Why did the Medium change so much between Playtest and book release?


Product Discussion


So this is my first post here, but I simply want to know why the medium changed so much between the play test and book release? I bought Occult adventures last night and overall every class seemed for fleshed out except the medium.

The original concept that made it similar to the occultist 3rd party class or the Binder from 3.5 made it an interesting and versatile class option. Your spells being bound to the spirits you had running was also an awesome concept requiring planning. Also every spirit seemed unique and you could use different combinations to create very interesting power structures for your character. Simply taking that original concept and adding more spirits, either the base way they where printed or maybe even adding just a Law and Chaos spirit to each stat would have been fantastic.

That being said I'm a little disappointed with the book version. Instead of gaining interesting spirits with an array of varied powers, and making an oddball yet effective combination of spirits, it all seemed to get whitewashed. What I mean by that was instead of that, now the Medium has an array of only six options Vanilla Wizard, Vanilla Cleric, Vanilla Rogue, Vanilla Cav., Vanilla Fighter 1, Vanilla Fighter 2.

I just want to know why this switch? Was there a broken or unfair ruling I missed play this class? Am I the only one with this opinion?

Just curious because right now I'm sticking with occultist or binder


I believe it was more an issue of space and practicality. See the conversation in the class preview thread for more details.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

That's when they discovered that they'd need multiple pages for a medium character's statblock.


I was upset when I first heard about the change, but then I realized they were just turning it into a 3.5 Chameleon instead of a 3.5 Binder.

I generally like the final result, though I wish the option to mix several spirits came online a little earlier (yeah, there's Spirit Dancer, but that still uses only one set of powers at a time in most cases).

It's annoying that the Medium really got shafted in the feat department, though. I could only find 1 Medium-specific feat in Spirit Focus (may have missed some, though), and it's not even all that exciting (maybe for Champion it'd be worth it).


In the playtest, they were talking about having 54 spirits - the nine alignments mixed with the six stats. That would take up a huge amount of the book (48 pages for spirits alone!), and a lot of them would end up playing similarly. It would be a pain for players and GMs to keep track of. There's that many more fiddly bits to make cheesy combinations with. Overall a bad idea.


As others have said, it was a space problem: they would have had either to cut a large number of the spirits, or greatly reduce the word count of each of their abilities, making them way more boring.
I myself really liked the wombo-combo/Harrowed Medium, so I was a little let down when Mark announced that it wasn't going to be in the book: I really enjoyed all of the moving parts.

On the bright side, like Mark said in the thread linked by Aaron Whitley and somewhere else, the Harrowed Medium is already done: all the spirits have been added, the ones that we already knew about have been fine-tuned, and the possession and spirit power progression has been streamlined (I suppose it's similar to OA Medium).
We know that Bhulman wants to publish it sooner or later, but they aren't sure where they'll publish it: if I remember correctly, they said that the Player Companion line would be too small, so they'd have to come up with something else.

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