So when Ultimate Intrigue came out I decided to get my opinions out there early and read the pdf while typing out my general impressions on what I read. Reading a 300+ page book that’s mostly rules left me tired and staring at a screen for so long made my eyes burn so halfway through I started drinking a bottle of wine my sister recommended and finished off the overview pretty drunk That overview was actually a pretty popular post so I decided to have a go again, now that Horror Adventures is out, only this time I’m not messing around by getting drunk halfway through. I’m starting drunk.
Here’s how this is going to work; as I type the introduction out I’ll be nursing a mix of rum and coke. Eventually I’ll be switching to Everclear and fruit punch. I’ll read a significant section or chapter, and then I’ll type up my assessment. I held off reading the book when it first became available to download so all of my first thoughts and impressions are from an inebriated state of mind. This does mean that this is not much of a review and more of an overview since I don’t think alcohol is going to make my judgement on rules more precise. I have my phone set to deliver an alarm every hour so I can pace myself with pre-measured shot classes of what I’m mixing with my soda and fruit juice so that I don’t die. My wife will be spotting me to further prevent my from dying. My computer is still broken so I’ll be using my tablet. Luckily I got myself a bluetooth keyboard to make this easier but this still means that I’ll be typing without a great ability to edit on the fly so I’ll be getting to that when I’m sober. I’m through my first glass so I’ll start up now…
We’re skipping the introduction and table of contents because I don’t care. I will say that the cover is kind of fun. We have the iconic Wizard, Paladin and Cavalier getting mobbed by zombies. If this was anything but a 3.X game I’d be worried but if they’re high enough level this will be easy to get out of. The Wizard is probably fucked though if he needs to make some Fort saves. I’m always playing games where arcane casters are complete chumps against undead. Especially witches.
The first chapter opens up with the Paladin turning evil and now the Monk has to fight her. The Monk is probably dead by now. Unless he’s unchained, then he might stand a chance I guess. Or he’s a really sick build, but I saw his stats in the NPC Codex and he’s not so great.
The book then tells us how to make a character for a horror game, although I’m pretty sure all of these are ways to play any game. It tells you to ask yourself things like what your character’s motivations and fears are so I thought to myself, you know, like every character should whether they’re in a horror game or stabbing ponies in Sparkleland. I shouldn’t criticise it that much though. It's not like this happens as frequently as I’d like. And I enjoy that about pathfinder. some games try to tell you how to role play to the point where you might as well not play after character creation, the game just plays itself. Anyways, blah blah, teach us how to roleplay like rollplayers, moving on.
We get some rules on fear. This initially seems overly convoluted for something we already have status effects for, but for the most part it's just adding some extra severities on fear effects by dividing the stages that exist into more steps. Also you get some variant rules about replacing fear immunity. Then there’s sanity. Basically your highest mental stat becomes your sanity AC and different stuff will attack you with brain menacingness when you fail saves and stuff and if you lose, depending on the severity, you get some kind of insanity. So if you’re pissed off that you couldn’t stab things more often in Call of Cthulhu, there you go.
Corruption gets a pretty deep subsystem. Basically you get some corruption that scales like spell levels that give you feat-like powers based on how much corruption you have. The powers differ based on the nature of your corruption. But these powers have some kind of downside and many of them are pretty harsh. Your level of corruption also starts messing with your alignment and can also lead to occasional loss of control over your character. This is kind of a wet dream for anyone that likes to roleplay significant weaknesses and purity struggles, and a literal wet dream for anyone that’s into Corruption of Champions. if you’re into werewolves then, this is a great fun way to handle lycanthropy curses. speaking of which, I just agreed to play an 5th edition game and made a character along those lines and my list of options made me miss Pathfinder so bad for options like this. Currently my character is forced to half-ass my concept.
The core races get some new alternate racial traits and favored class bonuses, which disappoints me because I barely use Core races outside of humans at this point. Who want’s to play a horror game with an elf. That’s is super weak. I want to play with a mud monster man, or a ratfolk or something else spooky. In Frankenstein the monster’s plan was for his dad to make him a woman and go off somewhere but Frankenstein didn’t want to because that would make a race of Frankenstein monsters. I want to play that. Some half constructs that are born with bolts in their necks and get healed with lightning damage. Do we have that already? a Flesh golem race? Or just zombie people? I’m pretty sure I have some third party thing about it.
So the cult leader at the intro for chapter 2 has awesome facial hair. I’m also still endlessly amused that the iconic Occultist is more portly. The cosplay potential for Pathfinder ever increases and now I really feel like ‘I’ could be an adventurer with my own fat ass. Anyways this is the real meat of the book, the class options. As much as the subsystems so far are pretty nice and the corruption bit more than a bit nice, that part is awesome, people are mostly going to look through this book for options so this is the real important part. It’s where everyone is going to open the book and judge it because the GM can already do whatever he wants so nobody cares. And with no classes introduced in the book we have a lot of room for everyone to get in on the party. It looks like everyone gets two pages of archetypes and options. I’m not looking to see what class is missing.
Alchemist gets two archetypes. One that lets you turn people in kool aide and one that lets you cast extracts above your level at the expense of it being random. It's handy how they did that, you’re limited to the APG list and they tell you the number of possibilities so you can roll some dice without counting. Still kind of a bookeeping nightmare if you aren’t using an app that has all the spells on it.
Barbarian gets some gnarly rage powers and four fun looking archetypes. One is a murder trance guy and one is a werebeast one.
Cleric gets a Cthulhu cultist archetype and two new domains, Stars and Void. Wait a minute. don’t we have those already? I’m pretty sure we did. I’m not that drunk. Okay I’m a little dizzy at this point but seriously I was pretty sure there was alrady a void and star domain. Fuck it I’m tired, i’m not fact checking so these are new domains. Even though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the Dark Tapestry subdomain before.
Okay so I notice Bard is missing so I guess not everyone is on board the Horror train.
Druid gets a couple of archetypes. I’m noticing one gets a spirit, a la the Spiritualist class. Seems weird to me. Also weird is the devolutionist Druid that can make animals feral and has a creepy devolved human as an animal companion. I’m not getting the horror theme on that one. Maybe it's a reference to some gross black and white era movie that will give me nightmares when I find it on the criterion collection. I will say that it's creepy but in a gross kind of way.
Page 52, I love that guy. Since he's in the Inquisitor section I guess he’s one of those. Probably the archetype that gets special eyes that are spookier than normal. naw, that’s the hex archetypes He’s probably the bookwork archetype that has Int as a main stat. Because he has a book you see.
Investigator gets three archetypes. I don't’ like most of them but I do like the one that is kind of an occultist but even then I’m not that enthused. I have to say, so far these options are way different from Ultimate Intrigue, in the sense that in that book the archetypes seem to be for roleplaying first at the expense of being actually useful but for the most part I don’t feel harshly crippled with little payoff with these archetypes. Sure there are exceptions but for the most part I feel like I’d pick these up more readily.
Kineticist gets two archetypes. Psycho and Dark. Both let you use Wis and Int respectively for your powers instead of Con, with different things happening in place of burn, or in the case of the Dark Kineticist, you can burn souls instead. . Its nice to have options like this because I was never that big on Burn. I’m especially happy that I can make myself an M Bison build now.
Good luck using the new Medium Legendary spirits. They’re all psychopaths that get you to do things that wouldn’t fly in most games.
I like the Mesmerist archetypes but really they aren’t making me too excited. I do like the prospect of being a freddy kreuger mesmerist even though in a lot of campaigns it's not exactly useful.
I absolutely adore the Occultist archetypes. One lets you have haunted implements with types chosen among the medium’s spirits, and the other makes for a fun japanese flavored paper talisman mage although the talismans aren’t by default paper.
Paladin Takes a weird turn by jacking class features from the Bard of all things. It's flavored as an effect cause by stigmata. The other two are more ‘normal’ but one switches charisma for wisdom so there's some interesting things to do with that.
Slayer gets two interesting archetypes and one that’s only useful in very specific campaigns.
Spiritualist starts off aping the bloodrager. Here is where I realize that I’ve been seeing a lot of class feature poaching in this book. More interesting is the other archetype that allows your phantom to be an undead creature as opposed to an outsider. Makes sense to me but I’ve seen so many arguments about the nature of undead and how they interact with class features and alignment to know that this will make some people’s head explode due to the way we think about ghosts and the undead in a non planar logic. Hell I’m on my… I don’t know what drink. I had two sodas worth of rum coke and another of vanilla coke rum, and I’m on black cherry soda and peach sake now, but anyways even now I get the difference between dead ghost and undead ghost.
Vigilante gets three new archetypes. They aren’t blatantly going superhero this time but still cover some iconic tropes of having a dual identity, like Serial Killer.
Witch gets a hefty slew of Patrons, mostly cthulhu mythos flavored. I couldn’t even read the second archetype because of Gingerbread Witch. FINALLY we get a proper fairy tale witch archetype. This will be my next witch. I’ll name her Totenkinder. You even get a gingerbread familiar. Mine will smoke cigars and swear and drink a lot with a scottish accent.
Wizard gets some cthulhu stuff. Lots of Cthulhu stuff in this book by the way. We get it. Cosmic horror in a horror book. If we get a Modern book then we’re all set to play Call of Cthulhu conversions I guess, but also two whole archetypes based on necromancy.
And that's it for the archetypes. lots of elder god/dark tapestry kind of things and a few stinkers but overall I feel like I’ve found plenty that I really want to play and not much is hampered by the feeling that the options are limited to very specific kinds of games. also lots of casting ability score swapping which is always nice to play with.
Next section is feats. since I don’t want to type about these all day i’ll just note the highlights. Nothing exciting. Some clarification occurs with the availability of monster feats because there’s some of those here. roughly half the style feats are interesting enough where I want to build around them. Story feats are back. Otherwise they are kind of mid ranged feats that you might take for flavor or when you’re running out of feats you need to fight or cast spells but not many actual trap options or anything that will become staples of the game except maybe fleshwarping but I don’t even know what that is yet.
Okay, I’ve been doing this for a while and I just burped up something that tastes like vomit so I’m going to call this Part 1 and finish this later. My general opinion so far, since I’m not even halfway through and we’re already done with feats, is that this book is a bit backed into a corner. If we didn’t have so much spooky crap in the game already, like zombies and occult stuff and all that jazz, then we’d have somewhere to go but right now I’m not exactly feeling the ‘horror’ of the book aside for re-teaching us how to roleplay with some actual consequences. I mean I like the archetypes for the most part but I’m not coming across much that seems drastically necessary. And the general themes seem to lean heavy on the Cthulhu corner since we’ve only really gotten bestiary stuff from that front. Out of the things that are worth the whole book no matter what the rest of it looks like is the Corruptions. That crap is awesome. I kind of wish it had been a class though but there’s more ways to play around with the concept as it is so there’s that. So far its the best part of the book. Of course the fear and sanity stuff is neat and i’ll use them but I’ve been doing something along the lines of sanity using third party stuff so i’m not that excited. And it’s got nothing on Corruptions. I love that subsystem so much. Although its probably a soothing a sore spot because 5e has given me nothing but crap in terms of making my concept actually work. I know people like the game and all and it is a cool game but this stuff constantly makes me feel like I have to play with my balls at home and I have nothing to rely on but DM fiat to do anything. People complain about the flavor options in Pathfinder being trap options but I love stuff like story quests and corruptions. It makes my weird whims and random ways for my character to suffer have some kind of mechanical relevance.
Sober me talking now; That was fun. I’ll find some time to review the rest of the book when I have some more extended drinking time. Please forgive the typos I missed and I’ll see you next time.
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