Augury - The Summoner's Circle (Advanced Feats)

The Summoner’ s Circle is the third installment of the Advanced Feats’ line for Pathfinder.

What we have here is, basically, a 19-page PDF, with 30 new feats, a detailed look at the summoner class (a new core class from the Advanced Player’s Guide) and three complete character builds. The product also have a very handy eidolon sheet.

Ok, first the feats. Like other Advanced Feats products, we have “director’s commentaries” after some of the feats. For example:

Enhanced Scent

You have trained yourself to take full advantage of your keen sense of smell.

Prerequisite: Scent ability

Benefit: You double the range at which you can detect and pinpoint creatures using the scent ability.

Commentary—Scent can be a handy tool for finding creatures normally warded by magical invisibility or who are using the Stealth skill and can be hard to defend against. While this is intended for an eidolon, some summoners may make use of it directly.

As you can see from the case above, not all feats are specific for the summoner class (or eidolons).

Some other interesting feats:

Cannibalistic Casting – the caster can suffer Constitution damage rather than use spell slots for casting;

Clockwork Summoning – a metamagic feat to summon clockwork versions of the traditional monsters;

Shifting Wall – another metamagic feat, this one allows the caster to move their walls spells 5ft. in any direction, once per round as a swift action.

The Summoner’s Circle has a good number of more “normal” feats, like Improved Resistance, Enlarge Wall and Improved Concentration (this last one should have being in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook). Some feats appears to be taken from house rules of the author’s campaigns, like Giant Step. Other are just updated versions from the SRD, like Fleet of Foot and Improved Multiweapon Fighting.

Some feats have the potential to become all-time favorites: Vampiric Summoning lets the caster drains hit points from every summoned servant to himself, while Hardened Spell increases considerably the DCs against identify and dispel attempts.

The character builds at the end of the product are especially useful because of the complete eidolon evolutions given. The summoner is a complex core class and many players are intimidated by the eidolon construction rules. Some examples and guidelines are always welcome.

Weal or Woe?

For its price, definitely “WEAL”. The Summoner’s Circle is a good product. You have an excellent selection of feats, a few probably overpowered, but the majority are a fine addition to your Pathfinder game (even if the summoner is not your favorite class). The eidolon builds are great and have already become an obligatory part of my Advanced Player’s Guide.