Does the rage variant ferocity stack with rage?

Question

When taking the Whirling Frenzy variant of rage, the text states that you cannot rage while in Frenzy. Similarly, per RAW it seems to replace rage for rage feats (Extra Rage, Reckless Rage, so on) and rage PrCs. Therefore as I understand it, if you take, for instance Frenzy Barbarian 1/Half-Orc Paragon 2 you don't get Frenzy and Rage but two uses of Frenzy per day. I guess you could get Rage from a different source but still you can not Frenzy and Rage at the same time.

In a similar scenario, how does the Ferocity variant interact with Rage? Does a Ferocity Barbarian 1/Half-Orc Paragon 2 get Rage and Ferocity or only two uses of Ferocity. In the first case, I couldn't find anything in RAW that bans a Raging character from entering Ferocity at the same time, but it just does not seem right that you can get +8 STR +4 DEX +4 CON -2 AC +2 Will at level 3. It would also mean that Ferocity can not be used in order to get rage feats or as a prerequisite for PrCs.

So, which one is the correct interpretation?

Answer 1

You are correct, nothing prevents you from mixing rage and ferocity. I have never seen anyone try, mind you, and I don’t know that many DMs would go for it, but you are reading the rules as written correctly.

Note that if you get this strict, you may have problems then using Extra Rage to get more ferocity. The feat doesn’t mention any such possibility (obviously, since it was published first), and ferocity itself doesn’t either.

Ultimately, ferocity is a variant from a web article—a relatively well-done one, but still. It doesn’t cover everything. Your DM has to make decisions like this about how to handle corner cases like this. And that decision should be more based on what is good for the game than based on what the rules say or what anyone suspects the authors intended. Is rage+ferocity too powerful? I don’t know; that is a huge chunk of Strength, but you will be badly limited per day so maybe that is OK. But maybe not; that is a huge chunk of Strength.