Adventuring Classes: A Fistful of Denarii

This is a simple pdf with almost a dozen new classes. They're mostly mixtures of other classes making them somewhere between alternative classes and hybrid classes from the Advanced Class guide. Your mileage may vary as they aren't terribly robust classes that do anything new but since none of them are spellcasters they can make nice additions to your player's options. For the most part I feel like I could recreate the general theme or mechanics with existing options; Well except for the Scholar class.

The Scholar introduces nothing truly new but it has a lot of ways it can go and works out as a jack of all trades non-caster that really works. It even has the option of getting a few spells making for the dabbler that some bards try to be but their focus on spells and performances prevent them from truly achieving. Really the pdf could have been worth the price if it were just about the scholar and some cool feats.

Oh yeah the feats. The feats range from standard support for the classes in the book to gamechanging support for non-casters. Rogue and Dex melee strikers get two feats that bring them up a notch while not being truly unbalanced. Seriously some of the feats have become staples in my games.

I was going to give this four stars because most of the classes are things I wouldn't take but the scholar class and a good chunk of the feats are good enough for the price which overcompensates for the price leaving me to put it up to five stars.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.


Retrospective:

This product has not aged that well. Since it's come out we've gotten a lot more out of even the weaker spell-less classes and the Advanced Class Guide came out giving us some mainstream martial classes along with archetypes and other support. This has made the classes of AFoD still solid to pick but kind of stagnant. Even my favorite, the Scholar, is getting a bit outclassed without the support to bolster it's theme.

As I said, the classes are still solid, and the feat support is still inspired. For the budgeted 3pp consumer I would still recommend it for a bit of martial diversity, but it's badly in need of an update and I don't think that all the classes would survive the transition. There's just better out there even within just Paizo options.

That said, the thought that went into this product is what put Tripod Machine on the map for me. Most of it's flaws are due to the product being ancient and in some of the aspects Paizo has not even caught up. Since then I've been keeping an eye out for large releases but sadly the only one is on the horizon, that being the space opera supplement from their kickstarter Conquest of the Universe.