Paizo Iconics - Mavaro

I've been doing these in batches of four, and that works out because I'll actually end the normal run just right; the total number is divisible by four. However, after that, if I go on, I've got a less nice number, so we'll see. However, sometimes it doesn't quite work out too; as Mavaro is the first of the "psionic" occultist classes, the actual Occultist, and he's the last for today. There are six total psionic classes, and I'll be mostly, but not quite, done in my next batch.

Of course, there are technically two entries for the Vigilante, even though they are the same character. It's a little bit like having Bruce Wayne and Batman being two separate iconic characters. Kinda dumb. 

In any case, I don't know if they were trying to go for a darker, edgier vibe to the occultist classes or not, but Mavaro is no hero. He's probably not actually a villain either, just a selfish jerk who unwittingly caused the death of every weirdo cultist that he grew up with, and then ran off to become a bit of a hedonist world traveler. I had kind of imagined him as a bit more like a Jules de Grandin with a few psychic powers of his own, but it doesn't seem like it.

I'm pretty curious about the whole Pathfinder 1e Occult line. It's obviously not at all the same take on Psionics as 3.5, which we get instead in the third party book Ultimate Psionics (mostly) but rather a completely different take on the concept.

Not being much of a mechanics head these days, and not caring nearly as much as I used to for alternative takes on magic, because I prefer a much lower magic concept anyway, I'm certainly less interested than I would have been twenty or twenty five years or so ago, or even ten or eleven years ago when this system was new. But I still have some interest in seeing exactly how this all plays out. I am listening to an actual play Carrion Crown podcast that features one of the PCs as an occultist, but it's hard to get a handle on what the class is really all about from that, honestly. She seems like a spellcasting fighter in many respects. No idea.

Here's another cover that prominently features Mavaro, also by Wayne Reynolds.

I honestly kind of wish that there had been an adventure path focused on the Occult line. There were five products for it, all starting with the word Occult...; ...Adventures, Bestiary, Origins, Realms, and Mysteries. It's not clear to me if one of the adventure paths kinda sorta played to the Occult themes, but there clearly wasn't one that really focused on them.