Feats of Charisma

By Thilo Graf

All right, you know the deal: from Abandoned Arts 3 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, 1 page content fort he 8 new feats, so let’s take a look!

• Armed with Style: As a swift action, make a performance check. You may add your cha-mod to weapon damage rolls versus demoralized/shaken foes. Per se cool, but it would help to know against which DC the performance-check is supposed to be – I suppose like intimidate, but I’m not sure. This needs clarification.
• Charming: +4 to diplomacy checks versus indifferent or better attitudes and to gain control versus opposing enchantments. Okay, but somewhat bland.
• Fascinating Spell (Metamagic): +2 spell levels, make non-permanent, non instantaneous spells fascinating on a failed will save for creatures for 1 minute per level of the modified spell. Okay feat.
• Hypnotic Suggestion: Implant non-magical post-hypnotic suggestions. NOW we’re talking! This is more up to Abandoned Art’s level of cool feats!
• Hyptontist: Provides concise rules to hypnotize others and unearth buried memories – glorious, neat and concise in presentation. I really, really love this feat and it will see use in my campaign. Two thumbs up and especially for investigation-heavy campaigns simply stellar!
• Smooth Talker: As long as you act before an enemy has acted during a surprise round, you may use a standard action to use diplomacy. Nice last second save for negotiations gone sour due to some flib by one of the players.
• Terrifying Tune: Creatures that save versus frightening tune are shaken for 1 round. Boring.
• Terrible Presence (Monster): Per se a good idea, this feat lets you expand the size of your frightful presence aura to one mile. Intended for dragons and similar beasts, this can be activated as a free action by flying overhead – which is weird, since the feat does not require to be airborne. The text, again, needs clarification – can this only be taken by flying critters? Can it be activated while on the ground?

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are not up to the quality I’ve come to expect from Abandoned Arts – there are multiple instances of lower case letters that should be capital letters and worse, two of 8 feats need, in my humble opinion, clarification on how they are supposed to work. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art’s 2-column standard sans frills, bookmarks and artworks, which is all fine at this price-point and length.

What’s not so fine is that, while there are two BRILLIANT feats herein, the rest either left me cold or is even problematic in the wording. Especially the latter drags down what would otherwise be a good offering that is not up to the usual quality. Especially at this length, errors carry a heavy weight. Thus, I feel I can’t rate this higher than 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2 for the purpose of this platform.

Endzeitgeist out.

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