Subscribers started getting their shipment confirmations so I got my hands on Paizo's Ultimate Intrigue. Here are my first impressions as I read through the book. Because these are just thoughts based on what I read there isn't a real structure or anything so you'll have to bear with me. I also won't be given specifics unless they are asked of me and I won't quote verbatim whats in the book.
Chapter one kicks off with the Vigilante himself after a very Batman like scene for the chapter cover. Only this guy seems to kill so it's more like Frank Miller's Batman. The Vigilante himself still has his dual identity and it works similarly to the playtest. He gets two identities that can have two alignments, scrying only works on one identity unless both identities are known to the scryer and certain abilities only work with either the social identity or the vigilante identity. The specializations Avenger and Stalker from the playtest remain in the class with the Avenger getting full BAB and the Stalker getting a pseudo sneak attack. From there the Vigilante has two tracks of talents. One for his social identity and one for his vigilante identity. He gets an ability that makes it virtually impossible to intimidate. The 'Appearance' line of abilities are still there where the vigilante causes enemies to become flat-footed, then shaken, then stunned when the Vigilante gets the drop on them. Lastly there is a mega punch that gets more powerful the longer the target was studied before getting jumped. Because the 'Appearance' abilities seem kind of useless in most scenarios I find myself in as an adventurer I'm not a big fan but they are nice and flavorful for the class and can be said about the whole class itself. Overall the structure is nice and simple. For the most part its two tracks for two identities without a lot of mumbo jumbo in between. Its a simple and clean design with a lot of little parts to move around.
But what about those parts? Like the entire class the social talents have limited usefulness in a typical adventuring day but they are all pretty appropriate and pretty powerful int he context of inner city intrigue, especially if downtime is involved. One interesting thing about the vigilante talents is that there is a backdoor to using them in the social identity by making a disguise checks, which is pretty cool. The vigilante talents themselves are mostly pretty neat. Some of the abilities I wish were a normal thing, like the ones that grant a feat but give some kind of extra ability to it. Like one that lets you make vital strikes on attacks of opportunity.
Then we go on to archetypes. Lots and lots of archetypes.
Alchemist gets the Alchemical Sapper(kind of a saboteur with more explosions), Interrogator(Injects people with mind control), and Metamorph (Actually a pretty interesting dirty mutie archetype but the cost is REALLY high. You lose bombs and extracts.).
Bards get the Impervious Messenger(photographic memory is now a class feature), Masked Performer(A little bit Factotum but not as interesting), Ringleader (A bard with a bit of mesmerist-envy) and Sorrowsoul(Emo Bard. I swear, I need to make a Bard/Skald party with each one representing a genre of music.).
Cavaliers get the Courtly Knight(I like these abilities more than the forced Mount. Its basically a more social cavalier. It also interacts with social dueling), Daring General(gets a non-broken version of Leadership with multiple cohorts and can buff them with knight stuff. This goes back into 'broken' territory when I remember how good Tactician is when you have a group full of martials. ), and Hussar(faster and more skilled mount rider).
Druids get the Feyspeaker(gets 8 enchantment or illusion wizard spells and casts with charisma), Skinshaper(Mystique druid?) and Urushiol(druid with poison goo skin and a hard time getting intimate).
The Inquisitor sure got some love. 6 archetypes and two new inquisitions. Notable abilities include; Filling a guys head with criminal thoughts, the ability to hate one particular alignment to a ridiculous degree, a lot of 'detect' abilities (What is the Inquisitor like the Anti-Vigilante?), an Inquisitor that gets Tactician, two more sneaky Inquisitors, and a social buffer.
Of course the Investigator gets 5 archetypes. One uses drugs for power. Much like the Inquisitor is an Anti-Vigilante in a counter subterfuge way, the Investigator seems like a natural advesary in both discovering secrets and hiding them.
The Mesmerist also gets six archetypes. Notable abilities include; Having a motherloving EYEBALL FAMILIAR?!?! That's just weird, another fey themed archetype that gains druid/ranger spells, identity theft, and a Mesmerist that's more like a Bard.
Ranger gets more Combat Styles. The archetype that draws my eye was the Dandy. It casts bard spells and has favored community instead of favored enemy.
The Rogue gets a whopping 7 new archetypes and some new talents. I can't help but to look at the archetypes as supervillains given the presence of Vigilante. Overall I see abilities that make me like the Rogue better but nothing groundbreaking.
The Skald gets four new archetypes. Nothing too new here but they give me some insight as to what the Skald is and how it's different from a Bard in theme.
Spiritualist gets two archetypes. One gets a shadow monster instead of a ghost and the other gets a location-based ghost that's tied to some aspect of the city it's from. Its a nerf in a lot of situations but it's pretty neat and I like that Paizo is playing around with their past subsystems.
Swashbuckler gets three archetypes, the Guiding Blade(the team player), Noble Fencer(The social one) and Veiled Blade(can hide weapons inside her body?).
The Vigilante, playing catch up, of course has a ton of new archetypes. Each of the superheroes. I'll name them.
Brute = Hulk
Cabalist = Daimon Hellstrom
Gunmaster = Lone Ranger
Magical Child = Every magical girl ever. (c'mon she even has a mascot animal)
Mounted Fury = Shining Knight
Psychometrist = Constantine
Warlock = Too many
Wildsoul = Spider-Man, Falcon and Wolverine.
Zealot = Too many
After that everyone that didn't get two or more pages of archetypes gets something or another. Antipaladin gets an evil ruler archetype, Cleric gets to have more skills at the price of a domain, spontaneous casting and BAB, Gunslinger gets some fancy gun twirling and not so fancy face punching, Hunter gets to be lamer for better downtime and social skills as well as get an archetype that can run around a city-scape like a spider monkey, Kineticist gets some wild talents that are hit and miss, there's a poison monk and a feint monk, a court occultist and a secret occultist, an intrigue mystery for the oracle (I guess they didn't want to call it a Mystery Mystery), a Paladin that can be any good (Which, in all honesty, isn't that great of an archetype in terms of what you gain,), a more social Slayer archetype and an Unchained specific fey Summoner.
First chapter is of course exciting. Mostly its the new class and it's archetypes letting us live out some nice super power fantasies. There are a lot more social archetypes, allowing some classes to more likely be a face, as well as themes of keeping or discovering secrets and of course intrigue. There is a very strong fey sub-theme going on. Many of the archetypes give up exciting and powerful things for interesting but considerably less useful things. At first I saw this as skill part of the martial/magic/skill trinity that would make the Ultimate series complete but it is far from that. It's more of an urban book so far with many of the archetypes being basically useless unless you're fairly stationary in a big city. In a game with a lot of travel and no home base or politics I have a hard time finding used for some of these. But there are also more sneaky archetypes that are more in line with what's useful in a generic adventure and some social aspects that will be useful when you have to deal with people but not for intrigue.
Next chapter is about feats. The first immediately notable thing is that fencing grace is reprinted.
There's a feat that applies Bravery to all mind affecting effects. Too bad so many archetypes replace bravery. I've noticed that there's a slight increase in vanilla Fighter love lately.
I'm seeing a few feats that do things that I already allow people to do using skills. My current count is 3.
Now it's 4.
Now it's 6.
Oh, another bravery feat.
Starknives get dex to damage. It looks like we burned that bridge already but why not just one dex to damage on finesse weapons? At this point it looks like Paizo is pretty okay with it. We don't need a feat for EVERY weapon. Lets just cut some corners. Maybe they don't want Monowhips to get super insane or something.
At first glance the feat section is kind of meh. perhaps I'll find some gold as I pay more attention to the specific entries but there isn't anything jumping out as particularly exciting. There's feats that I would use of course but it looks like I'll only pay attention to about a third of them.
Next chapter is Mastering Intrigue, the subsystem chapter for this book as well as discussing in general how to run intrigue based games and scenarios.
Influence seems simple at first. Basically you have several kinds of skill checks to make to influence an NPC but you can find out what they are and they work better if you make a check to figure out something about them that will make them easy to influence. As you gain more influence over them the better their attitude will be towards you. Its like a relationship score. Organizations work similarly but have different kinds of ranks. This gets all kinds of complicated with new kinds of stat blocks involved so I think people are more likely to just shove an influence tab on NPCs and make up stuff as they go along. Overall it is way more interesting to resolve influence than simply rolling single skills. so I'll probably use it in conjunction with Relationships/leadership and simplify it so that it's just one notch on the NPC stat block and some extra words rather than a whole new extra stat block.
The heist section is more like advice on how to smooth over those aspects of the game rather than hard rules, while the leadership section does have some more interesting rules to add to leadership. I've gotten to banning leadership and combining it with a mixture of relationships and leadership as described by a third party product so this is an interesting addition. There are even rules for monstrous followers and other more interesting forms of the leadership feat.
The nemesis section has rules but the feel less like rules and more like guidelines to build a proper Lex Luthor enemy in a campaign that slowly escalates the situation.
Yay, chase rules.
Library rules.
Sorry I'm not that useful here. My eyes are starting to burn staring at this book for so long, and a lot of these are just really big complications one things that used to be abstract and simplified. As a whole I think you can avoid all this and be happy so I think its for the people that want to play certain kinds of games but don't want to switch systems so they just have random tools to play Pathfinder drastically differently by hanging on subsystems. In fact that's what this entire book is about. Fitting characters in non-Pathfinder games because roughly half the class options are playing the flavor game rather than the 'actually useful' game. Depending on how you run games, or at this point what kind of game you want to run, your milage may vary. My eyes are glazing over but I know at some point I'll need some 'action research rules' for when we decide to play fantasy Phoenix Wright and need some ammunition for when we pull off but at this point there is bound to be a lot of complaining about how unhelpful a lot of this book is for a typical campaign.
Seriously, library research rules? And there's pages of the stuff.
Spells of Intrigue gives you advice and specific spells that can be useful in an intrigue game.
Next chapter is about social combat, and I've started drinking because it's night time now and I'm bored. That's right, a review where I am, I'm not going to say drunk but I'm getting there. I'll tell you when I'm there. I'll fix typos in the morning.
Like the Heist rules the social combat these are less of rules and more of directions on how to plan a game.
Oh snap! They pointed out that duels have been consistent things. There's sword duels, magic duels, psychic duels and now verbal duels. We could just complete the game without any of this combat system. there's a whole other system now.
By the way, I love the pictures in between everything. I think the Investigator is accusing the Magus of something at a Chelaxian court. Oh and Lem and Mel get to hang out but they still don't like each other. Well Mel doesn't like Lem. but in some pictures Lem looks like he's being a turd to Mel.
Verbal duels aren't that complicated but are about as useful as the other kinds of duels. You don't really need them unless that's the kind of campaign you're rolling with. You get a more simple set up in Carrion Crown but this is actually more interesting in addition to being more involved.
I'm there.
The inquisitor and the summoner traded hats. This is funnier than it should be.
There some further clarification on how certain social skills work and some rules about getting rid of opposed rolls
Spells is the next chapter.
I'm only going to lightly skim the spell lists to see if something interesting pops up.
meh. but there are some curiosities. Like I noticed that there's a 'Greater Detect Magic' and a 'Controlled Fireball'. This left me digging around for other spells that were other spells as I moved forward.
I notice a lack of zero level spells.
There are a lot of behavior spells that can probably cause some weirdness. I'm guessing will saves will be extra important after this or you're going to fall in love with a bugbear.
There is a spell that's literally a can of snakes.
Last chapter is about items. Interestingly there are new weapons and alchemical stuff.
Notable among the weapons is a wrist mounted dart launcher.
There are two new abilities attached to alchemical items. Alchemical burn, an kineticist-like burn condition that some items can give you, and alchemical inspiration which gives you a pool of alchemical points that lets you do something. Inspiration mostly includes using it to add dice to skill rolls.
Nothing estremely notable in the rest of the items. There are new weapon abilities and wondrous items. A bit lacking on the armor department. Mostly things that support some new options running around. Overarching theme of skill enabling.
Overall I like this book. I wasn't looking hard but I didn't really find it typoo-ridden like the Advanced Class Guide. But I can see where the online community can ride on it. As I said before, in a campaign where you're mostly traveling from town to town to kick in the local dungeon this book is mostly unhelpful. The archetypes are basically 2/3rds intrigue and flavor focused which means that the trade off for the new abilities is way off unless you're in a specific kind of game. For example: one cleric archetype loses a domain, medium armor and BAB for 4 extra skill ranks per level and more class skills. In most cases that is too many things lost for the skill ranks, but if you're in a campaign where you really can't afford having 2 ranks per level and no value from Int because you'll be twiddling your thumbs during any investigation scene then it's pretty desirable. This book takes the intrigue them very seriously.
The extra rules and subsystems are always valuable to home games but you probably aren't going to get much out of them in typical adventures. All this culminates into the majority of the book being useless for PFS. But for home games that need a bit of direction and some subsystems for inner city campaigns this book is extremely useful. Basically it's as game changing as Pathfinder Unchained in the sense that it opens up playing a whole new kind of game. Investigations become worthwhile and exciting, arguments and court battles have more give and take, going to the fracking library becomes an epic quest. Pathfinder is at it's core a game that can wear a lot of hats but no matter what it's mostly about stabbing a monster in the face. This book makes it very possible to run sessions upon sessions without any physical altercations. It can make Call of Cthulu investigations a real thing rather than some dice rolls in between stabbing an abberation.
If you're not into that, then that's fine. I understand. I'm not that keen on mass combat and downtime (Because I want to play "Lets slay dragons and explore dungeons!" not Civilizations). But there are some neat tools for playing more urban, social or smart characters, and a good chunk of the Vigilante stuff allows for some fun superhero builds.
Speaking of the Vigilante, the class is pretty okay. Like most of the book, having a social identity is useful in limited amounts of games. In normal circumstances I can see people not really using their social identity and therefore playing with two thirds of a class. I cannot see this guy in a PFS game and I know from experience (three different games with three different characters) that party members can see secret identities as a challenge and will spend half the campaign being Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane during the silver age of comics where they are constantly doing petty schemes to find out your identity. Then there are tons of abilities that require planning and schmoozing and downtime when some players want to just rest for the day and kick the door down in the next dungeon. On the plus side there are many ways to make changing identities quicker, both in and out of the class itself so it's not that burdened.
I certainly love the book. as much as I've been ripping on it, I was already working on a campaign where it's beyond useful.
My first glance rating is at 5 out of 5 stars. I'll read it deeper later so this may be subject to change. It's flaws are inherent in what it is rather than what it does and I appreciate what it does. I probably won't be playing Vigilante soon but I know what kind of campaigns I will want to use it for and at that point it will be awesome. In the meantime it has some archetypes that can fit in a normal campaign that may be useful.
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