This book begins with a vaguely pretentious and somewhat condescending introduction. I happen to like artificer classes and new items thank you very much.

After that we get the collector base class. they get heirlooms, magical items that function only for them. TL;DR, If you want to play a class that is defined by the gear that they use, play an Occultist (from paizo’s occult adventures) or one of the myriad archetypes that gains that classes implements class feature. Even if you take away the abilities that are far too powerful, all you have left is an uninspired mess of a class that tries to use things that other classes get as supplements to their abilities as class features.

To be specific the collector has several problematic abilities. Their main class feature, their heirlooms take the form of magic items of up to a certain price. This price starts small and improves as the collector gains levels. While the value of the heirlooms progresses thought the collectors career, it stops mattering after 8th level. At that point the collector can select minor artifacts as heirlooms. This allows them to gain a sphere of annihilation as an heirloom. While this is rather difficult to control when they get it, it is still kill anything with no saving throw and there are a handful of ways to make it much easier to control. While this is the most egregious example of what you can do as a collector, there are still plenty of minor artifacts that are only slightly less disruptive to play. The collector can also recharge magic items that have a limited number of uses, multiple times if they take the bond (the rage power esque pseudo feats that they gain access to every other level) this moves a wand of cure light wounds from a smart investment to 50d8 of healing a day. As early as 3rd level. This is an absolutely insane amount of healing that no other class can put out until they begin approaching 20th level.

There are a handful of other things like the ability to cast a spell from a wand twice in the same round and a bond that allows you to add 1/4th your level to your AC, along with a favored class bonus that does the same thing, making you obscenely difficult to hit. Also noteworthy is what’s missing from the class, namely any way to improve the save DC or caster level of any magic items you have, making items that cast spells non-competitive at higher levels.

There’s also the questing knight hybrid class. I don’t have access to the other class it draws upon (the fighting man) so I’ll decline to comment on this. I do note however, that it doesn’t get an heirloom at 20th level, making its capstone worthless.

After the collector is the Sacred Smith, this is by far the coolest concept of the three classes presented, but needs some heavy modification to work at the table. Their primary class feature is sacred forge, the ability to, over the course of 1 minute, create something from nothing. They have 10 pounds of matter that they can create every 24 hours, plus an additional 10 pounds per level they have. Unfortunately I don’t see anything that prevents them from just making gold with this ability, worse at 4th level they can make items created with this ability permanent, allowing them to, in essence, turn half their pool of matter into gold every day. (TIL: 50gp weighs 1 pound). At 9th level they can make magic items with their sacred forge ability. This doesn’t take any more matter than usual, and therein lies the problem. Most magic items don’t have any listed weight, meaning that the collector can make them for free and need only pass a check that is honestly pretty trivial (10+1/200th of the items price, rounded down. This DC gets even lower as the sacred smith progresses in level). A wand of cure light wounds is 1 oz and requires a DC 13 check to make. Trivial amounts of resources for positively insane returns.

They also have a few Battlesmith Trainings, rage power esque pseudo feats that they gain access to every few levels. Most of them are pretty solid, save that they expend only a pound or so of matter, which returns after an hour. That’s a lot of book keeping for very little expenditure, that’s more irritating than anything else. There are a few outliers, one gives you an enhancement bonus to damage rolls to bludgeoning weapons. But you get an ability before that that lets you give any weapon you make an enhancement bonus to attack and damage rolls that progresses at a faster rate. One gives you access to Dominate Monster (on creatures with the fire subtype) and Control Construct at 10th level. Those are 9th and 7th level spells respectively, and while they won’t come up every time, when they do, they’re absolutely devastating. Dominate monster lasts for a day per level and control construct is almost guaranteed to work if the sacred smith has ranks in spellcraft.

The sacred smith has a single archetype that allows them to trade out one of their abilities for the ability to create constructs via the animate objects spell, and later the craft construct feat. The last class in the lineup is the magician; they use a variety of props that mimic the powers of magical items in combat. While not particularly interesting, it is probably the most balanced of the classes.

Props are, as mentioned before, mundane items that the magician can turn into magic items, at least for a few rounds. They can only be slotless wondrous items, and the amount of gold they can cost varies by level. They can do this once per day per 2 levels they have. Unfortunately, they never get the ability to improve the save DC of these items, rendering there in combat use questionable at later levels.

They also gain secrets, ways they can modify certain magic items to gain certain effects. Most of these are pretty cool and I don’t have much to complain about. Although some of them give the magician bonuses on concentration checks and reduce arcane spell failure chance, niter of which were things the magician had to worry about, not having any spell casting abilities.

There is also a variety of new equipment tricks (from the adventurer’s armory book, a fact mentioned nowhere in the section). Most of these are solid choices, but some are pretty bad, dagger dance lets you do something you could already do, and hypnotic knuckle roll lets you spend a move action to give creatures a -1 on attack rolls for a round if they fail a will save.

There are also a handful of feats for intelligent magic items, a section of the game that’s better off being forgotten about.

Lastly there are a few rogue talents and magus arcana. These are all pretty solid, the magus arcana that lets you get a bonded item and later make it intelligent are pretty good, but I’m not sure how it works if the magus takes a wand with his arcane bond and makes it intelligent. Normally magic items with charges are explicitly not allowed to be intelligent items.

Unfortunately, most of the content in this book is unusable as presented, so I cannot give it a very good rating, but there are some gems in this book if you’re willing to put the work in to fix them.