Review: Into the Breach: Inquisitor.

The latest entry in Flying Pincushion's Into the Breach series covers the Inquisitor. Like the rest of the series it features several archetypes, an alternate class, Prestige classes and some options and items to round out the class in question.

The archetypes are imaginative and each one gives new and interesting options. Some of them however pick at a few peeves of mine when it comes to crunch. Some of it includes niggling details like inconsistent wording on replacing spellcasting or the Circuit Judge having an ability that calls out that it works for one round before calling out that it works for a number of rounds equal to it's level. Some of it includes personal opinions like some archetypes being too powerful, too weak or redundant for what they replace or Duplicating Accessor being, to me, a book keeping nightmare due to shifting ability scores as a payment for abilities. Nothing I've seen is outright wrong or anything that can't be solved with some clarification but the amount of instances where things like that happen make the product a bit awkward. The archetypes themselves may be worth the headache but tat would be chalked up to individual opinion based on whether or not what annoys me is the same thing that annoys you as none of them are objectively bad, or at the very least need more playtesting than number crunching to get a clear idea of how well or bad it goes.

The alternate class, The Vengeant, seems like a soup of classes. One part Paladin, one part Inquisitor, a splash of Monk and a slight hint of Cavalier. It's a full BAB, 4 level caster. Instead of armor it gets wisdom to AC. It gets an ability that functions a bit like Cavalier's Challenge ability and works with a Judgement-ish ability and makes the target susceptible to an Oath Strike, an attack rolls twice and takes the better number. Overall I like the class.

In the Prestige Class section is hard to judge for me because I generally don't like prestige classes. All I can say is that they didn't have any glitches I noticed and one is way better than the other in the sense that its incredibly more interesting mechanically.

The new Inquisitions are probably some of the most thematic inquisitions I've ever seen. There are some that are specific to a creature type, like Undead Slayer. They aren't too specific so you can make some actual use out of them. There are also racial inqusitions. A lot of them have some of the niggling problems I meantioned earlier, specifically that when an ability functions as a spell that spell isn't always italicized isn't always referenced as being spells or having a reference of what book it is.

Lastly there are new mundane items. Like any mundane item they aren't entirely impressive but hats off to them for having them. Its always magic item this and magic item that. Nothing happens unless it's magic. The all star of this one is probably The Bolt Feed, which along with Rapid Reload (I assume this works) lets you fire crossbows at the rate of a bow.

So as a whole? I like about half the archetypes which made me think this book was going to be a disappointment but the book gets much better further in. Like in a lot of the Into the Breach series I can feel the difference between authors of  the material based on different wording and inconsistent levels of clarification. This bugs the crap out of me and if you can get past that or give some GM oversight the classes I didn't like can be saved, and they probably should be because they do present a new play experience and an interesting take on what an inquisitor is. So it's a product with a lot of potential but kind of flawed on entry. I'd give it a high 3 out of 5 stars as a rating for myself but for the taste of others I'm rounding it up to 4 stars.

You can find it here over at Paizo.com