Was I Wrong About Ultimate Wilderness?

"Which way does a tree fall?"

"Uh, down?"

"A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean."



I wasn't impressed by Ultimate Wilderness when it came out. I consider it "late cycle" for Pathfinder 1st edition, since I've long considered its best days to be Occult Adventures and Ultimate Intrigue. I saw lackluster feats, middling special rules, and terrible archetypes. Did I judge it too harshly, though? I'd like to give it another chance.

Just to be clear on my criteria, here they are. The first one is mechanics. By this I don't mean to judge how powerful the options listed in the books are. Absolutely not. I want to see how interesting they are, if they're useful enough that you don't feel bad taking them for flavor, and if they bring anything unique to the table. The thing about mechanics is that I often search for a "good enough" level of playability because that makes it a viable choice compared to other things. Ideally, it should be good enough that you can take it because of your character's theme and not worry about being a feat(or class) behind for wanting it.

The other criteria is how inventive, insightful, or interesting the book is. I know, this is a pretty "feely" category, but what I can do for you is keep in mind books in the past that we all agree are excellent, even non-Pathfinder books like Lords of Madness or Libris Mortis. We can use that as a rough gauge in addition to just how clever I think the book is. Lords of Madness, for example, brought us the extremely interesting Abberant Blood feats in addition to a wealth of information on physiology, habits, and history of popular abberations. Despite the book not being a powergamer's paradise, it still knocks it out of the park.

I'll be talking about the racial archetypes when I talk about all the archetypes. Some of them do bear mentioning.


Races. We're not off to a good start. We have three races: your "I wanna play a fae" stand-in Gathlains, and plant people Ghorans and Vine Leshy.

Gathlain are okay. Perfectly playable. It's a great race if you're trying to maximize your AC: Small, Dex Bonus, and Natural Armor Bonus. I don't think maximizing your AC is a very fruitful endeavor, but there are worse things to be good at. They get a fly speed, a crappy one thanks to Pathfinder severely overvaluing fly speeds. But it'll be perfectly usable for all out-of-combat flying needs. They can take a few feats to gain some middling spellcasting, but also the amazing Wandering Mind at 9th level: it lets you roll a second save vs. mind-affecting effects on the second round of the effect. That's damn nice.

Ghorans are the first place in this book that I get upset. They get a plant type that's so cut down that it's a massive disadvantage: they get none of the plant immunities but are still subject to plant-type spells. It's not great, but in addition it's completely nonsensical. They're plantlike on the level that they literally need sunlight to live, but they're subject to poison, polymorph, sleep and stun effects. Sure, why not. They also get an ability called Seed which lets them plant a seed which grows into a healthy duplicate of them 2d6 days later. It's meant to let you rearrange your skill ranks, which is a neat idea.

But if you can't figure out why I dislike an ability which lets the PC go on a crazy suicide mission once every 2d6 days, I can't help you.

Next we have Vine Leshies, and yeah, they've got the cut-down immunities too. I'm not gonna go over their benefits too strongly. They get a nice thing or two for natural areas, but overall this is a terrible race. They're cute, but they're bad on the level of kobold or halfling, and that makes me sad. Special shout-out to giving a small size race a grappling feat. I'm sure everyone's rushing to make grapplers who are 3 feet tall.


Next up is Shifter. I talked about it already, so I'll be brief. Shifter's okay. Maybe even some good stuff. You need to use its errata, though, if you want to be effective. Without boring you with the details, primarily using natural attacks isn't a very good idea for 1:1 attack bonus types so it's really vital that shifter gets Shifter's Fury at level six. Otherwise, you're restricted to using deinonychus or tiger the entire time. It also wants to take a nice Wisdom for only one ability, Defensive Instinct. It feels bad, but it's not a dealbreaker. Mechanics aside, I like Shifter. They fill a great little niche and open up a lot of concepts that you would otherwise have to twist and squeeze to play.


Archetypes and Class Options. Lemme just get this off my chest right now, Leshykineticist, a Leshy-only archetype, sacrifices choice and utility for extra abilities. The first of these extra abilities is the talent Green Tongue, a "speak with plants" effect that they already fucking have via being a Leshy. This is inexcusably lazy design. I stared at this for an hour just trying to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

That's probably the biggest mistake in the book(so far), but the majority of these archetypes range from bland and boring to outright terrible "trap" choices. Another shining example is Tribal Fighter. They sacrifice metal armor and shields, their first bonus feat, and weapon training. In return, they get improved unarmed strike, an extremely minor benefit toward taking Style feats, and benefits with everything in the "tribal" weapon group. That does, at least, include unarmed strike. I mean, do you see the problem? How does this inform my play style, exactly? Why give them a bonus to all tribal weapons but also style feats? Why's this a fighter archetype and not a monk archetype? This archetype is extremely specific at best and leagues behind the Master of Many Styles monk archetype at worst, in terms of both concept and ability. Moving past that, there's several archetypes for the original, not-unchained monk. What a fucking waste of time.

Let's just go over the good ones, and you can draw your own conclusions based on how few there are. Herbalist is excellent for turning Alchemist into a completely different kind of class thematically, and I love it for that. The "Gathlain" archetypes of Fey Courtier and Season Sage are interesting ideas, with Season Sage in particular being an interesting trade-off for if you don't want to take Wild Shape. Feral Striker is another decent choice for Brawler if you'd rather not deal with Martial Flexibility. Saurian Champion is potentially the only good thing about Cavalier, and that's because you ride a dinosaur. As for Viking, I don't know how effective it is seeing as how it has a raging shield user aesthetic, but it's at least fun and unique.

Shifter gets its share of crazy archetypes that open up a ton of options, but they bear special mention. Elementalist shifter is fine, but Water has the issue of taking a -4 to attack and damage whenever the target is touching the ground. That's pointlessly debilitating. Rageshaper has you hulking out for a few rounds a day, tying your entire character to something that won't last more than one fight...and on top of that? It has another one of those "go crazy and start attacking your friends" abilities. No. No, not ever. This is stupid. I mean, was any thought put into playing these at low level? They get this at fourth level, spend a FULL ROUND ACTION to hulk out then...punch up the place for a measly four rounds? Things with a duration end on the initiative count right before they started so you do, in fact, waste a round activating it. It's not even markedly better than normal shifting which is measured in hours. Fiendish Shifter could use more than minutes per day for its abilities, but there's worse things. Weretouched is fine. Actually, it's a great way to play a lycanthrope so long as you don't care that your class kind of ends after level eight. Verdant Shifter is here too.

Oozemorph...

God Dammit.

Okay, so I know the guy who wrote this. He's an intensely creative person and has a keen eye for balance. Just so we're clear. Fluidic Body being something you have to manage really closely(or else lose your magic item slots) is...fine. It's not something I'd ever want to do, but I can see this being...okay. It really fucks you at low levels and I definitely feel like oozemorph would really suffer below level five or six, more from logistics than mechanics.

But...

Bob? Bob, do you think maybe this is a hard sell to fit into a party? Mechanics aside. As in, someone asks what I'm playing, and I say I'm a sentient pile of protoplasmic mercury? I know, I know, Odo. But...I get looked at weird for playing normal races. Like Skinwalkers or Nagaraji. I'm not saying it's bad or doesn't fit. Anything fits in Pathfinder, Golarion especially. It just doesn't strike me as very...easy to play.

The archetypes I didn't mention really don't deserve to be talked about. This is a huge section full of bland crap, to be blunt. Some of them are probably playable. I can't keep interest long enough to really analyze a lot of them. Kineticist even gets a whole element, Wood, and all I can say is...it's fine. I don't know if throwing your lot into healing with Kineticist is worth it, but if it is, Wood is your element. The book seriously leans on archetypes centered around terrain types, like swamp barbarians and mountain druids. It's fucking boring.

Feats. So I do have some praise here, but let's get this out of the way quick. I'm going to do a whole post on what makes an ability bad, but to go over it quickly: overly specific conditional bonuses are often the path to an ability nobody will ever want to take. There's a lot of those here and this section is almost as full of bland crap as the other ones we discussed. We'll save discussing specifics for another post, but suffice to say this book has a lot of examples. Many are fine if you've got room in your build for flavor feats...but not everyone does.

Onto the good stuff. The Wilding tree of feats is amazing and something I'd want to see expanded upon or emulated for other flavors. It's a way to add some nature spice to any class by taking animal empathy and some other neat things as feats. In exchange, not all of it stacks with class abilities. It's to limit bonus stacking in these areas, and frankly, it's something I'm okay with. There's also some useful and fun abilities like Woodland Wraith giving you concealment in natural areas(and thus letting you hide easier) and the awesome False Trail for when you're trying to shake someone tracking you. This is an amazingly useful feat if your character or party are criminals. Overall, this section is somewhat strong since it's filled with "diamond in the rough" powers like these. I could spend all day pointing out which ones are bad and which are great...but I'd rather teach you how to see it for yourself. So let's move on.

I'm gonna take the alternate rules separately instead of talking about the section as a whole.

Discovery and Exploration. These are, frankly, some really neat rules that can spice up having the characters searching for old ruins and such. Everyone can contribute and it turns the whole concept into a minigame instead of just "And Thusly"ing your way through it after a skill check or two. It adds value to survival(which, okay, didn't EXACTLY need it) but also to linguistics and some other skills. However, I'd move its suggestion of Profession(Cartographer) to another skill unless this is a game really focused on exploration...or if you're using the Background Skills alternate rule.

You really should use Background Skills, by the way. It's great. Anyway.

The First World. I get why this is here but, at the same time, I don't. This is a fairly standard explanation of the concept of a fae dimension or world, and it's fine. I don't think it really provides anything even an intermediate GM would need, but maybe it gave someone some ideas, and that's okay by me.

Foraging and Salvaging. Okay so, while pathfinder has a focus on magic items, I consider these vital and interesting rules which I've been screaming for since the days of D&D 2e. It lets people actually, legitimately gather resources, and while it may not be worthwhile to actually do...that can be tweaked. I can imagine games who are already using the Automatic Bonus Progression and cutting back on magic items to use these a lot. I like it.

The Green Faith. This is a bunch of nonsense that goes on and on about nature religions. It's bland and nobody needs it.

Harvesting Poisons. Another rule set I've been crying out for. Harvesting your own poisons is virtually the only way to make using them viable, and until now there's been no official rule for it. This is sorely needed.  This section also covers an expanded section on poisons which I find pretty good.

Hazards and Disasters. Adding CR and rules to natural disasters so they're more usable is a fine use of your book's space, I guess. I don't really see this as very necessary, but there are worse things to include.

Herbalism. This is a bunch of stuff you can either buy in a market or find with Profession(Herbalist). You know my opinions on Profession, but this is a damn nice thing to include. Even if they're not all very useful, it's nice that the druid can say they can find an herb to help in a situation and then actually do that without the GM having to bullshit him.

Spells of the Wild. This section is basically a whole thing on how all those nature spells(you know, the ones that aren't Fireball) are totally useful you guys, and this is how you use them. I mean, I guess it's fine. Most of their advice is bland and pointless, and really I'd have liked more alternate rules in this space...or even just more herbs. Those things were cool.

Trophies. Not much to say but I fucking love this feature. It adds some decent value to Craft, Knowledge and Survival and the extra gold you get isn't exactly going to break the bank. I've used these rules in a real game and it was fun to see everyone get into it and help make a trophy.

Weather. Listen. When people say Pathfinder is (ugh) "Fiddly" or has too many rules, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. I know it just amounts to a bunch of random tables, but did you really need this whole section to tell you there's like a 20% chance it rains?

Wilderness Traps. More traps. Traps are good. They're all CR 5 or below. That's bad.

Next is a whole chapter on familiars and animal companions that adds options, clarification and variety that's sorely needed. They're not all amazing options, but nothing ever is. It's fine, and plenty of the "bad" options I saw are fine enough if that's what you want. Prankster familiars getting the ability to fool their master is cute and harmless enough, but I've had GMs who don't need that kind of ammo. YMMV I guess.

Spells. You can't have a nature book without a big list of new nature spells, I guess. For once I don't mind, because D20 is a little lacking in decent nature-themed spells and this section adds some. It also adds Fey Form and Ooze Form spell lines, which is nice. Overall the spell section is okay, nothing to write home about. Sea of Dust stands out to me as the kind of spell that can start an entire plot moving...even if it's not the sort of thing we need stats on.

Equipment. This is a bunch of junk, frankly.

Magical Plants. I separated this out because this section drives me nuts. Honestly, it's neat to think of magic plants and what they might do. And I know it's better to have magic item costs than to not have them listed. But it's weird that these things are so restrictive in their use when nobody in their right fucking mind is ever going to buy them. It also brings to mind parties carting around a pile of sod and a tree in a wagon because it gives magic fruit. I don't like the whole culture of constantly saying PCs are idiots who do dumb shit...but I can really see this one happening.


@}-,-'--


The Conclusion. So is this a bad book? It's not great, but it definitely comes off as worse than it really is. The races, archetypes and feats sections are exhausting, so by the time you get to the meat of what this book is great at, you're probably too tired or mad to see it. In addition to that, the races, archetypes, and feats are most of what we were really hoping were great. It's a simple fact that for every GM, there's 4 to 6 players. Ultimate Wilderness brings a lot of cool flavor and options to the table, but overall it's a very "GM heavy" book. That's okay sometimes, but it's not what we wanted. As for me? I like it just fine. It brings forth great rule systems for things I've always wanted and hated "bullshitting" through in the past. It puts Ultimate Wilderness squarely in my "problematic favorite" category along with Gunslinger, Improved Familiar, and cheese fries.

World Building 101: Racial Culture (Yes, it's about Orcs)

So the Orc Argument kicked up again. I'll explain what that is in a moment, but suffice to say it's a fight I've been having for ten years or more now. I thought I'd collect my thoughts about it and tie in a little bit of advice on not being super fucking yikes when you include non-human races in your game. Before we go any further, though, I want to say two things.

I'm not an expert, and I'm not well spoken at the best of times.

And.

We are going to talk about real racism and real fascism and I want you to take it seriously. I'm sorry  if you feel like I'm telling you what to do, but some methods of thought or ideals we're discussing aren't okay. They cause real harm to real people, and believing these things or normalizing them is the first step down a very dark and destructive path.


I'm glad we got that out of the way. The "Orc Argument" I'm referring to is a lot of different individual topics ending in the general idea that depictions of Orcs (and sometimes other nonhuman races) is mired in racism, and the idea of an "antagonist race" is woefully terrible at best. The argument is generally one side saying "Hey maybe these are shitty racial descriptions and we shouldn't promote ideas like ingrained evil, eugenics, or stereotyped rip-offs of existing human culture" and the other side generally claiming that nothing has ever been racist or bad in the history of anything that's ever existed.

You know how racists are.

Anyway. This begins with Tolkien and how some alarming things leaked into his writing. While nothing leads to a directly stated narrative of Orcs being analogous to a real world race or culture, I hope this assorted collection of facts will get you closer to seeing what I mean.


Purity of blood and bloodlines are incredibly important in the Lord of the Rings books, from Aragorn's bloodline to Gondor's weakening totally having nothing to do with their mixing with Middle Men.

Race mixing, as Saruman mixing the blood of orcs and men, is depicted as a "great sin".

There is certainly an element of genetic imperative in his writings, from Orcs being "born evil" to the idea that Eowyn will never be happy so long as she's trying to "fight like a man" and refusing a more nurturing role in life.

Villains in Lord of the Rings are from the east and consistently(though not universally) described as dark, black, swarthy, sallow-skinned or slant-eyed.

Many of the heroes are tall and fair. All of them are white. And no, I'm not saying the hobbits or dwarves are tall. If you thought of using that as a "gotcha!" you're a jackass.

In a letter, Tolkien described Orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."


I won't go into depictions of dwarves in his work and the yikes of their place in the world, but look up their common traits and ask yourself who it reminds you of. So, was Tolkien racist? I don't think he was consciously so. He hated the racist depictions of Axis powers in wartime propaganda and he hated Hitler. We know that for a fact. No, I think the man was incredibly Eurocentric and that's where a lot of our problems come from to begin with.

The fact is, Middle Earth was fashioned with Orcs to provide an endless supply of enemies to kill that nobody felt bad about killing. This is a handy parallel, because that's what virtually every RPG setting uses Orcs and other Goblinoids for. In most settings, descriptions of Orcs sound like someone is playing Bad Guy Trope Bingo.

Here's a collection of what Orcs are like as of 3rd edition Faerun: Warlike to the point of the concept consuming their entire lives, savage, patriarchal to the point of treating women as trophies and slaves, brutish and encouraging of in-fighting between siblings, uncaring of the weak, sickly or undersized, and fond of slavery.

The passage in Races of Faerun then goes on to explain how much it sucks being an orc woman, then describe several other types of orc who are just as bad. Some of my favorite facts include Mountain Orcs are really dirty, Gray Orcs are irrational, and Half-Orcs all had terrible childhoods and are too savage for human society. We at least got through the entire Half-Orc section without talking about rape, so that's a mild half-thumb up for Forgotten Realms.

In Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, Orks are fucking ridiculous ultra-violent soccer hooligan types who are also psychic plant-based creatures who reproduce by spores and don't even have women. If you think I'm making any of that up...save yourself. Don't look it up. I don't normally overstate how awful something is without explaining it...but don't open that stupid, stupid pandora's box. Libera tu tutemet ex infernis.

Volo's guide is a new book, only four years old and written for 5th edition, and yet...it's about as bad as Races of Faerun. In 5th edition, Orcs fight constantly, their entire lives consumed with conflict, in the hopes that they can die in battle so Gruumsh adds them to his eternal army so they can keep fighting forever after they die. It calls Orcs savage and brutish, but also states that only orcs who were "touched by Gruumsh" can control or lead other Orcs. That might have been fine if it were some sort of literary flourish or a subtle implication, but the book goes on to state that Gruumsh literally sends "particularly charismatic" orcs an actual vision which imbues them with supernatural powers that allows them to rise to a position of leadership, which would be completely impossible otherwise. Yikes.

Volo's Guide goes on to say things like the Orcs are superstitious and constantly live in fear of their gods(who are all evil, of course). They don't pair-bond at any point and see mating as a "mundane necessity of life" with no special significance. Orc children receive no maternal or paternal love and grow up in constant conflict and are left to cultists of the orc's spellcaster and assassin gods to "accept or reject" if they can't handle it. So 5e's core setting Orcs aren't even pro-social, basically.

Several settings(not just Faerun or Volo's guide) also include the idea that Orcs "respect strength" as a simple(stupid) explanation why they're ruled over by a different, smarter(more European) and more powerful villain. The idea that strength and fighting is often their only major cultural trait yet they're perfectly willing to follow orders and stay in their lane when the GM needs some weenies for a fight is a big part of our problem.

There's a lot to unpack here. I'm sure everyone who's read our examples(and many other depictions of Orcs) can tell that these are pretty bad, but maybe not why. I'm going to try and slowly unravel this massive pile of yikes for you.

First I want you to imagine I came at you with a character concept. Forget any sort of racial background. Say they're a human. I tell you they're from a tribe of barbarian nomads who survive by fighting and raiding. They didn't have a mother or father and they've been fighting their entire lives. When there's no fight to fight, they're training to fight. They're hoping to die a "good" death in battle so they can fight for forever in the afterlife. They only respect strength.

I want you to look me in the fucking face and tell me that character would be acceptable to play. Drive up to where I live, knock on my door, pull a Ted Kennedy and look me in the eye. It's an absurd character most people, if not all, would call a thin excuse to play a munchkin character who checks out of all aspects of the game except combat. You would rightly call their barbarian tribe ridiculous to the point of parody.

Except you probably noticed that all I did in that passage was describe an Orc as presented in either of our fantasy examples. Even past all other implications, these cultures are poorly written. They're slapped together with "evil" in mind and filled to the brim with ridiculous stock "evil race" stereotypes. Faerun throws in sexism for seemingly no reason other than to make Orcs a little more detestable, something I can't stand to see. Many settings imply or outright state that an orc's nature is something "inside" them, or in their blood.


In the real world, the belief that behavior is determined by an individual's genes or some aspect of their physiology is called Biological Determinism. You probably know this from three places: One is that it's a core component of Eugenics. Another is the famously awful cranium capacity measurement experiments in the late 1800s which were used to justify slavery and oppose women's suffrage and immigration. The final reason you may remember this concept is that it's often used to scientifically justify racism despite being an enormous pile of bullshit that's been discredited for over a hundred years.

So it's not that Orcs resemble a real-life culture in any way, and that's what makes it racist. Orc "culture" being expressed as a ridiculous caricature and Orcs being "genetically bad" are essentially the same thing as tactics real life Fascists and racists use against marginalized groups to justify unconscionable acts against them.

This isn't okay to do just because this is a fantasy world with races who do have striking physiological differences. Supporting fascist ideals is wrong, even implying that Biological Determinism might be correct is wrong, and nothing about this being a fake fantasy world full of green dudes makes that any better.

The idea of an "antagonist race" is a fairly toxic one in several ways. The wholesale "othering" of an entire race is a pathway to racism that I've personally seen: People who strongly identify as Alliance players have expressed radical feelings against orcs in World of Warcraft despite the story going out of its way to declare that no entire race of people is all bad. However, this declaration often comes at the end of a long, long period where the faction opposite of you is depicted as far more villainous than those actual players would know unless they played your part of the story.

It's also shitty simplistic writing steeped in old Eurocentric ideas. All the good people live in this tired pastiche of ancient medieval Europe, mostly all happen to be white, and all the bad guys are total savages with darker skin who come from a different land, live by raiding and pillaging, think of nothing but fighting, and want nothing more than kill and destroy because it's "In their blood"...

Yikes.

I mean, it sure does sound worse when I spell it out, right? But I just described the classic Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Most of the people reading this will probably have played in a game like that. I truly, sincerely hope I don't need to explain what's not okay about that.


It's okay for races to have differences. It's not okay for races to have a biological component that drives or determines their behavior. It's okay for a culture to have negative aspects. It's not okay for any culture to be wholly and ridiculously evil. It's not okay just because they're racial cultures. It's not okay to use an entire race as antagonists in any sense. It's bad writing, it's a bad habit, and it's supporting bad methods of thought.

The idea that a villain has mobilized an entire race of people to do his bidding is another concept born from racism. It doesn't make any sense and is born from the sweeping generalizations racists love to make. Organizations, tribes, cities, individuals will work for villains for a variety of reasons. An entire race is absurd. If you want mooks and weenies in your fights, and stock villains you can easily use in fights, I promise you that you're not gonna have to stretch to make your party not care about killing them. You don't have to fuck up your whole world to achieve it.

If you want to use Orcs as villains, fine. If you want to tell a story about racism, wonderful. If you want people in your world insisting that Orcs(or tieflings, or aasimar, or any other race, even the planetouched) are just "born a certain way" and "have savagery in their blood", fine. It's not okay for that claim to be literally true.

Coming up with cool organizations and compelling villains is part of the fun of world building, anyway. Nobody's asking you to have a dense, morally grey plot. Just think about the decisions you're making and ask yourself why you're doing it. "That's just what D&D is" or "It's Tolkienesque" have been the crutch our hobby has been limping forward on for too long. Cast it aside and be better. Write better worlds.