Huge thanks go out to Sasha Hall, AKA Lindley Court of the Paizo boards. Without her support at the "Sugar Momma/Daddy" level of the IG Patreon, this class never would have even crossed my mind.
Picture, if you will, a druid. Now, give that druid a full BAB and take away his magic. Now, give that druid a bunch of "slots" and let him pick up his choice of primal aspects every morning as though he were a practitioner of pact magic. Now let him spend multiple "slots" on a single aspect to specialize in it for the day as though he were an incarnum, effectively sacrificing versatility for more oomph in a single niche.
I call this specialization mechanic prominence, and the sheer variety of possible build combinations it allows makes it more than worth the amount of work it took to make sure it worked correctly.
The animist, and its two archetypes, are available on OneBookShelf/RPGnow/DriveThruRPG right now for $5.49, with uploads to Paizo, Studio2Publishing, and d20pfsrd.com pending.
For those who want to get in on the action, the Interjection Games Patreon is gearing up for its next release, and a $5 buy-in nets you both the next product to be released, as well as a copy of the animist if you come claim it before the end of the month. If you've always had a dream class that never seemed to get off the ground, I'm also offering to design whatever a "sugar daddy" wants from the ground up for $150.
Aaaaand it's gone. I might have to stop doing Kickstarters at this rate. This is pretty awesome. Thanks, Sean!
This is a very interesting character, with some range between natural attacks maniac and buffer/debuffer. I'm building one up as a villain for a future adventure, and the visuals alone make me smile.
I wholeheartedly recommend participating in the Interjection Games patreon. It's nice to play around in beta-tests like the ones Paizo does, but to actually see a class being built from the ground up is something else.
Thanks for the kind words, Ragi!
Somebody's definitely going to prove me wrong, but I think the max natural attacks you can get is as follows.
Prominence 2 Giraffe - bite
Prominence 1 Scorpion - 2 pincers
Prominence 4 Jellyfish - 3 tentacles
Feat to remove one Prominence from Giraffe and add one Prominence to Jellyfish for the purpose of the Prominence Each ability - 1 tentacle
Of course, if you do that, the scorpion pincer and the frog tongue are locked out to you, not to mention the awesome healing or blasting powers of unicorn and decay or the snowstorm in a can of winter. Decisions, decisions.