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One of the perennial complaints about Pathfinder 1E is its heavy reliance on math.
It’s not so much that any of the individual calculations are hard, or so I’m given to understand, but how pervasive they are. Various disparate modifiers for attack bonuses, a profusion of DCs for various checks, and differing formulae for calculating magic item costs all serve to make up a numbers game that, for many people, seems to get in the way of role-playing.
But for a lot of people, myself included, this is a feature rather than a bug. The same way an architect can admire a bridge not just for its aesthetic qualities but also see appreciate the underlying designs that it incorporates, Pathfinder 1E is a game that’s more fun because of the math that its predicated on. Extrapolated outward, they inform the nature of the game world, lending an internal design to the world apart from the purely-narrative aspects. To us, this makes the game more fun, not less.
Connor Bates is clearly one such individual, and Read Magic – Vigor is the proof.
If you haven’t clicked on the full-size preview for the product yet, do so right now and read the Preamble section. It was on the strength of that alone that I purchased this book, and quite frankly it showcases exactly what I mentioned before, with Bates expertly dissecting the problems with the Pathfinder’s infernal healing and celestial healing spells, comparing them t 3.5 suite of vigor spells, and presenting what the solution should be.
Said solution is a plethora of new spells that allow for healing a small, static amount of hit points over a series of rounds. Not only that, but Bates goes one step further, introducing mirror images of those spells which cause small amounts of static damage over a series of rounds. Vigor is here, retooled for Pathfinder, along with tweaked versions of infernal healing and celestial healing. (Said tweaks are all useful as well as flavorful, such as doing away with the presumption that over-use of the latter spells will alter your alignment, making the duration vary more with your caster level, and inputs failure conditions whereby an opposed type of damage can end the drawn-out healing immediately.) And then he adds in even more such spells, such as vigor of the grave and fey healing.
All of these, by the by, offer not only lesser and greater versions, but also mass versions of the lesser, standard, and greater versions. With five different types of healing spells, that’s well over two dozen spells already.
Now, it’s entirely possible that you’re looking at that (or the book’s table of contents) and wondering if it’s worthwhile to have so many spells that do the same thing. Do you really need five different sets of spells that all offer drawn-out healing over a number of rounds? The answer, here, is yes, because those minor differences allow you to present different versions in your campaign by what suits your preference. Do you dislike the aligned nature of celestial and infernal healing, and would prefer a universal type of spell for drawn-out healing? Just use the vigor spells. Should drawn-out healing be presented as something fey, different from divine magic’s cure X wounds spells? Use the fey healing spells instead. It’s this sort of subtle world-building that speaks to aficionados.
And that’s not all. Not only does Bates present a necrosis series of spells as a counterpoint to vigor – dealing damage over time, rather than healing (though you can use them to heal the undead, the same way the vigor spells can damage them) – but there’s also an entire suite of other such drawn-out damage spells as well, presenting options for the type of damage inflicted based around the various weapon damage types (i.e. slashing, bludgeoning, and piercing) as well as elemental types (i.e. acid, cold, electricity, fire, and sonic). Fortunately, Bates provides templates for the standard and greater versions of those spells, as well as the mass versions thereof, rather than individually presenting each one; otherwise we’d be looking at almost fifty new spell entries just for those!
Now, there are one or two minor areas where I could nitpick some of what this book presents. For instance, the class spell lists that these new spells appear on are fairly restricted, at least when you look at the total number of spellcasting classes in Pathfinder 1E. The psychic, for instance, only gets one of the new spells here (inflict crushing pressure), albeit also with its lesser/greater/mass variations, which seemed a little odd, and none of the other occult classes get any of these spells. Ditto for the poor adept, which is perpetually overlooked. I likewise frowned at how there’s a chaotic counterpart to infernal healing and celestial healing (the aforementioned fey healing) but no lawful version thereof...though since I can’t really think of one myself, I can’t hold that against this book very much.
But minor complaints aside, this is an excellent book which deftly patches an area where the official materials from Paizo simply aren’t up to par. Bates has masterfully fixed this, and in so doing opened up new options that work beautifully with the Pathfinder system. The result is something which absolutely deserves a place in your game, whether your players have a dedicated healer or recover all of their hit points from a wand. For the incredibly low asking price, this is more than worth it.
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