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.
I wonder if they ever do a dragon based shifter archetype would you have to stick to one type of dragon. Also do we have low level dragon related polymorph spells yet?
Those could be cool and useful, so no, probably not going to get them from Paizo.
Why?
Because it's more than likely what's going to happen is that it'll say it's for that but fall short of actually being that. I'll point out the terrible "drake" archetypes for this(which the made even worse because it's the only way to get dragon companions that might be useful instead of, for example, the Young White Dragon you need to be at least level 16 and have a Leadership score of 14 to get. At that level you've just wasted time).
So when you ask why my response is precedent, really.
Those could be cool and useful, so no, probably not going to get them from Paizo.
Why?
Because it's more than likely what's going to happen is that it'll say it's for that but fall short of actually being that. I'll point out the terrible "drake" archetypes for this(which the made even worse because it's the only way to get dragon companions that might be useful instead of, for example, the Young White Dragon you need to be at least level 16 and have a Leadership score of 14 to get. At that level you've just wasted time).
So when you ask why my response is precedent, really.
So, one rules element you're not a fan of means ... I'm sorry, I have a hard time following your logic here, care to walk me through this? No problem if you don't.
Those are just the most relevant examples of Paizo dropping the ball. If you can't think of any others you've heard about, that's okay, but they are out there. I'm just talking about the dragon stuff because it was, again, relevant.
Players hear we'll get something cool, we get something watered down. Players get something cool, it gets made into wasted word count.
Those could be cool and useful, so no, probably not going to get them from Paizo.
Why?
Because it's more than likely what's going to happen is that it'll say it's for that but fall short of actually being that. I'll point out the terrible "drake" archetypes for this(which the made even worse because it's the only way to get dragon companions that might be useful instead of, for example, the Young White Dragon you need to be at least level 16 and have a Leadership score of 14 to get. At that level you've just wasted time).
So when you ask why my response is precedent, really.
Gah! I'm still trying to forget the drake archetypes.
Is there a protection from "meh" spell for all the neutral monsters?
You know, a cantrip or orison(because true neutral seem really rare to me) might not be a bad idea. Or a first level spell with a longer duration.
But Neutral Evil and "definitely Chaotic Neutral" aren't rare. Also, animals (as per the type) are always Neutral. So are the standard summonable elementals.
A spell that protected against all flavors of neutrality like the current ones protect against all flavors of Evil would be pretty good. Whether it's worth a level 2 slot or a level 1 depends on the campaign and the GM, but definitely not cantrip-level.
Protection from neutral alignment would be interesting. Though I keep thinking of that Futurama episode with Zapp Brannigan and his distrust of "neutrals"
I wish it was November, well maybe October 31st first, then November:)
I will take a full BAB martial shape-shifting class any way I can get it! As long as it is cool and thematic and has some umph to it's abilities, I will be happy! Besides, specializing in a few forms could be more powerful than having many. We shall see.
JUST.SO.EXCITED.FOR.THIS.BOOK.
I like the Beastkin Berserker archetype for Barbarian that allows you to benefit from rage AND shapeshift into up to Huge animals
IIRC it also stacks with Invulnerable Rager, which is admittedly a very good archetype ;-)
I still just want to know how many aspects there are and what they are.
As much as I was joking earlier, I really strongly hope there's some more exotic and interesting animal aspects in there with unusual abilities or qualities.
Bonus points if there's aspects for (ever underrepresented and underrated) vermin and also possibly some magical beasts.
I still just want to know how many aspects there are and what they are.
As much as I was joking earlier, I really strongly hope there's some more exotic and interesting animal aspects in there with unusual abilities or qualities.
Bonus points if there's aspects for (ever underrepresented and underrated) vermin and also possibly some magical beasts.
So far, the mentioned ones have been owl, bear, bull, and I think tiger. Those are all Hunter aspects, so I'd bet twelve aspects, with the same list as Hunter.
I am also curious about how many aspects you can have and how many there are total to choose from in the book. I also hope there are more exotic/interesting animal(and other) aspects to choose from.
I hope the list is a lot bigger then the hunter's.
Other then wisdom AC and claws of course. I would love to get immunity to disease and/or poison, constant endure elements effect, natural armor bonus, maybe a constant freedom of movement effect at level 17+.
I am also curious about how many aspects you can have and how many there are total to choose from in the book. I also hope there are more exotic/interesting animal(and other) aspects to choose from.
I hope the list is a lot bigger then the hunter's.
Other then wisdom AC and claws of course. I would love to get immunity to disease and/or poison, constant endure elements effect, natural armor bonus, maybe a constant freedom of movement effect at level 17+.
I seem to recall it scaling up to five aspects total. (First and every four levels after that seems likely if I remembered that correctly.) Having more than a dozen aspects in the initial book seems like it'd start cutting them down to pretty small space. While I'd like obscure animals, I'd rather have the basics covered first, and long-term, I'd rather each animal get a decent amount of space, like a Bloodrager's bloodline.
You know, a scaling Natural Armor bonus based off your Constitution modifier would've made a lot more sense for a class where you are constantly changing your body, not your mind.
I fear Shifter is going to be too Druid for it's own good. Still... it will allow at five attacks at level one for Ragebred Skinwalkers, so that's not bad. It's a thematic class for any of them too.
I hope they have an excellent favored class bonus. Or, more likely, get one in a player companion.
I fear Shifter is going to be too Druid for it's own good.
They'll have archetypes for that.
Like the ooze and dragon and vermin mentioned(or at least thought of) up thread? We have those druids already, so not there.
I think a construct archetype would/could be pretty nifty. Slowly watching as your body became less and less composed of flesh and blood...
Ah, I assumed you were talking about the alignment restrictions and stuff. The ooze archetype was something mentioned in the interview as dropping some of those Druid-like aspects. If you mean it's like a Druid more broadly, that seems a little like Bloodrager's similarities to Sorcerer.
I'd rather have the basics covered first, and long-term, I'd rather each animal get a decent amount of space, like a Bloodrager's bloodline.
That's a good idea in principle, but that could easily lead to only having a tiny number of options for a long long amount of time considering how Paizo has been scaling down how much crunch they put in their books.
The assumption of transforming into your aspect forms, and adding other aspects to it using the hunter foci has me grinning at the idea of making a literal bull frog.
The assumption of transforming into your aspect forms, and adding other aspects to it using the hunter foci has me grinning at the idea of making a literal bull frog.
The assumption of transforming into your aspect forms, and adding other aspects to it using the hunter foci has me grinning at the idea of making a literal bull frog.
The assumption of transforming into your aspect forms, and adding other aspects to it using the hunter foci has me grinning at the idea of making a literal bull frog.
The assumption of transforming into your aspect forms, and adding other aspects to it using the hunter foci has me grinning at the idea of making a literal bull frog.
I still just want to know how many aspects there are and what they are.
As much as I was joking earlier, I really strongly hope there's some more exotic and interesting animal aspects in there with unusual abilities or qualities.
Bonus points if there's aspects for (ever underrepresented and underrated) vermin and also possibly some magical beasts.
So far, the mentioned ones have been owl, bear, bull, and I think tiger. Those are all Hunter aspects, so I'd bet twelve aspects, with the same list as Hunter.
As long as wolves are an option at the very least. Hopefully dragons as well, but that would probably take an archetype.
The assumption of transforming into your aspect forms, and adding other aspects to it using the hunter foci has me grinning at the idea of making a literal bull frog.