New Class Request: Updating the Soulknife for Pathfinder


Homebrew and House Rules

Grand Lodge

As my friends know, I loved playing Psionic classes in DnD 3.5. My absolute most memorable was my human telekinetic, who ended up becoming a full-grown red dragon at the end of the campaign we were in. However, I admit to harboring an absolutely dreadful secret.

I played a Soulknife, and I loved it.

The Soulknife was an interesting psionic class. It had the base attack bonus progression of a cleric, but fought much like a ranger. Dual wielding was common. It was a martial class, not really having psionic abilities to use. It gained the Wild Talent feat as a bonus feat, to allow it to summon its blade (so, really just more of flavor, I guess). It had low skill gain, and was proficient only with light armor and shields. This made it more of a skirmisher, and with search, Listen, and Move Silently as class skills it made a decent scout, albeit with usually 10 Wisdom and 12 Dexterity this made him less effective in this manner. The soulknife didn't really excel in much, and in fact I think was a relatively weak class overall, as many classes in 3.5 were, but it was arguably a very interesting an unique class overall.

Now, what made this class so cool was it's weapon choice: it could create an immaterial weapon of psionic energy with the stats of a shortsword, and later on with the stats of a longsword or a bastard sword. Alternatively, it could shape it into two shortsword-stated weapons suitable for two-weapon fighting. The weapon also gained an natural enhancement bonus as it leveld, and could even get some weapon enchantments as well to improve it.

I'd like to see it come back.

When I made mine, I treated mine similar to a Protoss Zealot from Starcraft, and I believe he was an Elans, which was as close as one could get to the Protoss race. Be that as it may, Pathfinder has a habit of really improving on and, in fact, balancing classes substantially well. I've had many ideas for improving on it over the years, and I think a class like this is something that would be a great addition to Pathfinder for it's unique flavor. With the addition of psionics, I think it is valid to consider for flavor and the unique combat style.


If your group is comfortable with 3pp, the soulknife was remade in Dreamscarred Press' Psionics Unleashed.

I enjoy this incarnation alot; and archetypes from other books involve creating Mind Shields, and Mind Armor, along with the mind blade, as well as even Mind Bolts for those who prefer range over melee.

Grand Lodge

I'd like to see Paizo make it. I'd love to run it in Society, among other things.

Contributor

Quendishir wrote:
I'd like to see Paizo make it. I'd love to run it in Society, among other things.

In that case, you'll need to look up the mindblade magus archetype from Occult Adventures. The ectoplasmatist archetype for the spiritualist class has some similar mechanics and flavor.


There's a magus archetype in Occult Adventures which is the closest you'll see to a Paizo soul knife.

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It got remade by one of the most reputable 3rd party publishers. It's quite good. It's a full BAB class, like it should be. The magus archetype is also not too shabby. I think that's as good as it gets as a warrior that can conjure a weapon is a bit of a narrow concept.

On an unrelated note, I don't understand 3.5e's obsession with making some fighting classes have a 3/4 BAB.

Grand Lodge

Quite a few martial classes had 3/4 BAB for no damn reason. Honestly, I always felt like the Monk should have had full BAB, but Paizo fixed it when it came to combat maneuvers, which was a good thing.

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