4 out of 5 stars

Released on Monday (while I was busy traveling) this article contains 4 paragon paths for Bards, each focused on a bard who has multiclassed into a particular power source.  Indeed, while it takes only one multiclass feat in a power source to make the bard eligible for the matching paragon path, the divine and arcane paths are more powerful when you have more than one multiclass feat.  The primal and martial paths don’t have this stacking feature, however, and thus seem a bit lackluster by comparison.  However, given the feat cost associated with the escalating power of the paragon paths, I don’t think this makes the primal and martial paths any less powerful than the divine and arcane ones.

While I like the idea of the paths, and in particular the idea of a path whose power level increases when you take certain feats that wouldn’t normally be optimal choices, the implementation in the arcane paragon path really bugs me.  Each multiclass feat has a specific benefit associated with it, meaning that as the field of multiclass feats for arcane classes expands (as it will with the Eberron Player’s Guide with the introduction of the multiclass feat for the Artificer) the paragon path will need to be modified to account for the new feats.  Much better is the system developed for the divine paragon path, where you gain the Channel Divinity ability of the associated classes.  Of course, since arcane classes don’t have a common thematic ability like Channel Divinity is for divine classes, I don’t see how this could have been avoided.

Overall though, I think the idea and the implementation is pretty good.