Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Wilderness

3.00/5 (based on 59 ratings)
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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JoelF847 wrote:
Ventnor wrote:
Will Huston wrote:
JoelF847 wrote:
I hope the archetypes for other classes aren't mostly just a mix of the shifter class with the base class. I get bored of those really quickly.
I mean, the last book that had a class in it, Ultimate Intrigue, there really was only like one or two archetypes that were grafting Vigilante onto another class.
To be fair, a lot of vigilante archetypes are basically grafting the wizard/inquisitor/gunslinger/etc. to the vigilante.
True, there weren't as many in Ultimate Intrigue, but as Ventnor points out the actual Vigilante ones were mainly other classes onto vigilante. But Occult Adventures and Advanced Class Guide seemed almost entirely of adding the classes from those books to other classes.

In all fairness, Advanced Class Guide was mostly about grafting classes together in the first place, so it's not surprising that the archetypes followed a similar principal.

BMO wrote:
Think the Eidolon subtypes from unchained Summoner, but maybe encompassing even more outsiders that didn't get any love in Pathfinder Unchained, like kami, kytons, qlippoth, etc. In fact, why not introduce these eidolon subtypes in the hardcover as well?

Well, eidolon subtypes like those don't seem very wilderness-themed, save perhaps kami?


Well, new classes always means more content in future products. Recently we have a large amount of planar themed additional options for the Medium, something I was hoping for since the class release. The same can happen with the shifter. Maybe in a book where "Wilderness" isn't the central concept.

Archetypes, people. Archetypes. ;)

Or maybe addition to an existing feature, just like the bloodlines. Maybe the shifter has bloodlines as well, or something along those lines. As I said, its too early for us to even guess.

However, was there ever a shifter class that had bloodlines or something like that?

Dark Archive

Any chance of there being a playtest for the shifter like they have done for other classes?


This would be a fitting place for polymorph spells for turning into fey;)

Ultimate City/Urban/Civilization type book would be cool. As for Ultimate Dungeon, that would be a tougher sell for me.

I hope the Shifter has a fighter's HD/BA, at least 4+int skill points, and no spell casting at all, but spell powers would be okay.

Cultivating magical plants sounds interesting.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

haroOOOOOooOOOOOOooooo

Grand Lodge

Kevin Mack wrote:
Any chance of there being a playtest for the shifter like they have done for other classes?

I asked that too, but got told privately that the playtest is already done.


My hopes for Shifter are something that lets me play a shapeshifting trickster character better. 4/9 casting with some illusions and enchantments would be nice for that. That's unrealistic outside of an archetype (the description is pretty focused on mauling rather than trickery), but at the very least I can go with a kitsune nine-tailed build. Apart from specific hopes, I'm sure the class will be quite cool on it's own merits. I liked Mark Seifter's Masquerade Reveler shifting alternate class, and I do see him posting here, so I'm quite optimistic!

(That said, Shifter does have a weird design space issue, though, of competing with Druid's strong shifting on top of 9th level casting while presumably being somewhat limited by Monk and Fighter since it sounds like more of a martial class.)

Always excited for more familiar and animal companion content! (Or even old material to get reprinted and fixed up. I love familiar archetypes, but Mauler shows up on the rules forum a lot, and Guardian on Tumor Familiar is pretty cheesy.)

I think Ultimate Intrigue covered urban games, and this acts as a bit of a balance to that. But since I specifically guessed that there wouldn't be something called Ultimate Wilderness, my predictions don't have a great track record.

Legacy of the First World is coming out soon, so we'll have lots of fey content to enjoy.

Other niche stuff I'd like but am not counting on- a little more fungus stuff (plants get all the love!), and more PC options for pet swarms.

Sczarni

Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
kevin_video wrote:
Kevin Mack wrote:
Any chance of there being a playtest for the shifter like they have done for other classes?
I asked that too, but got told privately that the playtest is already done.

Was it a closed playtest? That makes me a sad panda!


2 people marked this as a favorite.

What i really don't want to see with animal companions is new tricks that make overly defined distinctions, or that require a trick to do something you can already do without a trick (for example making the watch trick when Guard was already doing that for 15 years). Ultimate intrigue had a lot of those, and they either get ignored (bad) or constrain what people can do with skills without pouring every resource they have into skills.


Verzen wrote:
kevin_video wrote:
Kevin Mack wrote:
Any chance of there being a playtest for the shifter like they have done for other classes?
I asked that too, but got told privately that the playtest is already done.
Was it a closed playtest? That makes me a sad panda!

Well, we are getting four hardcovers and Starfinder this year. I'm guessing it was a matter of not having the spare people to run a public playtest.

Grand Lodge

Verzen wrote:
kevin_video wrote:
Kevin Mack wrote:
Any chance of there being a playtest for the shifter like they have done for other classes?
I asked that too, but got told privately that the playtest is already done.
Was it a closed playtest? That makes me a sad panda!

Looks like, yeah. If that somehow changes, great, but I doubt it.

Silver Crusade

19 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Later playtests were 20% useful feedback, 80% "Paizo, whaizo u failzo at elementary design which a monkey could do?". I'm not surprised they ditched it.

Grand Lodge

15 people marked this as a favorite.
Adventure Path Charter Subscriber
Gorbacz wrote:
Later playtests were 20% useful feedback, 80% "Paizo, whaizo u failzo at elementary design which a monkey could do?". I'm not surprised they ditched it.

This is my take on it. Early on, playtests were great at generating excitement for products, getting a few ideas and feedback. The last few playtests have been so caustic that they were probably not worth the designers' time to go through them and read the threads. They were very heavy on theorycraft and very light on actual play, which was the exact opposite of what Paizo conducted playtests for to begin with.

-Skeld

Silver Crusade

9 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Pretty much. Little in-game reports, much "there's no point in even playing this because it's so flawed" armchair rambling.


It saddens me they did stop with public playtesting, they were fun, at least for the first 100 pages (or so) anyway;)

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Dragon78 wrote:

It saddens me they did stop with public playtesting, they were fun, at least for the first 100 pages (or so) anyway;)

Maybe for you, but certainly not for moderators and designers.


Whoa. What just happened?! You mean my favorite environs to play is now getting a hardback?! Sure, dungeon crawls are cool and iconic, city adventures have a lot of possibilities, but let me go out into the wilderness please--thank you for this!

Between this and the Blight reveal in the Paizo Blog, this has already been one dynamite Friday! It's not even 9:30 AM yet, where I am!

Liberty's Edge

A section on First World? that might be enough to sway me into starting a subscription for the RPG line... I predict wife aggro...

Sczarni

Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

I hope there is a kineticist archetype that allows shapeshifting of some kind!


11 people marked this as a favorite.

That's why we can't have nice playtests.


5 people marked this as a favorite.

Will there be a section detailing all the ways you get ants?

Silver Crusade

3 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Plausible Pseudonym wrote:
Will there be a section detailing all the ways you get ants?

PHRASING.

Liberty's Edge

3 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

It is really unfortunate about the closed playtest because the system itself went through a lengthy and very open playtest. I really enjoyed those days and sorry to see the system shift away from its roots so to speak.


Hmm... Sounds interesting. I hope we get some archetypes for animal companions and familiars. Also feats for those same creatures would be cool.

Scarab Sages

Any pointers on the new Kineticist content? :) Wheee!

My personal #1 wishlist item would be one or two useful infusions to take before Kineticist level 7th. After that, there's too many good things already. ;o) It's particularly dire for Electric Kineticist, who are basically forced to pick Thundering Infusion at 5th...

Or a way to get a physical and an energy blast at 1st. That would be all kinds of awesome as well. Or maybe a mini-AoE for the early levels that could be used by other elements than Fire? A 5'-radius burst or something...? Just to smooth out the long wait for the first AoE options at 7th (or 9th for multielementalists).


Product Description wrote:
Overviews of druidic sects and rituals, new spells, archetypes, and character options, and more round out the final contribution to the Pathfinder RPG rules!

Am I the only one that noticed this weird phrasing?


As a fan of nature-themed characters, this looks like a boon!

Excited!

Silver Crusade RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

2 people marked this as a favorite.
NewXToa wrote:
Product Description wrote:
Overviews of druidic sects and rituals, new spells, archetypes, and character options, and more round out the final contribution to the Pathfinder RPG rules!
Am I the only one that noticed this weird phrasing?

It says "latest" there. At least, it does now. Did it say "final" before? CONSPIRACY THEORY TIME! Seriously though if they had that phrasing in there that frightens me. A lot.


They updated it, which is relieving.


I hope the conversation about this wording involved somebody saying, "This may be the final hardback book of 2017, but that is not how our customers will read your usage of the word 'final'!"


Did it say "final" before, I must have missed that.

Anyone know where the mock up art is from?

I will miss you public playtests, RPG superstar, and hardcover campaign setting books:(

Dark Archive

So how soon before we start getting details on the new Iconic?

(Also really holding out that shifter is a full martial class since already have spellcasting shapeshifter via druid.)

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Kevin Mack wrote:

So how soon before we start getting details on the new Iconic?

(Also really holding out that shifter is a full martial class since already have spellcasting shapeshifter via druid.)

When Paizo's marketing plan says "it's time to hype up Ultimate Wilderness by releasing the iconic". Given my limited knowledge on how you do such things, it's going to be sometime after the last hardcover released before this one.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

Please have new options for tree-hugging, fey-friend wizards. Please have new options for tree-hugging, fey-friend wizards. Please have new options for tree-hugging, fey-friend wizards. Please have new options for tree-hugging, fey-friend wizards.
I'm TIRED of nature and fey magic being almost exclusively the province of divine spellcasters.


Kevin Mack wrote:

So how soon before we start getting details on the new Iconic?

(Also really holding out that shifter is a full martial class since already have spellcasting shapeshifter via druid.)

I'm looking forward for this new Iconic. I hope it's an kellid man or a mwangi woman. If not a Kellid, I'm hoping for at least a female iconic.

Maybe (most probably) it's a Gnome, because, you know, "wilderness" and "First World". If that's the case, than I hope it's a male Gnome.

Silver Crusade RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

I'm hoping for a wyrwood iconic. :-D (unlikely)

Silver Crusade Contributor

Iconics are core races only, I'm afraid.

Personally, I'm hoping for an elf.


needs theme music


Kalindlara wrote:

Iconics are core races only, I'm afraid.

Personally, I'm hoping for an elf.

Except if they're evil.


Dragon78 wrote:

Did it say "final" before, I must have missed that.

Ha - I figured out the problem. My laptop has a word filter that changes assorted words to other words - most of the time it's just amusing, but sometimes I forget the filter is there for words that I don't see as often. The first time I read the post, the filter changed "latest" to "final", and then the second time I checked I was on my tablet, which does not have the filter. It's all in my head!

For those that are curious, this is the filter, with some of my own substitutions added.

Silver Crusade RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

5 people marked this as a favorite.

... WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? LOL

Silver Crusade

4 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

0.o

Dark Archive

when i saw the title I thought of TSRs Wilderness Survival Guide.
not that it will be hard to do better than this, but please do a million times better


4 people marked this as a favorite.
cartmanbeck wrote:
... WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? LOL

This surprise cardiac stress test has been a public service provided by...

Designer

8 people marked this as a favorite.
Gorbacz wrote:
Dragon78 wrote:

It saddens me they did stop with public playtesting, they were fun, at least for the first 100 pages (or so) anyway;)

Maybe for you, but certainly not for moderators and designers.

They are really really stressful and kind of shoot productivity a lot to keep up with everything, but they can also be fun sometimes (the medium and stalker playtests actually were a bit more chill) and definitely spotted some useful things. That said, QuidEst isn't wrong that the the crunched schedule kind of disallows the time. I do have to say, since I too was a Paizo public playtester before working here and saw how much they could help, that I was a bit concerned myself about the closed playtests before they happened, but I was pleasantly surprised by how many playtest sessions and insights the closed playtest teams managed to generate for Starfinder (for instance, one particularly crazy playtest group, the one I was GMing, managed to play and report 11 separate sessions in the first two weeks of the playtest, with one playtester in particular generating 2,000 words worth of bullet-pointed data during that time O.o).

I'd still really like to have a public playtest when possible, having grown into Pathfinder on them, but it also makes me want to simultaneously invest as heavily in private playtesters as we did for the books where there were no public playtests. Then again, coming from a scientific AI background, I'm a glutton for as much data as possible, and that's just my personal thoughts.

Having posted all that, I'd like to ask people to move the discussion about playtests to a new thread and leave this one to Ultimate Wilderness if you would. Thanks everybody and rock on!

Designer

3 people marked this as a favorite.
QuidEst wrote:

My hopes for Shifter are something that lets me play a shapeshifting trickster character better. 4/9 casting with some illusions and enchantments would be nice for that. That's unrealistic outside of an archetype (the description is pretty focused on mauling rather than trickery), but at the very least I can go with a kitsune nine-tailed build. Apart from specific hopes, I'm sure the class will be quite cool on it's own merits. I liked Mark Seifter's Masquerade Reveler shifting alternate class, and I do see him posting here, so I'm quite optimistic!

(That said, Shifter does have a weird design space issue, though, of competing with Druid's strong shifting on top of 9th level casting while presumably being somewhat limited by Monk and Fighter since it sounds like more of a martial class.)

Always excited for more familiar and animal companion content! (Or even old material to get reprinted and fixed up. I love familiar archetypes, but Mauler shows up on the rules forum a lot, and Guardian on Tumor Familiar is pretty cheesy.)

I think Ultimate Intrigue covered urban games, and this acts as a bit of a balance to that. But since I specifically guessed that there wouldn't be something called Ultimate Wilderness, my predictions don't have a great track record.

Legacy of the First World is coming out soon, so we'll have lots of fey content to enjoy.

Other niche stuff I'd like but am not counting on- a little more fungus stuff (plants get all the love!), and more PC options for pet swarms.

Much as I love shapeshifters (having created the Masquerade Reveler, as you mentioned, and been the #1 cheerleader for choosing to include a shapeshifter class as our next class), Logan and I were back working on Starfinder during the class stages, so the shifter is the child of Jason and Stephen's brand of genius design-fu!

As to familiars, it's certainly true that my ability to write accurate rules text has come a long way since my Familiar Folio freelance work that I wrote after my job offer and move but before I started working and learning the job and styles, so it would definitely be refreshing to get a chance to make those less confusing and to solve a bunch of Non-RPG-line FAQ requests/rules threads in one fell swoop. However, you'll have to wait and see.

Designer

2 people marked this as a favorite.
Luthorne wrote:


In all fairness, Advanced Class Guide was mostly about grafting classes together in the first place, so it's not surprising that the archetypes followed a similar principle.

And Occult Adventures was about peeling back the layers of reality and learning about occult and psychic themes, so it's not surprising that the archetypes to make the other classes feel more occult also made them feel like the occult classes too, even when they didn't use the same class features to do so. I'd conjecture that any time an "Adventures" book has new base classes, the archetypes for the other classes will feel more like those classes than in most other books (we only have one data point for this conjecture, though, since Mythic and Horror didn't have new base classes).


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Mark Seifter wrote:
QuidEst wrote:

My hopes for Shifter are something that lets me play a shapeshifting trickster character better. 4/9 casting with some illusions and enchantments would be nice for that. That's unrealistic outside of an archetype (the description is pretty focused on mauling rather than trickery), but at the very least I can go with a kitsune nine-tailed build. Apart from specific hopes, I'm sure the class will be quite cool on it's own merits. I liked Mark Seifter's Masquerade Reveler shifting alternate class, and I do see him posting here, so I'm quite optimistic!

(That said, Shifter does have a weird design space issue, though, of competing with Druid's strong shifting on top of 9th level casting while presumably being somewhat limited by Monk and Fighter since it sounds like more of a martial class.)

Always excited for more familiar and animal companion content! (Or even old material to get reprinted and fixed up. I love familiar archetypes, but Mauler shows up on the rules forum a lot, and Guardian on Tumor Familiar is pretty cheesy.)

I think Ultimate Intrigue covered urban games, and this acts as a bit of a balance to that. But since I specifically guessed that there wouldn't be something called Ultimate Wilderness, my predictions don't have a great track record.

Legacy of the First World is coming out soon, so we'll have lots of fey content to enjoy.

Other niche stuff I'd like but am not counting on- a little more fungus stuff (plants get all the love!), and more PC options for pet swarms.

Much as I love shapeshifters (having created the Masquerade Reveler, as you mentioned, and been the #1 cheerleader for the shifter class as our next class), Logan and I were back working on Starfinder during the class stages, so the shifter is the child of Jason and Stephen's brand of genius design-fu!

As to familiars, it's certainly true that my ability to write accurate rules text has come a long way since my Familiar Folio freelance work that I wrote after my job offer and move but...

Cool, I look forward to checking it out!

There is indeed much excited waiting-to-see going on. Having familiars and companions called out in the product description is plenty to tide me over!


I haven't been really enthusiastic about a hardcover since before Horror Adventures. This one looks really nice.


I'm enthused because apparently Mark Seitfer now has a new favorite class to play with.

Well that and wildness...

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