This is a hefty book. Think Player’s Handbook, plus some. Think, “Throw this at your friends if you’re desperate to kill them instantly” size. This is bedtime reading for a good few weeks. The cover art is pretty classy, but it’s not
Monster Manual II quality.
A quick flick through reveals that it’s all in black and white. That’s not a problem, as generally the art’s pretty good (the marching army on pg. 48 is fantastic, as is the later flight of dragons). It does have its not-so-great moments, though, and I wouldn’t recommend showing it to parents or young children (some of the art is distinctly not-very-work-safe, although to be honest, if you’re reading RPG supplements at work I’ve really lost all hope for you).
Anyway, onto the text. I don’t know how everyone else feels about dictionary definitions to open a book, but I like them, and there’s a lovely definition of ‘feat’ sitting at the top of page three. It moves on to explain how the book’s sorted. The individual sections it’s broken down into are Feats of the Arcane, Feats of Arms (the largest section), Feats of Blood, Feats of Crafting, Feats of the Divine, Feats of the Mind, Feats of the Monstrous, Feats of Power, Feats of Skill, Feats of Song and Stealth, Feats of Today and the Future and Feats of the Unliving (pause to breathe).
The layout’s generally pretty consistent (with a lapse in the Feats of the Monstrous section), and although I haven’t spotted any spelling errors I have noticed some of the ubiquitous ‘him’ instead of ‘his’, and the like (cue 1001 RPGnetters searching my review for examples – it’s not my fault, it’s Microsoft’s).
There seems to be a bit of a monk bias to the whole thing (actually, come to think of it, there’s a monkey bias too – Clever Monkey Spins the Branch, Monkey Taunts the Emperor). There are feats designed for monks in practically every chapter of the book, which although it’s great for monk players, gets a little boring for the rest of us. There are also a couple of repeated feats (there are two feats allowing wizards to get extra spells when they level up according to their Intelligence modifier, although they do have mildly different prerequisites).
Having said that, some of the feats are pretty cool (I like sorcerers being able to permanently burn off hit points in order to learn new spells, and the troll feats are excellent [if on the gruesome side]). The layout makes it pretty easy to navigate it as well, although (turn rant mode back on) giving monk feats a separate section might have been nice (rant mode off).
One thing that gets mildly annoying is the number of reprinted feats. In the ‘Feats of Crafting’ section, for example, pretty much all of the item creation feats from the Player’s Handbook are repeated. It does go on to how to make voodoo dolls, however, so it gets away with that one.
The only two chapters I have issue with are the Feats of the Mind and Feats of Today and the Future. The Feats of the Mind, the psionics section, I found pretty interesting – but I imagine the majority of people don’t have the Psionics Handbook, so I question its usefulness. Even more so in the case of the modern and sci-fi feats – I don’t have d20 modern, and I doubt I ever will, unless I see it locally and have too much cash to throw about, so this section is useless to me, and probably the majority of other D&Ders.
So, in summary – a good, generally well-written book, but with a few flaws and a hefty price tag. If you’re a DM and you buy it for your players, they’ll love you for it (except the group of ingrates I have). If you’re a player and buy it, your DM will hate you for it as he dedicates the rest of the year to reading it. And if you’re a DM, and buy it for yourself… Well, suffice it to say your players life is about to get… interesting…
-Chris Chave
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