A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement: The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less Vol. 4: Fantastic Footwear

The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less Vol. 4: Fantastic Footwear by Owen K.C. Stephens is a role playing game supplement published by Rogue Genius Games (originally as Super Genius Games) for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result. This is the fourth in a series of supplements detailing low value permanent magic items.

This is an eight page PDF which is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $3.99 but which was purchased at the reduced price of $0.20 as part of a special bundle. Two thirds of a page are the front cover and one page is the Open Game License and Credits.

The supplement begins with a brief overview of the series’ aims; to make low level foe’s equipment, and therefore treasure, more diverse and interesting, to allows low level characters to build wealth with permanent items not charged or one shots and to give mid level characters a wider range of interesting items to craft, with all of the items being worth less than 2,500 gp. This is gone into in more detail in the first supplement in the series, The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less Vol. 1: Armor and Weapons.

The next section is Magic Item Slot Affinities. This talks about how there is an unwritten rule in Pathfinder that certain magic item slots will have items that have similar types of enchantments. So belts tend to provide enhancements to ability scores. Similarly, the assumption is mode that footwear is for movement or speed, and the footwear in this is in that vein. There next is a bit on Boots where it says that, although the various footwear given has descriptions, these could easily be changed to footwear more appropriate to the campaign setting if necessary.

Next are the boots, and other items, themselves. There are sixteen new magic items covering a range of different abilities. This includes a self-described cheap shot at modern footwear – a pair of what are clearly high-heeled shoes, designed as the rather modern footwear often seen being worn by fantasy sorceresses. There are a variety of boots of… for different races, based around the boots of elvenkind notion, for the major core Pathfinder races. Footwear has properties such as improved balance, disguise, charisma, minor attacks, being regarded as unthreatening by undead and faster travel.

The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less Vol. 4: Fantastic Footwear in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and, although it is quite short, these would have been appreciated. Navigation is fairly poor.

The text maintains Super Genius Games’ old, three column landscape format and no errors were noticed. The landscape format was intended to be easier to read on tablets, which is more true for larger tablets; it is inconvenient for printing though. There are a few pieces of presumably stock colour images of boots; images for each item would have been nice, but unusual. Presentation is okay.

The Loot 4 Less supplement series has Behind the Counter sidebars whereby how the price for certain items was calculated, the Pathfinder rules being less than brilliant in this respect. This supplement has a larger than normal number of sidebars, which take up a noticeable chunk of the content; presumably, calculating the cost of footwear was even trickier than normal.

The range of abilities in the footwear is interesting; none look to be really overpowered but all have at least some use, even if that use is at times really specific – but more cannot really be expected for cheap magic items. The Genius Guide to Loot 4 Less Vol. 4: Fantastic Footwear is a good entry in the series with many new items for characters to wear on their feet and it can be found by clicking here.