By Casey Smith, Staff Reviewer

Available at the Ronin Arts Online Store

Initiative Round

The Book of Unusual Feats is a recent product from veteran author Phillip Reed (the latest being the promising The Dungeoneer’s Field Guild to Hazards). The title should leave no mystery about what this product’s contents: feats, feats, and more feats. Worth mentioning is the fact that The Book of Unusual Feats is a compilation of the author’s other recent offerings: 101 Feats, Another 101 Feats, and 101 More Feats. By my calculations, that’s 303 feats. The Book of Unusual Feats comes in both print (a first for the company, I believe) and pdf versions; the print (which I am reviewing) is an impressive 70 pages long and retails for $16.95 . . . but those of us who won initiative were able to preorder it for a mere $8. So, is it possible to have too many feats? Click that link below to find out.

The new feats in The Book of Unusual Feats cover a lot of ground. A few aren’t so unusual; there’s feats that give you skill bonuses—like Great Negotiator—and feats that begin with the dreaded words “improved” or “greater”—like Greater Turn Outsiders or Improved Aid Another. A few are good for anyone, like Innate Affinity (you get another favored class), Powerful Cohort, or Quick Learner (get class abilities one level earlier). Some are good in specific circumstances; for example, High Ground Attack gives you an extra +1 bonus to attack rolls when elevated above your opponent, and Prone Defense improves the bonuses and worsens the penalties for being prone (a good feat for crossbow snipers). And a few are just inexplicable, like Appear Larger than You Truly Are, Verbal Bull Rush, and Indigestible. There’s really something for everyone . . . or anything.

In addition to these meat-and-potatoes unusual feats, many of the new ones fit in a wide range of feat categories. Among the familiar categories are many new metamagic, divine, psionic, and epic feats. The new ones are quite varied. New spelltouched feats take advantage of some of the open-game content from Wizard’s of the Coast’s Unearthed Arcana. Survivor feats, my personal favorite, typically give you immunity to some sort of special attack, but only after suffering its effects. Spirit feats harness spirit energy for some sort of effect, such as protecting yourself, turning partially insubstantial, boosting your stats, and speaking with the dead. The strangest of all are timebound feats. These let you borrow resources from your future selves, like spells, food or hit points. As characters use timebound feats, however, they accumulate a temporal dissonance score that can damage or stun them if it gets too high.

Concluding The Book of Unusual Feats are a pair of appendices. The first outlines Reserve Points, a variant introduced in Unearthed Arcana that allows characters to heal faster without the aid of magic. Some new uses of reserve points are included, such as spending them to remove status conditions (sometimes by permanently spending points) and a few reserve point-specific feats. Ending the book is the second appendix which has UA’s defense bonus rules (for campaigns where characters typically don’t wear armor) and two feats for that optional system.

Overall, The Book of Unusual Feats is nice to look at. The layout is good and a border makes the pages a little more visually interesting. The interior artwork is composed of line drawings of medieval warriors and such that, while not necessarily tying into the page subject matter, at least looks appropriate for a D&D book. The exception, though, is the cover drawing of a samurai and three soldiers, which is neither here nor there. But considering that this is a small-press product, the art is more that acceptable overall.

Critical Hit

The best thing about The Book of Unusual Feats is the sheer quantity of new feats, and you’re bound to find some that strike your fancy. Some of my personal favorites include Arcane Threat, a feat that allows spellcasters to create magical duplicates of themselves that threaten nearby areas. Overcast allows a spellcaster to boost his caster level at the expense of a few hit points. Holy Shadow is a strange feat that allows a divine spellcaster to harm evil characters that stand in his shadow. Cheat Death allows a character to negate an attack that would be fatal, but only once per level. For character who can’t evade death, Gray Wanderer lets them at least ignore the level penalty for dying.

Gray Wanderer is one of those survivor feats that I’m fond of. I can’t help but be amused by feats that require death as a prerequisite. Others survivor feats protect against trampling, stench, petrifaction, and even death attacks. I could see making some of these for my homebrew campaign.

I also appreciated the fact that the entire book is declared open game content. Indeed, Phil puts the OGL to good use by adapting the feats themselves from a wide variety of sources.

Critical Fumble

While I appreciate the vast scope of The Book of Unusual Feats and many of the specific feats, the book also suffers from some important problems. Balance is all over the place, and several of the feats are completely broken. Probably the most serious offender is Executioner’s Blow, which allows a character to perform a coup-de-grace attack against a non-helpless foe once per day. Unless, say, an awakened cat is using this feat against a dragon, the results are always going to be fatal. Arrow Trip allows archers to instantly make trip attacks when it’s not their turn and without even using an action. To top it off, the trip attempt using their attack roll opposed by only the opponent’s Dex check. Armored Grapple lets a characters add his armor bonus as an equipment bonus to grapple checks (not only can this become a tremendously huge bonus, but it’s also of a bonus type normally reserved for d20 Modern). Intelligent Defense adds a character’s Intelligence bonus to his AC, along with his Dexterity modifier . . . and an improved version increases this bonus by 2. There are many more that bothered me, but I think you get the point. At least the author pointed out that these should be cleared with the DM before seeing game use.

Additionally, many of the feats are overly-complicated. Arcane Strength stands out as one of these: a number if times per day equal to the user’s Intelligence bonus, it allows a character to sacrifice a spell and boost his Strength by the spell’s level for a number of rounds equal to his Intelligence bonus. It would probably be safe to make this feat usable at will and have its effect’s last for a minute, to say nothing about making it easier to manage in game. Plenty of other feats are like this, being usable a number of times per day equal to an ability score bonus, or half a character’s base attack bonus, or whatever. Some of the metamagic feats inflict status conditions on the spell’s targets, and have especially convoluted save DCs to avoid the effect (like caster level + ability score bonus + spell’s level) when just saving against the spell’s originally DC would be sufficient. Cleaning up the mechanics and keeping the effects of feats simple (as feats should be) would make this book a lot more appealing to me.

Lastly—and this probably doesn’t bother many other people beside myself—I was annoyed by the inconsistent format of the feat prerequisites. An Intelligence prereq, for example, could be listed as “Intelligence 13”, “Intelligence 13+”, “Int 13” or just “Int bonus +3.” The order is also inconsistent, with sometimes feats being listed before skill requirements, and sometimes the other way around. Some more attention to detail would have made the book look a lot sharper.

Coup de Grace

Whether or not The Book of Unusual Feats is useful to you is largely dependant on what percentage of its contents you would have interest in. While there are several standout feats that can spark interesting character concepts, most are merely average or too specific for the average PC. The spirit and timebound feats also are probably too exotic for most campaigns. And many of the feats could also use a serious tune-up before seeing the light of game. If you’re not afraid to put some work into it or don’t mind the rough edges, The Book of Unusual Feats is worth considering. If you want quality instead of quantity, your best bet is the Player’s Handbook II (actually, just buy the PHB II if you don’t have it already). Personally, I’m happy with my purchase (albeit an $8 one) and find it great for idea mining. Whatever else can be said for The Book of Unusual Feats, it certainly lives up to its name.

Review Scores
Game Mechanics Rating: 10 (67%)
OGL Open Content Rating: 16 (100%)
Originality Rating: 19 (83%)
Playability Rating: 18 (82%)
Presentation Rating: 26 (81%)
Value Rating: 16 (67%)
Reviewer Opinion: 7 (70%)

Overall Total (Does not include OGL Rating): 96 (76%)
Final Grade: C+