Feat Ideas

So sorcery is unreliable in The Known World, it tends to go bug nuts crazy and do things like remove the oxygen from the air or start turning people to stone for no reason. One of the oddities of this is that Fallen, Fell Humans, and Soulless (three races that owe their continued existence to sorcery) do not do this. Granted, there are background reasons as to why they don't just randomly explode or cause nasty magical complications, but it is odd nonetheless. I'm actually really surprised no one has commented on it considering I've made such a big point of saying magic items and magic are prone to misfiring. What is a Soulless if not an extremely complex sentient magic item?

Oooo, that is an interesting idea for a character. Imagine an intelligent magic weapon sitting in a cave. Left there from a battle from long ago, just lurking and getting shit on by cave wights or something. This intelligent item is all alone, unable to speak to anyone and completely unable to do anything to affect its surroundings. Now imagine that it can feel its animating magic slowly unraveling and bringing it ever closer to just exploding. Every day it tries to think smaller thoughts so as not to push the boundaries of its animating magic, but by its very existence and ability to be concerned about the unraveling magic, it is activating the magic because the magic is what created it. I wonder if that is how Eloise got started. I should actually run that concept by Fred tonight. 

Anyway, so I got to thinking about a feat that might allow a Fell Human to explode his ensorcelled blood if he concentrated on it. I thought it might be a cool concept, albeit one no one in the group would ever use. The prerequisites would be that he was a full blooded Fell Human, not a Fell Descendant or anything like that, and that he had one or more of the Fell blood feats (Acidic Blood, Fiery Blood, Icy Blood, etc).

The effect would be that as a full round action, the Fell Human could concentrate and basically destabilize the sorcery in his blood and cause a blast of energy to spread outward from him. The blast radius would be 5 feet per Fell Heritage feat (which is basically any feat with the word Fell in it, plus a few others). The damage would be 1d4 for every two Fell Heritage feats the character has and the save for half damage would be a Reflex save with a DC of 10 + the character's Charisma modifier + 1 for every two Fell Heritage feats. The type of damage the blast does would be tied to one of the energy types of the Fell blood feats the character has, he'd choose one when he activated the ability. The character would not get a save against the damage, but his Fell blood feat would protect him to some degree. The character would be able to use this ability a number of times equal to his Charisma modifier each day, minimum of 1/day.

I'd also create a pile of feats that would alter this ability. Something to increase the damage die, something to allow a shaped blast like a cone or line. Nothing that would allow the character to shoot bolts of energy, because basically the ability causes your blood to burst out of every orifice and be all magically violent, not allow you to shoot mind bullets or spit daggers of fire. Hmm, I dunno, I guess allowing it to be a ranged touch attack rather than a line or cone or whatever wouldn't be awful.

In this vein, I also think I'd like to create a feat that allows a character to use a swift action to deal themselves 1 point of damage with a piercing or slashing weapon (or a bludgeoning weapon if they've already been injured) to coat their weapon with their sorcerous blood. This feat would also be dependent upon the Fell blood feats. Once coated, your weapon would do like +1 or +1d4 elemental damage on strikes for one round. The type of damage would depend on which Fell blood feats you had.

Alright, that is enough about Fell blood feats.

I'm not sure when, but I think at some point during our latest session, one of the guys may have said that the Unarmored Combatant feats were overpowered. This is when I made Dodge a prerequisite, rather than Evasive Reflexes. Looking at Greater Unarmored Combatant, the +10 bonus at 20th level combined with the Dexterity requirement means that the feat basically grants you +5 Mithril Scale Mail that is not vulnerable to firearms. Thinking about it, that isn't a big deal. There is a whole other +5 worth of enhancements that could be on such an armor that you have no ability to get because you don't wear armor. Plus, +5 Mithril Scale Mail is kind of chump change for a 20th level character. The armor is valued at 29,050 gold pieces and a 20th level character should have roughly 880,000 gold pieces worth of shit. Basically a drop in a bucket.