For those of us who play tabletop RPG's, and honestly, if you are reading this, I am assuming you are a fellow gamer, the concept of basing a desire to recreate our fantasies is why we're all here. Whether it was a character from a favorite novel as a child, that one movie, with those two guys (you know the one), or a show you ran home from school everyday to not miss a minute of. My point is, when you ask a roleplayer for their source of inspiration, you're going to hear about favorite characters and ideals from throughout the entire genre of fantasy, sci-fi, noir, even westerns if you ask the right folks, we all grew up pretending to be someone, and luckily, most of us never outgrew that. The problem comes in when you try to apply game rules to the concept in your mind, and you quickly discover that class concepts are a lot stricter than imagination. Luckily, Paizo thought to open the door to the idea that perhaps multiclassing wasn't the only way to explain why a fighter would know how to cast a few spells, or a priest might be handy with a gun. And by opening that door with the feats Amateur Gunslinger and Eldritch Heritage (both published in Ultimate Magic), they allowed Super Genius Games the opportunity to run with it, and expand upon the idea that perhaps individuals can actually be just that, individual.
Now, it goes without saying, when you sit down with your playgroup, if you expect your paladin to be a two-dimensional Lawful Gullible buzzkill who has never thought to learn anything more than what the church has told him he needs in order to able to bring the light of his teaching to the world, well this might not be the book for you. On the other hand, if your paladin didn't find the calling right at the moment of birth, and perhaps had a childhood of misadventure that picked him up an interesting skill or two that you would like to be able to represent via new options and tricks available to you as the player, well then, this book just might be for you.
Ok, so why not just multiclass, right? I mean, we've always had the option, so why a whole new concept to gain abilities of various classes, fair enough question. And, here's a fair enough answer. Multiclassing is a murky, convoluted messy affair that can very quickly break a character, that's why. What do I mean by break a character? Let me give you an example, let's go back to that paladin. Let's say as a lad, he was orphaned to the streets, and had to learn to survive the old fashioned way. Now, ignoring the hilarity of seeing rogue1/paladin5 on a character sheet (chuckle), I don't want to give up a level of my possible 20 to rogue, it's not like he was trained, I don't want nor need all that comes with that level of rogue, I just want a few things, just to acknowledge my character concept. But, by taking a multiclass feat such as Talent for Mischief from this PDF, I can acknowledge my paladin's time as a street urchin by choosing an appropriate rogue talent that he retains to this day. Maybe he was always good at stealing food for him and a few other kids, or he was the one they always sent climbing up the buildings to find ways in. Regardless, this optional system of multiclass feats allows me to design the character more fully to match my vision, and thereby allows for a fuller back story to be supported by the math on the character sheet when done.
Contained within the 21 pages of this PDF are 47 of these multiclass feats, 2 of which are reprints, added to allow for a sense of completeness under one cover. Of the remaining 45 feats, 5 are geared towards abilities from SGG classes like the Time Thief/Warden, Armiger and Death Mage. The remaining 40 are spread across a fair selection of the Core and APG classes. Whereas a great deal of these feats are designed to give you access to spell casting in one form or another, that's far from the only thing covered here.
Now, it would be insane to allow folks to pick and choose all the cool toys from each pile without giving some form of checks and balances, and whereas I admit I wasn't entirely clear the first time I read the restrictions through, I caught on pretty quick to how one keeps a character in line when it comes to these feats. Essentially, it comes down to favored class options, and losing them if you start picking from to many piles for your multiclass feats. It's more refined then that, and presented a lot more elegantly by Owen and Ryan, but there's the nutshell version. There are exceptions, and obviously more to it then my shortened rendition, but without giving to much away, there you go.
Along with the concept of adding these feats, and an optional ruling on them that would allow for less restriction upon them to explain certain abnormalities within a population or locale (think Freeport, if ever there was a city where EVERYONE should get some free rogue talents, lol), the concept of designing additional multiclass feats is covered, with advice on what to look for in a class that would be the signature abilities perfect for the multiclass concept.
The formatting follows the familiar three column with embedded artwork that has dominated the look and feel of SGG products, right along with their partial cover front page. The artwork is all color throughout, with pieces of stock art interspersed with original (or at least pieces I haven't seen used to death everywhere else yet), and tends to range from the not bad to the really good in quality. I noticed no grammatical errors, no formatting ones for that matter.
My only real complaint regarding this PDF is that I am going to have to wait for volume two, as I want to see more multiclass feats handling the martial classes, as well as a great deal more SGG classes getting the multiclass feat treatment. Another fantastic product guys, 5 star.
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