Campaign Options: Wilderness Masters
Physical Description: Campaign Options: Wilderness Masters is a 127 page PDF with a color cover and black and white art. The bookmarks are extensive but unfortunately not always accurate to where they will go, for example clicking on prestige classes will get you a description of a whip. The layout is designed for screen reading and unfortunately the boarders is full color for heavy ink printing with no print version available..
The Introduction, table of contents, author notes, and flavor text take up first 7 pages before chapter 1. The last 3 pages are made of the license, an advertisement for this product and a back cover.
For the player: 3 new character classes, 8 prestige classes, new equipment and a number of feats. Almost everything in here though should be checked with your DM to make sure it is suitable for the game and mechanically sound. This book is even better if you are playing an elven character.
For the DM: This sourcebook gives you a toolkit for tweaking your wilderness based characters. If you are unsatisfied with the Ranger, or want to see a more wilderness based Barbarian this book has some places to start. New magic items that will make your players and NPCs shine in the wilderness, and an adventure designed for a party that has a character who takes advantage of some of the new rules within.
New Mechanics: This book has a lot of new crunch in it. I have broken each chapter down to talk about the contents within and to point out some of the flaws I have seen. I have also tried to point out a few bits that I liked and would use in a campaign in given the chance.
Chapter 1: Alternate Wilderness Masters
New wilderness base classes, The Wilderness guide is first. Very similar to the ranger in skills, saving throws, hit points and BAB and spells. Special abilities are different, but do include the standard but modified favored enemy, track and wild empathy. It also gains some bonus feats from a survival category listed in this book.
Overall, very similar to the Ranger, and not a non magical version either, but for those looking for favored terrain rules and don’t care for combat styles this is worth looking at.
Next comes the Wilderness Scout, a common theme to fill in the gap left by the late to arrive WOTC version of the wilderness rogue. They have 6 skill points a level and d8 hit dice and use the rogues BAB. This class seems to specialize in being fast and not getting lost. In my opinion this class could use some tweaking, there is nothing to make the class fun in combat, the rogue and WOTC scout have interesting combat abilities, that take planning to carry out and really make them the thinking man’s fighter.
This class has nothing that stands out for a PC, and strangely enough for a class that appears to be built all around guiding and tracking it doesn’t get track until 4th level.
Last is the Wildman, it appears the Wildman is Tarzan meets the Barbarian. I admit the picture is intriguing with a hulking figure duel wielding axes and with some sort of antler headdress. I think to myself that this looks intriguing, however after reading the description the Wildman is not proficient with anything except simple weapons, disappointment after seeing the picture and a little annoying.
Now comparing him to the wilderness scout I see that he too gets 6 skill points, fast movement and a number of abilities that make him a great tracker. In addition he has good BAB, 2 good saves, d12 Hit dice, and animal companion, wild empathy, damage reduction, wild shape, etc. An ability for each level. If the Wilderness scout was a little weak, this character is definitely a power house.
Chapter 2 discusses the benefits of some of the class abilities from chapter one. Nature’s lore is the umbrella like category for 3 specific abilities: Terrain Familiarity, Quarry Bonus and Favored Enemy. Quarry bonus is the most interesting of the three as it really narrows in on the idea of the Wilderness master as a tracker. You gain a bonus to listen, sense motive, spot and tracking ( I will assume they mean Survival) when following a specific creature or group of creatures. Only one such group can be designated as your quarry. The Favored enemy rules seem more varied giving you some additional options on what bonuses you would like to have, however strangely unlike the Ranger, they must choose a specific type of creature such as a red dragon and not dragons in general. Terrain familiarity is a number of skill bonuses gained in a type of terrain the character has chosen to specialize in.
Chapter 3 deals with feats, and gives a substantial number at 32. Some erros can be found in this section, mostly due to having been badly converted from 3.0. An example is the common prerequisite to be able to wildshape to direform. In 3.5 as long as you can wildshape to the appropriate size and hit dice, dire shape is possible.
Another example is the redundant Articulate Wild Shape, in 3.5 you can communicate with creatures of the same species as your new form, no feat required.
Barebacked is another example, it gives you the benefit of riding any mount without penalty, obsolete in the 3.5 version of the ride skill. It does still provide some benefit by negating the penalty for riding without gear.
Bipedal Wild Shape is a cool idea for a feat that wasn’t developed far enough to go anywhere. Basically you take a lycanthropic like bipedal form of an animal you can wild shape into. Unfortunately the template like rules do not go into any details on whether or not you gain any natural weapons, movement abilities, etc. A bidpedal fish by these rules would gain + 2 to two physical stats (player’s choice) and some skill bonuses. No swim speed or ability to breathe underwater. In return you also lose the ability to speak, cast spells and take a penalty to charisma.
So out of all the feats, some will need tweaking to work, or are obsolete. However I do like a few. Exacting Shot builds off the point blank shot feat and gives you the ability to add your Dex bonus to damage within 30’.
Chapter 3 deals with skills and really all it does is give a separate knowledge skill for each type of monster. This unfortunately is another example of redundancy as the various knowledge skills in 3.5 cover most of these creature types anyway.
Chapter 4 is equipment. A variety of new armor types and weapons. It really focuses on elven gear and if you have other elven source books a number of the items carry similar themes. However there is a lot here and you can pick and choose your favorites. Interesting additions include the belaying pin which seems out of place in a wilderness sourcebook, as it is a nautical instrument made for tying ropes to, but can be used as a club in a pinch. Most interesting is the saberbow, a two bladed sword, curved and used as a bow or a melee weapon.
Magical gear rounds out the chapter, one interesting new type of wondrous items are a number of blindfolds that allow the wearer special types of sight. I could see using a NPC with one of these to surprise your characters who think their opponent is blind.
Chapter 5 is prestige classes, there are 8 listed here from Bird Brothers to Swan Mays. There is a sidebar on adapting them using the standard ranger abilities. The prestige classes are given some thought and work. Again the rules don’t entirely make sense, the Bowmaster can shoot 2 arrows at once taking a penalty to both attack rolls. Manyshot as a feat would seem to overlap this ability and should have been given instead in my opinion. A few of them are written for elves are those trained by elves, which is ok for a wilderness themed sourcebook however with only 8 prestige classes it would have benefited me more to see classes for any forest dwelling character.
Chapter 6 contains 14 new spells for the ranger or wilderness master. Some seem week, like the 1st level Moonlight spell that lasts only a minute a level, when the 0 level Light spell lasts 10 minutes a level.
One I like is the Tree Limb Strike that turns a tree into an immobile ally that flails with its branches to attack your foes. Other interesting spells include Earth Works a forest version of Guards and Wards.
Chapter 7 is a small adventure for 7-10th level characters. It takes place in a haunted woods between two major cities. Enlsited by a swanmay to find the secrets of what has gone foul in the woods. Shaded boxes letting me know what is meant to be read aloud would be helpful as such text is interspersed with back ground information.
Overview: This is a good sized PDF that has a number of options for wilderness based campaigns and characters. If you are looking a for a main sourcebook you would probably be better off with another supplement, however there are bits and pieces here that can add to any campaign. This book gets a 3, rounded up from 2.5, for the amount of effort put into it, unfortunately like stated in the intro it was first started to fix the Ranger from 3.0 and was not finished with the release of 3.5. Unfortunately not every revision made it into this product and it suffers some because of that. Plenty of bits to work with here for any campaign heavily featuring the outdoors.
