Legendary Vigilantes has a lot to like. I cannot stress this enough. That being said, my idea of reviewing third party content goes as follows: would I allow it in a campaign, would I point players in a campaign I’m involved in towards it, and would I myself use it if it fit my concept thematically. A bit complicated, I know, but it’s worked when looking through 3pp before for keeping my sanity. And for this, my first official review, I will say it’s a mixed bag. There’s several things that I think are absolutely delightful, that I would use or encourage others to use, that I think are fun and well balanced. And then there’s things that give me a headache reading through, things I would be a bit concerned about the health of a campaign allowing, and in one instance that I will force myself to avoid ranting on, something that actually caused my temple to throb a bit with irritation. So let’s dive in.

Arsenal Summoner is a cool concept, an archetype mixing the Black Blade magus and some of the fighter’s coolest tricks into something that actually reminds me a bit of Iron Man. In essence, you get a weapon and a set of armor that you can call to you at a moment’s notice. The talents revolve around these, and include weapon and armor training. Also included is a magus’s arcane pool, renamed to anima pool. The only problem that I have with this is that it gives access to advanced weapon trainings at roughly the same rate a Weapon Master fighter can get them, and the frankly terrifying interaction between anima pool and the advanced weapon training Warrior’s Spirit, which grants the same thing in a separate pool. Recommend banning that interaction if an Arsenal Summoner joins your party.

Beast Born is a druid without spellcasting, gaining an animal companion and animal-only wild shaping. Compared to the first party wild shape archetype, Agathion, I think I prefer this one. A full level animal companion beats out at-will but significantly neutered beast form in my eyes, and it gives up half its talents.

Dynamic Striker felt weird to me. It grants two specializations in place of the Avenger and Stalker, but unlike the later example, it seems more like N. Jolly wanted to make two different unarmed strike archetypes, but in the name of word count they were put into one. I’ll look at them individually accordingly. Brawler (a pet peeve of mine, by the way, is giving something a name that something else in 1st party Pathfinder already has) is essentially Avenger with free improved unarmed strike and wisdom focus instead of charisma. I like the emphasis on raw damage, but it’s actually tarnished slightly by having access to both Avenger talents and its own unique pool, granting it significantly more flexibility than any other specialization gets and making it a tad overpowered for my tastes. This especially so when vigilante already had a niche for the hard hitting unarmed strike, a Fist of the Avenger… Avenger.

Technician, on the other hand, brings a sort of weird hybrid of swashbuckler, monk and investigator to the table, gaining studied combat and a sort of focused opportune parry and riposte. It definitely looks to play like a tactical fighter, something we don’t see much of outside of sneak attackers, and I really appreciate that as a concept.

The Exposed Vigilante is built around not having dual identity, instead just acting in the social one, and… it kind of irks me. Not because I don’t like the vigilante with no secret identity, to be perfectly honest that’s been every vigilante I’ve played or theorycrafted so far save one. But, it gives up dual identity and seamless guise, two class features that in 90% of campaigns are mostly flavor, for an extra skill rank and social talent, which is actually mechanically very good. Considering how you can already play a vigilante normally without ever using dual identity and not feel bad or like you’re not getting bang for your buck already, it just seems like unnecessary extra gravy.

Focused Hunter is another archetype that doesn’t give up specialization, which I generally approve of already. It gives up the Appearance line of class features for favored terrain, hide in plain sight in that terrain, and eventually swift action displacement. Not much to say here, except that I dislike the Appearance features and would much prefer these on the base vigilante so we’ll give it a nice big thumbs up.

Masked Grappler is a bit of a complicated beast at first glance, but looked at closely is actually a really, really cool overhaul of grappling. The unique talents offered include several new options for maintaining grapples, all inspired by professional wrestling moves: submissions, which continue the grapple with minor penalties, and techniques, which end it but deal much more massive ones. My only issue here is that using a submission or technique also does normal damage, possibly adding just a bit too much. Considering how effective a dedicated grapple specialist can be at getting a hold of someone and squeezing the life out of them, it makes submissions like the anklelock (reducing the enemy’s speed) and armbar (reducing their attack modifier) much weaker overall, while others like the bearhug (making the enemy fatigued) pretty much only serve to help maintain the grapple. Techniques, however, are the bee’s knees for how cool they are.

Paladins are my favorite class so I’m a bit biased towards the Noble Soul. Like Dynamic Striker, it’s two specializations wrapped up in one. The Crusader is a smiting fiend, putting more power into their smites and even gaining the ability to smite neutral enemies. The Healer does exactly what it says on the tin, gaining lay on hands. Interestingly, the Oradin has already been wrapped up into this, gaining Life Link and Charisma to AC as talents (a better version, even, than Lore and Nature Oracle get). Here seems like a good time to mention one of the best qualities of this book: the archetypes do an excellent job of replicating classes without replacing them. Despite having, ultimately, better versions of smite evil and lay on hands, their inability to access both and not gaining any auras means that paladins still easily have a place alongside the noble soul, with neither likely to outshine the other.

And then there’s the Outrageous Lyricist. I love the Outrageous Lyricist. I don’t even like bards, which this is, and I love it, for no reason other than the talent names are amazing. Which would you rather do as a support character, declare that you’re playing the Dirge of Doom, or the Black Metal Medley. I know which one I pick. Some of the talents are also incredibly fun, allowing you to do things like challenge opponents to a battle of wits mid-fight or turn 5’ steps into 10’ steps by moonwalking. But, while I love this archetype, I can’t like it, for the simple reason that it’s grossly overpowered. Being able to constantly effectively heal allies every round in conjunction with those performances and turning the party’s weapon damage into sonic damage, the single least resisted damage in the entire game, is inconceivably strong. If these were performances in and of themselves, I’d probably be all for it, but the fact that you’re granting these abilities on top of a regular inspire courage, already an ability of such value that I automatically ignore any bard archetype that gives it up, is just too much.

Lastly is the Sentai Soldier, or Power Rangers meets Avatar: The Last Airbender. It gets a kinetic blast as a kineticist, and the talents are all piecemeal kineticist class features. I don’t particularly see a reason to play a Sentai Soldier over just being a Kineticist with the new Masked Identity feat, but otherwise I’m mostly neutral on it.

This brings us to the talents section. The social talents offered are about what I expect from social talents, interesting, flavorful and generally very useful in social encounters. The vigilante talents are also what I expect from there, providing viability for a lot of otherwise mediocre builds and putting new twists on existing feats. Of particular note is the emphasis N. Jolly seems to have placed on Vital Strike. I want to call special attention to the Grit Pool talent, which instantly fixes the garbage that is the Gunmaster archetype by allowing it to actually use its class features a reasonable number of times per day.

Coming to the feats section, there’s a fairly tame selection, the bulk of which is made up of expanding access to talents and granting Dual Identity to non-vigilante characters. Of particular note, I really, really liked the solution to the problem of the Extra Vigilante Talent feat being untenable due to Vigilante Talents being mostly objectively better than ordinary feats. Vigilante Savant has a prerequisite of 7th level, and allows you to pick a talent you would qualify for at half your level. But, on the flipside, Vigilante Casting Savant is available at 5 and has no restriction for what you can take, but you have to be a casting archetype, allowing it to be taken to make up for losing half of them. You can only take the feat once, and you can’t take both of these. I’m gonna take a moment to commend a really nicely thought out set of feats for this.

The magic weapons section is actually very light on things that primarily benefit vigilantes, although special mention has to go to creating Clark Kent’s glasses as a mechanical item. I hate the Martial Wraps, you should not have a slotless item that does the exact same thing as a neck slot item while costing half as much, but I already promised I wouldn’t rant about them.

The book’s new mechanics end with a prestige class called Scion of the City. Entered as early as level 5 due to the low requirements of a +3 BAB and 4 ranks in a few skills, plus the Renown social talent, it takes the vigilante’s dependence on staying in one place up to the next level, granting a large number of social talents and a handful of regular ones as well with early access or improved benefits (such as Loyal Aid doubling as Leadership, though with no cohort). It also effectively doubles as vigilante levels, though with reduced speed in gaining talents normally to compensate. If playing a campaign that doesn’t leave your home city ever, this is without a doubt the prestige class for you. Interestingly, though, I noticed something while reading it. Because the Extra Social Talent feat can be taken by a non-vigilante starting at level 5, it can technically be accessed by non-vigilantes. Because of the wording of some of the class features, I think this was unintentional, but it does open up a really interesting way to create PCs and NPCs alike that have no secret identity, have no heroic identity either for that matter, who are mechanically rewarded for the flavor of being very involved in the campaign city’s goings on.

N. Jolly’s traditional example character is Rashid Zill, or Dark Star, a heroic Sentai Soldier with void powers. Even before reaching the bottom of the book, though, Dark Star’s story unfolded in blurbs at the beginning of every section, giving you a look ahead of time. It’s actually a very interesting story for a very interesting character, although it disappointingly makes no use of anything in the book aside from the Sentai Soldier archetype.

For the book as a whole, I only have one note about the editing. N. Jolly’s final draft, to my understanding, was apparently about twice the size, and got split into two books. There are a lot of references to what’s in the other book. When it comes out, I’ll probably take less issue, since there will be context for the things being referenced, but for right now, there’s a lot of references to feats, talents, and even an archetype in the introduction that simply do not exist in published form yet, and it detracts a little bit. Now I don’t know the behind the scenes, when the decision was made and what kind of time crunch the editors were under to get the split sorted out, and I’m not going to put a lot of fault on them for it. But I am going to put a bit of a black mark on this specific product as a result.

So I probably came across as pretty harsh. I want the record to show, it wasn’t out of a dislike for the book. Overall, I liked what it had to offer. Make no mistake, if you’re interested in the vigilante as a class, this is a book worth purchasing and using, because there is a ton of amazing stuff in here, things that I already plan on using in my urban campaigns from now on to be certain.