Horizon walker

The path of the horizon walker is one taken by rangers whose goals it is to explore and map out the worlds beyond the Prime. Those explorers who have an irresistible sense of curiosity and wanderlust to travel the planes take on the path in order to gain an innate connection to their surroundings, whatever those surroundings may be. As the horizon walker becomes more experienced, he or she is treated by their surroundings as part of them, giving him or her special abilities and senses that protect them from the dangers of incessant travel.

Culture
Little gets past the worldliness of a horizon walker, for there is little that hasn't already been experienced by such an individual. The only thing that truly piques a horizon walker's interest is the truly unknown, which unfortunately becomes harder and harder to find for an experienced seeker of the unknown and untraveled. This knowledge aides those who would seek a horizon walker's wisdom, for the horizon walker is an unsurpassed guide and vanguard that can be the single difference between life and death in the woods of the Feywild or the wastes of the demon-infested Abyss.

Though all horizon walkers have some training as rangers, many also have a degree of experience as bards, even barbarians, or even druids. Bards are attracted to the path as keepers of forgotten lore and natural wanderers and barbarians are attracted by a similar pull. Those few druids who take up the role of a horizon walker are also drawn by a sense of wanderlust, though their commitment to the natural world and its defense make their numbers relatively few. Most horizon walkers, regardless of their origins, see one another as a kind of loose brotherhood, a bound network of warriors who push the limits of what is unknown and what has been discovered.

Abilities


So difficult is the path of a horizon walker that most who choose it usually already have a large degree of expertise about the local geography of their world, as well as a capacity for punishment. Though horizon walkers draw initially from physical ability and personal training, adherents to the path often gain supernatural abilities as a result of their constant exposure to planar environments. At its most basic level, this allows horizon walkers an increased degree of coordination early on, enabling them to act with greater swiftness. For instance, horizon walkers who have traveled the Shadowfell or its predecessor, the Plane of Shadow, gain the ability to see in the dark, if they did not possess it already, and are generally more conscious of their environment.

In a similar manner, horizon walkers become extremely hardy as a result of their travels along the transitive Astral Sea, recovering from wounds more quickly and becoming overall more difficult for their enemies to finish off. Some horizon walkers also gain a particular resilience against the material that makes up a plane, making them more likely to survive hazards composed of this material.

Therefore, it often isn't very long before horizon walkers eschew the exploits used by their predecessors, and instead choose to use spells charged with arcane power drawn from the planes. Most of these spells have a distinctively planar flavor, such as fey strider, which allows a horizon walker to teleport from one location to another. Likewise, Elemental Chaos Smite allows a horizon walker to charge his or her weapon with elemental energy of any kind.