I missed the boat on the First Edition of the world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game, having gotten into it a few years into Second Edition. As such, I never quite got what the thief-acrobat was all about, save for a vague idea that it was a more acrobatic version of the normal thief. Now I play Pathfinder, where the thief is called the rogue, Acrobatics is a skill, and LPJ Design has just released Lost Classes of Fantasy: Thief Acrobat in what I assume is a thematic (rather than literal) update for the old 1E class. So, let’s look under the hood.

The PDF is nine pages long, counting six for the class itself, one for the OGL, and two for a character sheet that’s included also. Save for the graphic on the first page, there’s no art here (notwithstanding the company logo on the character sheet), though there are grey borders along the top and bottom of each page; hence, printing this won’t be a problem. I’m always a fan of bookmarks, and initially was pleasantly surprised to see them here, only to find that there were only two bookmarks, the main entry and a nested entry strangely labeled “STR.” Compounding my confusion was the fact that neither bookmarks actually led anywhere when clicked on. So that particular feature is broken, but it really doesn’t make much practical difference in a nine-page PDF.

However, other oddities began to creep in as I read the class over. The class has flavor text under the headings for Background, Role, and Alignment, but that was all, which makes the PHB-style write up seem somewhat aborted. It was after that, though, that what I saw furrowed my brow.

To be clear, the Thief Acrobat is a base class; it has a full twenty-level progression. And yet, it has entry requirements…and strange ones at that. For example, you can’t take this class if you’re a half-orc, because “half-orcs are simply too bulky to make effective Thief Acrobats.” Yeah, whereas dwarves are known for being so light and nimble. Beyond that, you can’t be a Thief Acrobat if you’re Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil, something the text tries to justify in the flavor text Alignment section, but which still comes off weakly. And finally, there are a series of skill prerequisites that effectively mean that you’ll need five levels in another class before you can multiclass into Thief Acrobat.

I really don’t understand why these restrictions were put in place. My only guess is that this is done in homage to the class restrictions in 1E, which were far more stringent than the few alignment-based class restrictions in Pathfinder, but nevertheless these are not only too binding, they don’t make much sense, both thematically and because they mean that you can’t take this class as a 1st-level character. Why hamstring the class like that?

In regards to the class itself, there’s nothing wrong with it from a mechanical standpoint, but it seems fairly bland in what it offers. There’s no capstone ability at 20th level, for example (though that doesn’t matter too much, since no character will get past 15th-level without going into epic territory). The Thief Acrobat’s main class abilities are sneak attack damage dice and talents, just like a rogue. Admittedly, the talents are different, but the majority of them grant the effects of either a feat, or another class’s ability (e.g. quick reflexes, like a barbarian). There are some new things here, but they’re mostly a slight reworking of some skills, which doesn’t go nearly far enough to make this class an attractive option. The Thief Acrobat really seems like nothing more than a rogue with slightly fewer defensive abilities and some altered talent options to mimic a few other classes. The book ends with five new feats, and while I did like a few of them, they aren’t enough to justify this class.

Maybe I just don’t get it; maybe there are parallels to the original 1E thief-acrobat here that I’m in the wrong target group for. But what I see is a class with some nonsensical restrictions and basically functions as a slightly sub-optimal rogue. There’s nothing particularly bad about the Thief Acrobat, but there’s certainly nothing that wowed me, or convinced me that it filled any particular niche that needed filling. Despite its name, the Thief Acrobat is a class that falls flat on its face.