw something of your trail (like the Burglar Rogue's Distraction ability) or beckon a similar animal over. So you've got to convince your GM that the noise you're making is doing whatever it is you're trying to do. I have to assume that sort of thing is the intent, but the feat itself is just missing it.

Silver Crusade

The Feat is very open ended in what all you can do with it, which would rely on how well you roll and your GM’s adjudication. The item mimics a specific animal call... that gives you a bonus to track said animal. Somehow.

Contributor

4 people marked this as a favorite.
Mark Seifter wrote:
Dragon78 wrote:
Alexander, I think you meant "sage" not "saga" familiar archetype though a "sega" familiar archetype sounds interesting as well;)
You can only take that familiar archetype with a hedgehog, flying fox, or echidna familiar.

It's amazing that Pathfinder's come so far that this joke works.


I love the Sylvan Trickster archetype. Can someone in the know -- a contributor, editor, designer -- let us know if the Rogue can count her Rogue levels as witch levels while using her Hexes? Please? I'm assuming that you can, but it doesn't exactly specify.

Shadow Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Rysky wrote:
The Feat is very open ended in what all you can do with it, which would rely on how well you roll and your GM’s adjudication.

So... it's a Disguise/Bluff check? That you now can't use without the feat?

Wonderful design, this...


So overall not bad. Kinda wish Gathlains were tiny though. Playable pixie-esque PC would be awesome and Small is just too big to really pull that off even if they otherwise fit the aesthetic.

Biggest disappointment though for me is the Commando Gunslinger. Archetype is thematically cool and trades away a lot of utility skills for other flavorful utility skills in a balanced fashion. And then you hit the end of the archetype and find out it loses gun training and the whole thing falls apart.

Star Watcher is another one that bugged me. Feels like you give up a lot in its modified alchemy and don't really gain a lot anywhere else, though knowledge for sense motive is cool. There are a few archetypes like that though.

Otherwise thought the book was okay. I like Ice Chemist (though I wish it was bigger), Fiendflesh Shifter (though I wish it was bigger), Sharptooth (though the numbers on ocean breath and swim like fish feel conservative), Venomfist, the kineticist archetypes.. etc.

Ixos wrote:
I love the Sylvan Trickster archetype. Can someone in the know -- a contributor, editor, designer -- let us know if the Rogue can count her Rogue levels as witch levels while using her Hexes? Please? I'm assuming that you can, but it doesn't exactly specify.

I feel like we need a general rule somewhere on this.

There are a number of archetypes scattered across a number of books where a class borrows a feature from another class without specifying level equivalency. Daring Champion Cavalier adding a nonexistent swashbuckler level to damage is an infamous one, but there are others.

Sovereign Court

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Pathfinder Starfinder Society Subscriber
Dragonborn3 wrote:
Rysky wrote:
The Feat is very open ended in what all you can do with it, which would rely on how well you roll and your GM’s adjudication.

So... it's a Disguise/Bluff check? That you now can't use without the feat?

Wonderful design, this...

Without the feat, you would use Disguise and take significant penalties for physical differences. With the feat, it is a Bluff check (more common skill) and doesn't face those penalties.

Publishing the feat doesn't negate the previous use of the Disguise skill. The feat just makes you better at it (and uses a better skill).

Silver Crusade

Dragonborn3 wrote:
Rysky wrote:
The Feat is very open ended in what all you can do with it, which would rely on how well you roll and your GM’s adjudication.

So... it's a Disguise/Bluff check? That you now can't use without the feat?

Wonderful design, this...

You can use Disguise without the Feat, and that has been the official rule for disguising your voice since the Ultimate Intrigue clarification*. This Feat lets you use Bluff to disguise your voice.

*before this clarification there was no rule nor consensus on what skill you used to disguise your voice.

Edit: ninjaed more succinctly by King.


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I'm just glad no one gave King Mogaru levels in Cavalier so he can't do Green Knight... ;)


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Thomas Seitz wrote:
I'm just glad no one gave King Mogaru levels in Cavalier so he can't do Green Knight... ;)

BRB, know who the BBEG will be will be in next campaign.

Now you make think I'm joking, and I am, but what is really concerning is that was actually more than half-serious, there's an actual chance I'm going to do this


I'm glad I got people inspired. :)

Silver Crusade Contributor

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Hello, new user, and welcome to the forums! ^_^


Jinkies!


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Scratch what I said abouve about the Commando, misread it. It's cool.

Shadow Lodge

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So... do we use the fire damage or the acid damage this time?


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

The Gathlain doesn't seem to have it's type listed. Anyone see it?

Shadow Lodge

It isn't listed anywhere but the bestiary entry. It's a fey. I really have to wonder why it is STILL not listed anywhere else....


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

A nature themed book and not even one illustration of a Catfolk. Much disappoint, such sad.


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Caleb Garofalo wrote:
A nature themed book and not even one illustration of a Catfolk. Much disappoint, such sad.

Yes... But there is a feat that lets you turn ANYONE into a catgirl if you want.

Orc catgirls? Sure.
Tangu catgirls? Sure (but what does that even look like?)
I think thats what the feat does at least.


3 people marked this as a favorite.
J4RH34D wrote:
Caleb Garofalo wrote:
A nature themed book and not even one illustration of a Catfolk. Much disappoint, such sad.

Yes... But there is a feat that lets you turn ANYONE into a catgirl if you want.

Orc catgirls? Sure.
Tangu catgirls? Sure (but what does that even look like?)
I think thats what the feat does at least.

I think it may also have mechanical benefits, just as a little icing on the cake. ^_^


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It would have been cool if granted a +1 racial bonus on attack rolls against rodent based animals, humanoids, and magical beast;)

Dark Archive

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J4RH34D wrote:
Tengu catgirls? Sure (but what does that even look like?)

A blur, since it spends most of it's time reflexively chasing itself.

Ditto for Ysoki/ratfolk cat-girls.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Set wrote:
J4RH34D wrote:
Tengu catgirls? Sure (but what does that even look like?)

A blur, since it spends most of it's time reflexively chasing itself.

Ditto for Ysoki/ratfolk cat-girls.

Tom is Jerry.


Mark Seifter wrote:
Almonihah wrote:
I'm just kind of amused by how polarized the reviews have been. I grinned a bit when I saw the 1-star and 5-star reviews had balanced out perfectly to give it a 3-star rating (though the scales have since tipped slightly).

As a scientist before being a game designer, I'm a hardcore data nerd, so I couldn't help but see the parallels with the intriguing and unusual movie review split on An Inconvenient Sequel (fivethirtyeight link).

The similarities include the polarization but also the fact that it built up lots of reviews before full release (it already has almost as many as some much older books, and more than others).

I actually did some Machine Learning research during my undergraduate years...

Anyway, sort-of back on track, how many other releases have had similar review distributions? Is Ultimate Wilderness the most divisive release in Paizo history, or are there other books that have done likewise?


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Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscriber

We're not allowed to talk about the other ones in this thread, because it adds several dozen pages of back-and-forth that the moderators have to clean up.

There have been a few significant issues in the past with releases, to say the least.


Wei Ji the Learner wrote:


We're not allowed to talk about the other ones in this thread, because it adds several dozen pages of back-and-forth that the moderators have to clean up.

There have been a few significant issues in the past with releases, to say the least.

...I don't think I have seen this level of broad scale disappointment however......

Silver Crusade

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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
nighttree wrote:


...I don't think I have seen this level of broad scale disappointment however......

That's because you have that piece of metal covering your eyes.

.
.
.
.

HAHAHAHAHA! THAT WAS A GOOD ONE, WASN'T IT!

In other news, Ultimate Magic and ACG are both rated lower than UW, Ultimate Combat is about the same.


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Rated lower, yes. However, it feels like there's almost a war going on between the 5 star reviews and the 1 star ones. The book isn't perfect, by any means, but neither is it worthless. I think that a lot of the reviews (especially some of the positive ones) are intentionally exaggerating the book's good points while ignoring its shortcomings, in order to artificially inflate the rating. UM and the ACG don't have that quite as much.

Silver Crusade

2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Dαedαlus wrote:
Rated lower, yes. However, it feels like there's almost a war going on between the 5 star reviews and the 1 star ones. The book isn't perfect, by any means, but neither is it worthless. I think that a lot of the reviews (especially some of the positive ones) are intentionally exaggerating the book's good points while ignoring its shortcomings, in order to artificially inflate the rating. UM and the ACG don't have that quite as much.

I didn't ignore anything, just for me, as a DM, there are sections of the book which I just don't pay as much attention to. Shifter is one of them. Maybe, if the PDF was 40 USD, I'd be edgy that I'm paying too much for material I don't need, but at 10 bucks? No reason to complain.

Scarab Sages

8 people marked this as a favorite.
Dαedαlus wrote:
Rated lower, yes. However, it feels like there's almost a war going on between the 5 star reviews and the 1 star ones.

I believe it's the difference between people appreciating the forest or people that wanted that one tree.

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