[Review] Feats of Alchemy

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111892-thumb140[1]By Thilo Graf

All right, you know the drill – 3 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial/SRD, 1 page content – this time detailing 8 new feats dealing with alchemy, so let’s take a look!

  • Alchemical Cocktail: Add an ingested alchemical item to a potion and ingest both – to maintain balance, the combined potion has to be ingested in 1 round or lose all potency. Still, a nice idea!
  • Cerebral Surge: Reduce Cognatogen-bonuses to gain access to mage hand, detect thoughts and telekinesis, depending on the amount of bonuses you sacrifice. Cool one!
  • Devious Trapsmith: Incorporate alchemical items in your regular or ranger traps, making them slightly more deadly. Ok, I guess – but not worth a feat.
  • Gruesome Transformation: Sicken intelligent creatures that witness your cognatogen or mutagen transformation. Neat!
  • Mad Bomber: This one really cool, as it allows you to maintain up to 3 delayed bombs at once. Nice!
  • Mutagenic Alchemy: Mix acid, alchemist’s fire, antitoxins, thunderstones or tindertwigs with your mutagen for varying benefits – cool idea, but bad format: that could have been a whole supplement. For a feat, it works, but feels a bit limited.
  • Scientific Curiosity: + 1 to Craft (Alchemy, Traps), Disable Device, heal, Profession (Engineer, Herbalist), Knowledge (Engineer, Nature)-checks. Okay, varied skill bonuses, but not too exciting.
  • Weird Science: Effects produced by extracts may not be identified with spellcraft. On the one hand very cool, but the lack of other options of identifying means that the extracts could become comparatively powerful. Not comfortable with that one.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I didn’t notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art’s no-frills 2-column standard and the pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

This pdf provides some interesting feats with unconventional mechanics – the sacrificing of bonuses for example feeling like a good idea, as does the genius mad bomber feat. That being said, Weird Science screams for abuse and some of the feats herein don’t reach the excitement of their fellows. All in all, we thus arrive at a solid addition to the series, providing at a low price an interesting array of alchemy-themed feats and a solid 4 star-verdict, not quite reaching the upper echelons of 5-stars.

Endzeitgeist out.

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