Pathfinder: "Ultimate Equipment" [RPG]

 Ultimate Equipment is a whopping, 400-page collection of stuff to kit out your Pathfinder character.  With stats and prices included for everything, the book is a shopper’s dream.  It compiles, occasionally revises, and significantly expands the gear options from previous Pathfinder hardcovers as well as various other Paizo products.  The book doesn’t have *everything*, of course—new books continued to be published after it, containing new items—but it does have a wealth of gear for the vast majority of characters and builds.  The lists of items and their descriptions is broken up with a lot of illustrations, and the book is in full-colour.  Structurally, the book is sectioned into an introduction, six chapters, and three appendices (plus an index, crucial for a book like this).

The book’s introduction is just two pages long.  It starts by going over where the items in the book are drawn from, noting that there are also several new ones (it’s great to see several contributions from the RPG Superstar contests).  Each chapter then gets a paragraph or two of description, but the structure of the book is pretty self-explanatory.

Chapter 1 is Arms & Armor, surely the most visited part of the book.  The 46 pages of material here cover all of the well-known weapons and armor in the game, but also includes a *lot* of fairly obscure ones.  There are good descriptions of the equipment and helpful, clearly-written refresher on rules elements related to them (so you don’t have to switch to the Core Rulebook to remember what Armor Check Penalty affects, for example).  There’s an extensive overview of the firearms rules, an organisation of the fighter weapon groups, a section on special materials (including some really interesting ones!), and a section for gear made of primitive material like bone or stone. 

Chapter 2 is Gear and comes in at 56 pages.  Everything from general adventuring gear (like rope) to mounts to clothing to lodging and services are covered here.  Alchemical items receive several pages of coverage (a lot of the alchemical remedies are as good as spellcasting, and much cheaper), and there’s a couple of pages on poisons (with a good, clear explanation of how they work).  I’ve always found particular value from the section on services—the book has costs for things like hiring a lawyer, a doctor, or a scribe.  A lot of players (i.e., those not as interested in equipment) will appreciate the expanded list of class kits to get things done quickly.

Chapter 3 is Magic Arms and Armor and is 38 pages long.  This chapter has weapon and armor special abilities as well as specific named weapons and armor.  Some of the named weapons are really cool because they can do some things you just can’t do with the generic list of special abilities.  Other items I noticed were things like folding plate (a brooch that instantly covers or removes a suit of full plate mail—like Iron Man in the movies!) and burrowing bullets (staggers living creatures as it burrows through their body).

Chapter 4 is Rings, Rods, and Staves (28 pages).  I find most of the items in this chapter too expensive with effects easily duplicated more cheaply elsewhere.  Most staffs, for example, just aren’t worth it apart from the few with one-of-a-kind abilities.  On the other hand, the metamagic rods are surprisingly cheap for the instant versatility they give spellcasters, and probably should have been priced higher.

Chapter 5 is Wondrous Items and is the longest in the book at 122 pages!  The chapter is broken down into body slots, so it’s easy to find something to fill an empty slot on your inventory sheet.  There’s a ton of fun things that one hardly ever sees because folks are too busy with optimising every +1 they can out of the game.  Neat things I noticed include the belt of the weasel, the shirt of immolation, the cloak of fiery vanishing, the bracelet of friends (in case you *do* split the party), and abjurant salt (could be a real life-saver!). 

Chapter 6 is the shortest chapter (26 pages) and covers Artifacts and Other Items.  The “Other” category referred to consists of cursed and intelligent items.  I’m not a fan of intelligent items—they require the GM to role-play an omnipresent NPC and their ability to cast spells makes the action economy of the game too unbalanced.  On the other hand, I am the evil type of GM who likes cursed items, and wishes we saw more of them—classics like the berserker sword and innovations like the dust of sneezing and choking really twist things around!  Artifacts aren’t something I’ve ever had much opportunity to use.

The three appendices contain *extensive* random tables to generate various types of treasure, gems, and art objects.  If you want a random level 1 potion or level 4 wand, this is the place to come.

Everything in Ultimate Equipment is setting-neutral, so you don’t have to worry about adventure spoilers (unlike those naughty players who just start googling stuff!).  The items are also better vetted, and I wish more tables just limited available options to this book.  If you can’t find what you want here, you probably don’t really need it!