Time to choose Boanerges’s two feats. We’ve already chosen one, of course: Celestial Obedience (Awi) at 3rd level. The question is his first-level feat. Feats are often the most time-intensive aspect of D&D3.x/PF character creation, of course. I start by spending some time to see if can find an appropriate feat to counteract Boanerges’s Wisdom deficiency, but after looking through www.d20pfsrd.com and every book I could think of covering magic and religion, all I was able to find was a Rogue Genius Games 3rd-party feat that would allow me to just change his spellcasting attribute. The powergamer in me would want to shift it over to Charisma, but that (once again) seems to diminish the discomfort theme in Boanerges’s character. Intelligence makes more sense considering Awi’s associations with knowledge and books, but is still rather unsatisfying, to be honest. Furthermore, I seem to have grown a little bit more conservative as I age ~ the fact that it’s 3rd-party is, in itself, an argument against using it. Sadly, none of the books I looked through offered anything much terribly exciting even beyond that idea. The most interesting were various ways of improving Boanerges’s ability to make nonlethal attacks and one that improves his ability to redeem evil creatures, which is definitely a frontrunner possibility.
The idea of perhaps giving him Amateur Swashbuckler has been in the back of my mind from the beginning, as that’s how I imagine the army that gave rise to Boanerges, as composed of barbarians with the Amateur Swashbuckler feat, barbarian/swashbucklers, hooded champion rangers, devoted muses (from a variety of base classes), dancing blade fighters, wildstrider swashbucklers, and the like, all pumped up with teamwork and panache feats to make them even more frightening. By itself, however, the feat seems rather ho-hum and, more damning, not adding terribly much to Boanerges that he doesn’t already get from vigilante.
I get bored poring through the list of feats on the SRD, and the teamwork feats don’t provide anything overly attractive. Same story for the Improved Unarmed Strike tree and style feats. The afore-mentioned redeemer feat seems to be the best and most obvious choice, so let’s go with that. Except it’s a trait, not a feat >.< Well, I’ll definitely take that in the next step!
Realizing that I’ve mentioned Awi’s association with knowledge a few times but haven’t built that into Boanerges yet, I start looking for appropriate feats to do so. Searching “Knowledge” in the SRD and restricting it to Feats turns up nothing more interesting than Scholar, which feels kind of blah for Boanerges. But I later find Cosmopolitan, which weirdly feels more exciting as a marker of Awi’s blessing (and, in some ways, more powerful than Scholar, too, as it could be seen as the equivalent of 8 skill ranks at lower levels, as opposed to Scholar’s four). Yeah, let’s take Cosmopolitan, giving Boanerges access to two more languages (one of which, for sure, is Celestial) and two Knowledge skills ~ I’m gonna go with planes and arcana ~ as class skills.
That done (finally), we turn our eyes to character traits. As stated, Redeemer from Champions of Purity is a definite go, leaving only one more trait to be chosen. The other one involves a lot of scrolling through the Traits database on the SRD page. Enough that I started to despair of finding something good, until way down near the end, I come upon a list of traits from the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play (sidenote: that abbreviates to P.S.O.P., which makes me think of the brandy qualification system and its V.S.O.P. Does the Pathfinder Society produce brandy to finance its operations? That could be the seed of a rad adventure/campaign idea). The rather-despicable-to-my-anarchist-mind Sovereign Court has a trait associated with it called Impressive Presence that does pretty much exactly what I want it to do. Much like most all of the ifrits in Boanerges’s horde have access to panache through Amateur Swashbuckler, archetypes, or the swashbuckler class itself, most all of them also have the Impressive Presence trait. It is the basis for their entire tactical understanding.
The last step with Boanerges is to equip him. A third-level character is supposed to get 3000 gp of equipment (that’s wealth equivalent to about $600,000 to $1,500,000 in modern money). It’s usually a good rule of thumb to spend no more than half of one’s wealth on an individual ite, but a prophetic paraphenalia from Faiths & Philosophies seems just a little bit perfect for something Awi might have given him ~ it’s very much in line with Awi’s style, and is 2000 gp (500 more than I should spend on an individual item). I usually despise limited-use magic items, a hatred borne of an over-extended critique of industrialized late capitalism’s disposable, planned-obsolescence, addiction-economy obsession. Ultimate Equipment offers four other possibilities for magic items: belt of tumbling, armbands of the brawler, seer's tea, and war paint of the terrible visage. I know I said I was wary of third-party content, but I also happen to own Nyambe, for the express reason of helping me add more African elements to my world, borrowing from someone who (hopefully) has better knowledge about it than I do.
Neither Nyambe nor Eberron’s Secrets of Xen’drik adds any droolworthy magic items to our list, but Nyambe can help us decide what mundane equipment we want Boanerges to buy, which can determine our budget. Let’s start with a large darkwood shield, which would cost 257 gp ~ a masterwork small would be 153, if we need more room in the budget. Nyambe lists a wooden plate armor; if we make that darkwood, it would cost 450 gp, which might be a bit much (especially with the -2 armor check penalty). So let’s go with masterwork studded leather (which I just learned is actually brigandine ~ the “studs” are rivets holding the plates beneath the leather) for 175 gp. So, armor as a whole costs 432 or 328 gp. For a weapon, we’ll call the whacking stick the official weapons of these swashbuckling ifrit barbarians. A masterwork version would be 303 gp.
We’re left with 2265 gp, or 2369 gp if we want the space. If we leave the prophetic paraphenalia behind, then the magic items I’ve chosen come out to 1950 gp, leaving 315/419 gp. He gets a traveler’s outfit for free, and we buy a woven backpack (2 gp), light blanket (3 sp), bottle calabash (5 sp), 2 wooden boxes (used instead of leather belt pouches; 2 sp), wooden headrest (2 sp), wooden game board (5 gp), 3 doses healing salve (30 gp), 4 doses marsh water (20 gp), iron fishhook (1 sp), iron pot (5 sp), iron sewing needle (5 sp), tent (10 gp), disguise kit (50 gp), and a silver holy symbol of Awi (25 gp). That comes out to . . . 144 gp 3 sp spent. We have at least 170 gp 7 sp left to spend. A light warhorse is 150 gp, but we wouldn’t be able to afford any barding for it. A labor elephant costs the same, and a pack animal is better suited to my visual image of Boanerges, anyway. A Huge pack saddle swallows up 10 gp, and 3 days of feed another 6 gp. We finally buy 8 days of trail rations for Boanerges himself, and are left with 3 gp walking money. Oh, let’s not forget a second traveller’s outfit for the Unseen Heart of the Flame’s costume. That’s a gold piece out of the walking money.
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