Friday, January 1, 2016

Review: Kineticists of Porphyra



Since Occult Adventures came out I've seen a few products crop up to support the new psychic classes to bring them up to the bulk of options that other base classes enjoy. This product from Purple Duck Games is based on the Kineticist.

After some fluff to explain how kineticists work in Porphyra we kick off with new archetypes for the kineticist. There are four. Some are obvious ones such as the Elemental Avatar that controls earth, air, fire and water, and the Elemental Scion that focuses on one element. The other two feel like they represent the ends of the martial caster spectrum where the Cerebral Kineticist that gets mental buffs instead of physical ones and changes it's main ability score from Con to Int, then there's the Kinetic Duelist makes for a straight melee battler kineticist. The ones that need them, Elemental Avatar and Kinetic Duelist get some archetype specific wild talents to support them.  Honestly I'm a little concerned that these types of archetypes weren't the first that Paizo made when I did some light digging to check for redundant concepts. Beyond the archetypes that needed obvious representation the same could be said for the new elements in here, Light, Sound, and Time.

The new elements of course come with a whole list of wild talents which take up most of the rest of the document, about 30 pages worth of talents. If the previous paragraph sounds like a lot of grid-filling, it certainly feels like it, and the wild talents follow the same route. Not that this is bad, particularly since these are grids that should have been filled from the beginning, but nothing particularly exciting happens if you're familiar with tropes of the new elements. If not then you'll have a blast (heh) because most of the effects are worth having making choosing actually pretty difficult. In some cases they're almost be too good since there are so many paizo wild talents that I'd gladly pass on. I'm also just wary about any status effect infusions since you risk handing out status effects like a witch hex only with more damage. Of course I could not playtest all of these as there are quite a few of them so for the most part I had to make guesses so your milage may vary. (As a side note, sometimes Kineticist Abilities are hard to judge. Comparing them to spells they resemble is one thing but you also have to take into consideration burn, burn mitigation, the fact that the Kineticist barely does anything outside of it's Kineticizing. ) Some you do have to suspend a bit of disbelief like Calming Tone, a utility talent that functions as Charm Person that's associated with sound. The Wild talents aren't limited to the new elements. They cover up to Occult Origins in element considerations which is nice.

After the new wild talents are a few feats the probably should have been printed by now. One to reduce how much burn you get and one to gather more energy among other very obvious ones. Then the product ends with a Kinetic Duelist NPC stat block.

This product seems to have some new and exciting things in it but it mostly achieves this by filling in concepts that I had expected to see in a Paizo book rather than something high concept and obscure. Especially things like Elemental Avatar due to the popularity of things like Avatar the Last Airbender. Sure you can achieve a similar effect with vanilla Kineticist but its not the same. But the fact of the matter is that Paizo did not print these concepts yet and these fit in pretty well without being trap options so the gridfilling is all positive leaving me with new ideas for characters and material to bring them to life, which is what a product like this is supposed to do. If I had an actual criticism it would be that I'm suspicious of how good some of the options are, or at least I would be if I had some faith that the kineticist chassis had a real way to abuse these things so I'm willing to give it 5 out of 5 stars until something comes up at the table.

You can find this product over on Paizo.com here.

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