The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less vol. 4: Fantastic Footwear

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78512[1]By Thilo Graf

This installment of the L4L-line from Super Genius Games is 8 pages long, 2/3 of a page front cover, 1 page editorial/SRD, leaving 6 1/3 pages of content for discount magic boots, so what exactly do we get?

All in all, we get 16 new specific boots priced below 2500 GP that use fractional modifiers and are fully compatible with the regular craft-rules. While the Abarka of Allure are not necessarily too serious, they do make for an interesting item, enabling you to make faster diplomacy-checks without incurring the usual -10 penalty. All the nationalities apart from the hip elves now also finally get their own racial footwear – dwarven boots grant you better movement in armour, for example. Gnomish boots can create a ghost sound leading away from you – perfect for high-tension infiltrations!

There are also boots that, if you succeed at your bull rush, enhance the result without making the check easier, boots to hide from undead and there are the Hit Kickers. At 2200 GP, they are the only item in this pdf I consider utterly unbalanced: When making a full attack, you gain an additional attack for 1d6+ full Str-mod at your full BAB without any feats, multi-attack or otherwise for the measly price of 2200GP. This is, at least in my book, severely overpowered.

In contrast, the 1/3-league boots are iconic and cool and the attunement process for shadow boots is so cool, I’ll steal it to open up whole new venues for investigations: If you walk with these boots in the footsteps of someone else for a prolonged time, they grant you a bonus to sense motive. It’s far-out activations like this that make magic feel magical and uncommon. Kudos!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I didn’t notice significant glitches. Layout adheres to the 3-column full-colour standard by SGG, artworks are ok and the pdf has no bookmarks. I really enjoyed this installment of the L4L-line – the boots are useful, surprisingly iconic and come with some neat ideas. Apart from the hit kickers (the only blemish in the book), I enjoyed the boots and consider them balanced. Due to this one bad apple and the fact that I would have loved more cool activation methods, I’ll settle for a final score of 4.5 stars, rounded down to 4.

Endzeitgeist out.

The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less vol. 4: Fantastic Footwear is available from:

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