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[Ascension Games, LLC] Announcing Path of the Wilds! Kickstarter and Playtest Discussion Thread

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After a long hiatus, Ascension Games is back, with our next product in the “Path” series, Path of the Wilds!

As with the rest of the Path series, Path of the Wilds focuses on a specific area of magic, in this case, nature. Harnessing elemental spells, plants, animals, weather, terrain, you name it. Spells that chain foes with living storms, erode away artifice, and conjure toxic blooms are just a sampling of what's in store for Path of the Wilds. And just like with Path of Shadows and Path of Iron, this book will cover all aspects of Pathfinder. Archetypes, class features, feats, magic items, you name it: we want to make sure there’s plenty of options for any master of the wilds.

Here's an overview of what you can expect in Path of the Wilds:

  • -The elementalist base class, a spellsword that has mastered the forces of air, earth, fire, and water. They can absorb latent energy from their spells to form a powerful planar aegis, letting them switch between spell focus and combat focus at a moment’s notice. They can also convert elemental spells into simplified “twists” for more utility, or combine their spell slots together to reach greater heights of arcane potency.
  • -The invoker base class, a mystical warrior that bonds with the spirits of nature. Unlike most “pet” classes like the druid or summoner, the roles for the invoker and his spirit companion are reversed: the invoker players the front-line combatant while his companion casts spells to support him from afar. He can also invoke over a dozen lesser spirits like Tempests Herald and Oncoming Storm and Depths Beckon With Silent Murmurs to grant him unparalleled adaptability in his approach to combat.
  • -The warden base class, a verdant protector of nature. The warden is the first line of defense for both nature and his companions, gaining a slew of defensive and support oriented abilities. He creates magical wards that shield allies from harm, and can improve them with natural facets like summer’s heat or river of life to shield against specific threats. His remedy feature grants him a slow-but-steady healing stream, while his mastery of nature’s close-kept secrets gives him new methods of support and further control over his enviroment.
  • -New archetypes and options for existing classes. Play archetypes like the Animist barbarian to summon ancestral totems, or an Elemental Savant sorcerer to learn a wide selection of elemental spells from other classes. Options include new kineticist talents and a new selection of six “primal spirits” for the medium class.
  • -Spells for casters that want to evoke nature’s benevolence - or its fury. Turn into a being of light with the solar body spell, or tap into your wild side with the primal fury spell. Gather foes together with a watery vortex, then poison them with a toxic nettle burst.
  • -Feats that let you truly master the wilds. Use wild empathy to impart magical suggestion effects on creatures with the Mystic Empathy feat, and track down impossible quarries with the Skilled Tracker feat. Call out your foe’s weaknesses with the Spotter’s Call and take them down with a single Mountain Strike. There of course will be feats to support the new classes, as well, such as Latent Remedy to let wardens grant contingent healing effects and Aegis Strike to give elementalists and extra arcane edge while using their aegis form.
  • -A plethora of new magic items and equipment properties. Always have the right element at hand with the cycling weapon property, and entangle foes that attack you with miring armor. Fly upon the wind with the stormlord’s raiment and freeze foes solid with the rimeflower bow.

Kickstarter and Playtest for Path of the Wilds

As with Path of Iron, we want to ensure the best quality for the Path series. Ascension Games always uses commissioned art in our books, and we take a painstakingly long time to ensure the rules text is clear, balanced, and - most importantly - fun. In order to make this book come to life, we’re excited to announce that we are launching a Kickstarter for the book today! The campaign will run from October 16th until November 15th. You can find the Kickstarter here.

To go along with the Kickstarter, we are also simultaneously releasing a playtest for the three new classes (elementalist, invoker, and warden). These classes have many atypical mechanics, so thorough testing is a must. You can download the playtest from:

You can use this thread to discuss the playtest document, or send us feedback directly on the Ascension Games website.

Thank you for your support, and I hope you are as excited as I am for Path of the Wilds!

Christopher Moore,
Ascension Games, LLC

The Playtest is now available on the Paizo store! Follow this link for the download page.

And Backer #7. After the quality of your first two releases, especially Path of Shadows, instant back on the kickstarter. Have downloaded the playtest doc and will start to look at it next. Thanks and best of lukc on this kickstarter.

Had some time on my hands and decided to start looking through the playtest, and might as well give some feedback on my thoughts as I go.

Have only read through the elementalist so far:

It seems pretty solid and definitely a unique and intriguing class design. I'll mostly just mention stuff that stood out to me or that I thought could maybe benefit from some changes.

Chassis seems fine, though 4+int skill ranks on an int based prepared spellcaster that doesn't seem to have much of a thematic skill focus seemed a tiny bit odd to me.

Aegis is interesting and the energy pool costs seem decently balanced, though the inability to cast during aegis as well as the loss of all pool points on leaving it early does introduce a rather unique thought process as far as casting spells vs. entering aegis goes. I could definitely see a situation where a player winds up not entering aegis in a shorter combat due to not wanting to waste a bunch of pool points, and casts some spells or twists instead causing the pool to get even larger in a feedback loop. Changing it so only half of the remaining pool points are lost on early exit might be worth considering, as that would still give a downside to dipping into aegis for short periods of time, but wouldn't make you feel as locked in if you want to efficiently use resources.

What's the reasoning behind having conversion only fill the pool at half rate? It's a standard action so the action economy of using it in combat isn't very good, and if you're out of combat you'd be better off just firing off those spells at a wall as it would get you more pool points. The only time I could see this maybe being used if if your pool is drained and you absolutely need to activate aegis NOW (for something like a fly or swim speed maybe), but that's a pretty niche situation.

Affinity powers:

For the lessers, air seemed easily the best as far as synergies go. Cold's bonus damage is very slow to do much, fire's is okay but the class doesn't have proficiency in any high crit range weapons, earth's varies from useless to solid depending on the enemy, but getting 20-40 ft. range on a melee weapon will pretty much always be amazing, especially when it can be accessed as soon as level 5. The ranged half seems fine, but it might be worth having the melee part (so it's 10-20 range), or changing it to boost your actual reach by +5-15 (which would work out the same as a 10-20 range, but synergize with reach weapons and stuff like enlarge person).

Moderate and greater powers do different enough jobs from each other that they seem fine.

For master affinities, not having any ability to exclude allies from the effects could be problematic with how large some of them can get. Granted, at that level your party could easily have tools to deal with the effects but it would still be nice to not have to work around it.

Spell twists:

Ash: I feel it might be worth altering this one to have the blind last a round/level (as glitterdust does) rather than a flat 1d4 rounds. Or maybe round/2 levels.

Blast: This is definitely going to need a buff of some sort. Flexible damage and the ability to prep a utility spell and convert it to a blast later is handy, but its damage and scaling are just terrible. It does less damage than a snowball spell up until you sacrifice a 3rd level spell on it for instance (remember that as a twist blast loses out on the damage boost from potency). It's also pretty much just worse than the freeze or spike (less damage than spike, doesn't entangle like freeze, and also never gets extra targets). For those to be worth both investing a twist and then burning spell slots on, it definitely needs the ability to create more projectiles at higher levels (such as an extra one for every 2 boosts), probably with the ability to fire them off at the same target (similar to scorching ray or hellfire ray) and a bit better damage scaling (maybe using 3d8 as the base, or possibly mixing in a couple +1 damage per die rolled in the boosts). Otherwise it's just never really going to be competitive with weapon attacks as a pure damage ability.

Warp: I feel this could do to scale better. The +1 damage/die is decent and changing element can be useful, but when blasting isn't your only damage source the element swap isn't quite as attractive as it would be on someone like a sorcerer and you don't have as many spell slots as a full caster does which makes having to effectively pay double spell slots even more costly. Adding in something like "For every two spell levels above 1st, increase the damage by an additional +1 damage per die rolled" would help it scale better for the higher spell levels while not affecting the lower ones where its price is more easily handled.

As a whole it's definitely a solid class, but there were a few points that I felt stuck out a bit.
Taggerung559 wrote:
Chassis seems fine, though 4+int skill ranks on an int based prepared spellcaster that doesn't seem to have much of a thematic skill focus seemed a tiny bit odd to me.

I originally had it at 2+INT, but I try to give 4+INT as the baseline for classes. 2+INT only really feels sufficient on INT-based full casters like Witch and Wizard to me. But if it's a common complaint I'll reduce the count.

Taggerung559 wrote:
Aegis is interesting...changing it so only half of the remaining pool points are lost on early exit might be worth considering

I have considered this, but I want to see how it tests out with the all-or-nothing approach first.

Taggerung559 wrote:
What's the reasoning behind having conversion only fill the pool at half rate?...The only time I could see this maybe being used if if your pool is drained and you absolutely need to activate aegis NOW (for something like a fly or swim speed maybe), but that's a pretty niche situation.

That is the idea, yes. It's also to encourage gaining points through actually casting spells and interacting with that half of your class rather than just burning away the slots as a resource pool.

Taggerung559 wrote:

Affinity powers:

For the lessers, air seemed easily the best as far as synergies go... Cold's bonus damage is very slow to do much, fire's is okay but the class doesn't have proficiency in any high crit range weapons, earth's varies from useless to solid depending on the enemy, but getting 20-40 ft. range on a melee weapon will pretty much always be amazing.

Making air a reach bonus is one way to do it, and seems like a decent change. For fire, it might not have 18-20 range weapons but it does have a good number of 19-20s, along with a few x3 weapons (which increases the burst damage). Earth's is sort of the all-around baseline since it grants weapon damage instead of elemental damage. Cold is...probably too slow, yeah. Trying to balance damage over time in Pathfinder is rough.

Taggerung559 wrote:
For master affinities, not having any ability to exclude allies from the effects could be problematic with how large some of them can get. Granted, at that level your party could easily have tools to deal with the effects but it would still be nice to not have to work around it.

I don't want to give ally immunity to the effects, certainly; the master affinity powers are supposed to be dangerous. The more likely solution might be similar to what I've done before with classes like nightblade and the new warden and let you reduce the radius of the effect in increments of 5 feet.

Taggerung559 wrote:
Ash: I feel it might be worth altering this one to have the blind last a round/level (as glitterdust does) rather than a flat 1d4 rounds. Or maybe round/2 levels.

Part of this was to avoid letting you use a 1st level slot for a 2 minute blind. If it lasted as long as glitterdust it'd need to grant a new save every round, which I wanted to avoid.

Taggerung559 wrote:
Blast: This is definitely going to need a buff... it definitely needs the ability to create more projectiles at higher levels (such as an extra one for every 2 boosts)

Probably the best solution. Depending on scaling it might need capping on how many blasts you can fire at one target (maybe 3?).

Taggerung559 wrote:
Warp: I feel this could do to scale better...

Part of the scaling is letting it affect higher-level spells in the first place. I'm not sure about granting a much more significant damage boost (between potency and this twist that's already +2 per die, which adds up pretty fast for AoEs), but as with all suggestions I'll take a look at the numbers.

We're off to a good start on the Kickstarter, with all of our Pioneer tier rewards being taken! If you can, be sure to like/share us on our Facebook page or retweet us on the Ascension Games twitter to spread the news about the Kickstarter; every bit is greatly appreciated!

Today is also the first in a series of previews for Path of the Wilds, starting with new feats! Check it out on the Ascension Games website.

Add-ons are now available! In addition to getting Path of the Wilds, you can get any of our earlier products at a heavy discount when you support the Kickstarter campaign! Check out the new add-ons here.

Time for another update! Today we take a look at some of the new magic items in Path of the Wilds, focusing in particular on weapons and armor. Check it out on the Ascension Games website.

As requested over on Giant in the Playground, there's now a public Google Drive document for the playtest. Feel free to leave comments there!

Today we preview some of the new spells in Path of the Wilds! Check them out on the Ascension Games website.

Today we continue our spell previews with some new utility spells! Check them out on the Ascension Games website.

Our third spell preview showcases some new plant-based spells! You can find them on the Ascension Games website.

Let's take a look at the last chapter of Path of the Wilds: archetypes and class options! Give it a read on the Ascension Games website.

Time for our final content preview for Path of the Wilds! Today we look at the new Animist Barbarian, a totem-summoning warrior that supports allies. Check it out on the Ascension Games website.

The Kickstarter for Path of the Wilds is ending soon! CLICK HERE to support the project!

Call up those high-level clerics, because we're in need of a miracle! The project still has a long way to go, and we need your help now more than ever. With your generosity and the aid of your tabletop group, we can make this project come to life.

You might be thinking, "Well, with how much is left before reaching the goal, should I even back the project?" To which I say, Kickstarter projects only charge you if the goal is met. If you are interested in Path of the Wilds, even if you think the project might not make its funding goal, please consider backing! If everyone that was hesitant to back the project for fear of the goal not being met actually did back the project, we'd hit our funding goal in no time at all. Every bit helps!

There's a playtest document you can read on Google Docs, or you can download directly from DriveThruRPG, Paizo.com, or the Ascension Games store if you'd like to look at the content before backing.

If you missed any of our updates, you can check them out on the Ascension Games website:


Thank you for your continued support!
Ascension Games, LLC
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