Feats of Witchcraft

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111648-thumb140[1]By Thilo Graf

All right, you know the drill – 3 pages of content, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 1 page of content for 10 new feats dealing with witchcraft, so let’s take a look!

Taking a cue from Super Genius Games’ patron-excusive hexes, many of these feats are only available to witches with certain patrons, adding some unique tools to the respective witch’s arsenals.

  • Eerie Presence: Ignore negative cha-mods you may have, gain +2 to cha-skills to influence unfriendly outsiders and aberrations.
  • Forked Tongues: +2 to Bluff vs. indifferent, friendly and helpful creatures and bluff as a class skill; double the bonus when the creatures are under a mind-influencing effect.
  • Heart of Ice: When successfully demoralizing foes, double the penalty to fort, ref or will-save depending on the patron. Cool!
  • Nightshade Brew: You can lace potions with ingested poisons, increasing the DC for either by +1. Rather weak and circumstantial.
  • Patron’s Promise: When using unarmed or natural attacks, you deal additional damage equal to the highest level patron spell you have prepared. Also get this bonus to saves versus diseases.
  • Pierce the Veil: See ethereal undead creatures. This one is overpowered as hell for my tastes. Not gonna happen in my campaign.
  • Shimmering Illusion: Add an eerie glow to your figments, letting them emit a bit of light and adding +2 to the disbelieve DC. Cool one, albeit a bit on the weak side.
  • Terrible Transformation: When one of your transmutation polymorph-effects is removed/dispelled, the target suffers from an insanity effect on a failed save. Does this extend to such spells cast on allies? The feat fails to specify this, though I assume so. Also: Quite powerful for my tastes.
  • Wise Words: When speaking words of wisdom while casting conjuration (healing)-spells, you may reduce effective spell resistance by wis-mod. Can be useful, but rather limited in its application.
  • Witch of the Wilds: Count your nails as primary weapons and qualify for the elemental or stunning fist feat depending on your patron.

Conclusion:

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

The feats in here are nice and I like that they develop further distinction between witches of different patrons, but they also more than once fall a bit on the relatively weak side of the power-scale, offering very circumstantial bonuses that would make them rather weak choices for a feat-slot. Combines with the fact that none of the feats herein truly blew me away, I’ll thus settle for a solid verdict of 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 for the purpose of this platform – a good offering that could have been stellar if the patron-exclusive feats had been developed in a slightly more inspired way.

Endzeitgeist out.

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