Step beyond reality as we know it! Pathfinder Player Companion: Plane-Hopper's Handbook offers new tools for explorers brave enough to venture into the unknown—whether to abandoned cities created by dead gods, worlds where the ground is made of forsaken souls, or even stranger realms. Add planar allies, magic, or heritage to your adventures and infuse them with the power of the planes!
Inside this book you'll find:
Five new eidolon subtypes for the unchained summoner, including dualistic aeons, radiant eidolons from the Positive Energy Plane, and ever-shifting storykin eidolons!
Alternate racial traits, favored class bonuses, and racial feats for races with origins tied to the Great Beyond, such as aphorites, duskwalkers, and ganzis!
Player options and equipment for characters who walk the planes, from hellish style feats to spell-enhancing planar shards to the planar rifter gunslinger archetype!
This Pathfinder Player Companion is intended for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Pathfinder campaign setting, but it can easily be incorporated into any fantasy world.
ISBN-13: 978-1-64078-071-2
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The Plane-Hopper’s Handbook is a 32-page softcover companion to the Planar Adventures hardcover that Paizo released as the final “big” book for Pathfinder First Edition. Since Second Edition had already been announced, Planar Adventures was intentionally “crunch-light”. But The Plane-Hopper’s Handbook is full of options like new archetypes, feats, traits, spells, and more for players interested in having their characters adventure on other planes. Not everything in the book nails a perfect landing, but overall it’s a solid product and worth purchasing if a campaign looks headed in an off-Golarion direction.
We’ll start with some general notes. The cover isn’t my favourite, as it puts something uninteresting in the foreground (a character looking at their hands, and another tugging on them) and the really cool thing (a gate to another world!) in the background with a colour scheme that makes it hard to make out. This cover art is reprinted, sans text, as the inside back cover. The inside front cover is . . . Well, I’m not really sure—I guess some sort of artistic representation of how some of the planes relate to one another. The full-colour interior artwork is fantastic though—Paizo’s interior art is better than a lot of companies manage to get for the cover of their books. The book has a page for the table of contents and two pages for an introduction. The introduction is a sort of series of one-sentence overviews of each of the planes, and isn’t particularly useful. However, it does have three new traits, and they’re pretty good in that they help characters acclimatize or navigate the planes. The body of the book is divided into nine sections—and yes, I do have all day, and we will go through them one by one!
PLANAR TRAVELERS (6 pages): This section starts with a good explanation of various ways to reach the planes (and get back home), and then moves on to summaries of two planar organisations: the Blackfire Adepts and the Riftwardens. The section has, of all things, a new archetype for gunslingers (“Planar Rifter”)—it’s really cool in that their bullets can open interdimensional portals! The section also includes an occultist archetype (“Planar Harmonizer”—looks okay), several new arcanist exploits, and then a set of really powerful style feats.
PLANE-HOPPING EQUIPMENT (2 pages): This section starts with a couple of different equipment packages for planar adventurers, which is a clever idea. It then introduces several new material power components for spellcasters. My favourite thing in the section is a new vehicle, the planar carriage--a vehicle capable of travelling through the planes, but with a set of specific limitations that makes it a great plot convenience without becoming overpowered. I could envision a whole campaign centered around low-level PCs gaining access to a planar carriage but being given responsibilities across myriad dimensions.
PLANE-HOPPING MAGIC (2 pages): This section contains a couple of good general utility spells. It then provides some aasimar- and tiefling-specific spells, which I’m not a huge fan of as those races are already overpowered to begin with, and don’t exactly need more game support.
APHORITES (2 pages): New to me, aphorites are a sort of free-willed, more individualistic versions of axiomites, and a playable PC race. This section provides them with alternate racial traits, several new feats, and some favoured class options.
DUSKWALKERS (2 pages): Another new playable race, duskwalkers sound interesting—souls given a single, second chance at life because their first life ended too soon. As with aphorites, this section has several new options. I really like the set of origin feats.
GANZIS (2 pages): Ganzis are mortals infused with chaos. The section includes a (somewhat incoherent) new archetype for paladins (“Chaos Knight), some “expanded oddities” for the race (fun flavour, but mechanics are small, forgettable flat bonuses), and some favoured class options.
PLANAR SCIONS (4 pages): This section is a bit of a grab-bag. It introduces alternate elemental heritages for oreads, ifrits, undines, and sylphs, but I’m not a big fan--a lot of complication to the setting for little gain. Gathlains gets several new feats representing titles in the court of the fey--they have story prerequisites, which is relatively rare. Finally, shabti (no idea) get a set of alternate racial traits and favoured class options.
PLANAR ALLIES (4 pages): Several new eidolon subtypes are introduced here; I’ve never played a summoner, but many of these looks really cool. Next, new elemental-themed archetypes are added for animal companions. There’s then some “planar mentor feats” that offer up some interesting story possibilities if selected with the cooperation of the GM.
DEMIPLANES (4 pages): Demiplanes are more specialised or unique off-shoots of the major planes. In this section, some new character options related to demiplanes are introduced. There’s a series of spells tied to the Akashic Record, which I like in concept but they all end up pretty underpowered. Worshippers of Desna get a series of feats related to the demiplane Cynosure, and these are pretty cool: they allow non-spellcasters to teleport and plane shift! For the Dimension of Dreams, we get several new lucid dreaming feats. Pathfinder Society devotees will note some feats and a spell related to the Hao Jin Tapestry, and anyone who has played through the very well-regarded module The Harrowing will find a new eidolon archetype. Some fun stuff in this section.
To sum up, The Plane-Hopper’s Handbook is like most Player Companions in that it offers a mix of really good options and a few clunkers. But overall, there’s more gold than dross here, and the writing and artwork are strong. I’d recommend it.
Time to Hop, Skip, and Jump Your way Through The Planes.
A good solid book with some great options for the plane-touched races. Though I really wish the kineticist wild talents didn't require the planar infusion feat since the class is already strongly connected to the plane that you get your power from.
Loving many of the new options for Duskwalkers.....but question...
The feat "Personal Chronicler" under it's "special" states "If you ever willingly consort with sahkils or undead,"....
How would "consort" be defined. Does that mean simply talking to ? making a temporary agreement ?
Loving many of the new options for Duskwalkers.....but question...
The feat "Personal Chronicler" under it's "special" states "If you ever willingly consort with sahkils or undead,"....
How would "consort" be defined. Does that mean simply talking to ? making a temporary agreement ?
Though the final say is up to your GM, I would say that "consort" constitutes working with a sahkils or undead in any way. You're free to talk to these creatures, as you might need to do so to learn information from them or attempt to stop them, but anything beyond that starts going against the philosophy of your nosoi.
A GM should interpret this much in the same way that she would a cleric or a paladin working against a god's wishes.
I do wonder if the planar rifter is supposed to get rid of guntraining altogether? I know its elemental/aligned damage, but 1d6(and two dead levels for guntraining 2 and 4) in trade for a raw Mod is a rough trade, especially since you basically won't ever benefit from planar resistance and planar strike at the same time.
It appears that this product has been released but my order from the subscription has been pending since September 10th. Do I need to alert customer support to get this order fulfilled or is it perhaps due to shipping options?
Wait a second - why in the world does the Rimesoul Undine variant get Chill Touch as an SLA? Methinks an author doesn't get what that spell is beyond it's name...
Wait a second - why in the world does the Rimesoul Undine variant get Chill Touch as an SLA? Methinks an author doesn't get what that spell is beyond it's name...
I vaguely recall back in 3.5 it showing up on lists of 'cold' or 'winter' related spells as well, so much so that I made a version that did Cold damage (and Dex damage instead of Str damage) instead of negative energy damage (and was an evocation [cold] spell instead of necromancy).
I was too lazy to make a 1st level cold / ice spell like 'throwing icicles' or 'snowflake shuriken' or whatever to put in that role. :)
Wait a second - why in the world does the Rimesoul Undine variant get Chill Touch as an SLA? Methinks an author doesn't get what that spell is beyond it's name...
I vaguely recall back in 3.5 it showing up on lists of 'cold' or 'winter' related spells as well, so much so that I made a version that did Cold damage (and Dex damage instead of Str damage) instead of negative energy damage (and was an evocation [cold] spell instead of necromancy).
I was too lazy to make a 1st level cold / ice spell like 'throwing icicles' or 'snowflake shuriken' or whatever to put in that role. :)
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