Ultimate Feats - Volume 1

[Messageboard Golem]

Volume one of Ultimate Feats is a giant 256 page book compiling the most popular feats that have appeared in D20 supplements since the game system was released, as well as adding a lot of never-before-seen material. It further includes guidelines to creating your own feats and how to balance them for your game.

 

[GameWyrd]

A book with two hundred and fifty-six pages and a hardback cover is the sort of weapon a frustrated GM could threaten to beat the annoying munchkin over the head with. Not so this book. I fear if Ultimate Feats is brought too near a munchkin that the bugger would swell with power, or worse, drool. Ultimate Feats is a book with a real “core rules” feel to it. It’ll thump down on your gaming table with the same weighty thwack as the Player’s Handbook does and probably more so. It is about as far from core rules as you could get though, Ultimate Feats consists of re-printed feats from other Mongoose Publishing products but there’s also a sizeable chunk from other d20 publishers too. There’s AEG, Bastion Press, Soverign Press, Fantasy Flight, Green Ronin, Pinnacle, Natural 20 Press and White Wolf to name just a few. There are a lot of other Mongoose books, at my last count there were more Mongoose books than Wizard’s D&D products. In Mongoose’s product line you’ll find the futuristic Judge Dredd RPG and you’ll find futuristic and modern day feats in Ultimate Feats.

It’s quite simple. You won’t find anything other than feats in this book. Ultimate Prestige Classes had tips and tricks for prestige class creation in its introduction but there’s nothing similar this time round. The introduction simply explains the break up of the book; by class type classification (feats of the arcane, feats of arms, etc), types of feats (psionic, metamagic, etc) and that you’re lucky to ever get more than six feats in a game.

Yeah, there are psionic feats. That’ll cheer some people up. The book isn’t entirely too heavily re-print either, there are new feats and there are likely to be new-to-you feats.

Turn to the back of the book if you’re thinking about buying it. There’s a complete and total index. I’m glad the book includes the OGL feats (Cleave and co) from the core rules. It means that you really can use Ultimate Feats as your ultimate resource for feats. You want the rules for any given feat from the main or Mongoose rules then it’s probably in this book. There are pages of tables too; rows and rows of feats with their prerequisites. If you’re one of the people like myself who really do like to have everything nicely organised then the index and all these ordered tables are a winning strategy.

I’ll run down the list of categories in the book. The list will speak for itself.
- Feats of the Arcane
- Feats of Arms (oh so many!)
- Feats of Blood
o Elven Feats
o Dwarven Feats
o Halfling Feats
o Gnome Feats
o Half-Orc Feats
- Feats of Creation (making stuff)
- Feats of the Divine
- Feats of the Mind
- Feats of the Monstrous
- Feats of Power (metamagic)
- Feats of Skill
- Feats of Stealth and Song
- Feats of the Unliving
- Feats of Today and the Future

It is nice to have so many feats without any cramping. You can find feats that take up nearly an entire page by themselves. I also found the inclusion of monster and undead feats especially pleasing. Those sections are about as close you can get to a breath of fresh air without going off topic. Monster feats do also tend be those that are scattered far and wide through different books, appearing only in ones and twos, so they’re a good choice for inclusion in Ultimate Feats on that level.

You’ll recognise many of the illustrations in Ultimate Feats. Some of the artwork here has been re-printed as well. I don’t particularly mind this. Sometimes it’s too easy to link a particular image to the rule mechanics or flavour text it initially appeared beside and by be seeing the same picture in a different context you can disentangle this association. It’s not just any other illustration that’s made it into this book either; it’s the good ones. I can think of a few in the Encyclopaedia Arcane/Divine series where the full-page illustration in the inside cover is better than the outside. A few of these great pictures appear for an encore in Ultimate Feats; they have a page all to themselves but they’re not in colour.

Ultimate Feats is a success. Two thumbs up. Ah but there’s a caveat. There’s only so much you can do with a book of feats and Ultimate Feat’s success is due in no small part to the extremely useful way in which it acts as master list.

* This GameWyrd review was first published here.

 

[JoeGKushner]

How are art and layout in this book? In the Ultimate PrC book, I thought that the resue of art was in bad taste because a lot of it was originally bad art and resuing it didn't do it any favors and the spreading of a two page PrC to a three page PrC really took the cake.

 

[GameWyrd]

Layout is standard two columns of text. Artwork tends to totally fill one of the columns and cut into the other but not in away that makes it hard to read. I like the illustrations but I do favour the style in Mongoose books. The pictures do seem to be the better ones from other books plus a good amount of brand new art. Feats are, of course, much smaller than prestige classes and they don't suffer so badly from being spread over a page. I've been flicking through the book just now to search for the largest feats and those with their own tables. None of these large feats are spread over two pages, rather, none of them are spread over a turn of a page. I might have missed one. This is proving to be a jinxed review and I've edited it twice since posting the original already. Heh.

Now, if I'd thought to say that the layout wasn't a problem in the original review then that would have been better.

 

[Simon Collins]

This is not a playtest review.

Ultimate Feats is the second in Mongoose Publishing's 'Ultimate' series, this one offering a plethora of feats.

Ultimate Feats is a 256-page mono hardcover book costing $34.95. Though margins, font size and white space are all reasonable, there is a fairly wide gap between paragraphs. Given the subject matter, this does string out the text considerably over the whole of the book. Art ranges from poor to superb (not surprising given that there are 22 different artists used throughout the book). Given the nature of the subject matter, the writing style is fine. Editing seems good (though there is a weird reference to Ultimate Prestige Classes in the Contents section).

Perhaps the most notable thing about Ultimate Feats is that you get nearly 1000 feats for your money. That really should be enough to be going on with. The OGC content comes from a variety of sources, but over 350 of these come from the Netbook of Feats - a free resource on the Internet, which can be found at http://www.datadeco.com/nbofeats/. Ultimate Feats also includes all the feats from the SRD too. Other resources used were AEG, FFG, Natural 20 Press, and (unsurprisingly) a whole host of Mongoose products - notably Slaine, which had some excellent generic combat feats.

There is a 3-4 page section of advice in the book at the beginning with some discussion on what makes a feat (as compared to class features or magical powers) and what a feat should not be, as well as some advice on progression planning, and a classification of feats in to type and benefit given. This gives some hints on how to create ones own feats, but I would have liked to have seen this issue dealt with in more detail - it would certainly have improved the value of the product to have had such a section.

The feats are split into several different sections and there are several pages of tabular feat summaries at the back of the book as well as a comprehensive index.
* Arcane Feats - including metamagic feats available only to arcane magic users. 17 pages.
* Feats Of Arms - combat-orientated feats, including armour-related feats. 55 pages.
* Feats of Blood - race-specific feats (elvophiles will be disappointed at the measly 4 compared to the other PC races). 10 pages.
* Feats Of Creation - crafting magical and psionic items. 10 pages.
* Divine Feats - focused around channelling turning or rebuking undead into other powers. 10 pages.
* Feats Of The Mind - psionic-orientated feats. 21 pages.
* Monstrous Feats - designed for use by creatures, with some creature-specific sections for such creatures as minotaurs, dragons and trolls. 12 pages.
* Feats Of Power - those metamagic feats not specific to a class. 13 pages.
* Feats Of Skill - feats that enhance skills and abilities. 39 pages.
* Feats Of Stealth & Song - feats designed to enhance the abilities of bard and rogue types. 10 pages.
* Feats Of The Unliving - taken from Mongoose's Encyclopaedia Arcane: Necromancy product, these feats make use of a necromancer's negative energy to enhance undead but at the cost of causing physical and emotional problems for users.7 pages.
* Feats Of Today And The Future - d20 Modern-style feats. 6 pages.

The index is 7 pages, the tabularised rules summaries are 25 pages long, and 3 pages of OGL.

Conclusion:
This brings a wide range and large number of feats into a single product and will be useful for the GM who has limited space in her bag. The book provides a good set of references and is fairly well organised, to make relevant feats easy to find. I would have liked a more technical look at feat creation in the introduction, but apart from that Ultimate Feats is a very useful reference book.

 

[Sagan Darkside]

39 pages for feats related to skills? Wow. Are they all +2/+2 feats?

 

[Simon Collins]

Sagan Darkside

No, about a quarter to a third of them are +2/+2 feats. Examples of others include +4 to a more focused skill such as a Handle Animal check on your mount only, meta-skill feats such as making one cross-class skill a class skill, 'saving throw' feats such as Lightning Reflexes, and a host of miscellaneous feats such as Pack Mule (which allows you to carry weight as if your Strength were two points higher).

Hope that helps.

Simon Collins

 

[jeffh]

Does it include the feats from the SRD? I assume not, but this review doesn't actually say and there is no reason it couldn't.

 

[Simon Collins]

jeffh

The review _does_ actually say the feats from the SRD are included in Ultimate Feats!!

Simon Collins

 

[Simon Collins]

Just a note to clarify - I received a mail from Mongoose saying that there are _over_ 1000 feats, not _nearly_ 1000 as stated in my review. Its a true giant millipede, with over 1000 feets.