If you think that a cloak is for more than keeping the wind and rain off you, more than a blanket to keep you warm at night, this may be of interest... and if you are a GM, these can make interesting and unusual 'treasures' for characters to find.

Opening with a list of 30 cloaks divided up into minor, medium and major items complete with numbers should you wish to use percentage dice to roll for a random cloak (quite useful if you just want to put one into a cupboard or on a peg for characters to find, rather than use it as a plot item), we then get descriptions of each one. (The table, for no readily explained reason is headed 'Rings' - possibly the table from a compainion volume about rings being reused...). They sound quite fun and potentially useful without being game-changing.

The very first one, the snow-white Cloak of Authority, sounds like just what I need - I've just taught the first lesson of the academic year, fortunately my students behaved themselves without need of magical assistance! However, had I got one, this Cloak confers an aura of authority on the wearer which makes other creatures inclined to listen to what the wearer has to say. Each entry gives details of appearance, cost on the open market and the requirements to make one, should you feel inspired. There's also information - both descriptive and rules-mechanical - about the effects that it has, so that once found, purchased or made you can use it to effect in the course of your game.

Most give some small advantage to the wearer, and as you'd expect with something as flamboyant as a cloak, it is often something to do with illusion, concealment or in other ways affecting people's perception. Then there's the Cloak of Heraldry. When you put it on, you choose the colour and the heraldic symbol you want to display... but choose wisely, as you can then get that symbol to make melee attacks on those nearby!

Not all are benign, however. The Cloak of the Contrary makes the wearer disagree with everything, and tell lies into the bargain. It will, however, allow the wearer to tell if someone is lying to them.

To round out the list there's a full-blown artefact cloak, complete with backstory... use it as is, or as inspiration for writing your own backgrounds and weaving the cloak of your choice into your adventures.

It's a fun little work, helpful if you want to add some rather more unusual items to treasure hoards or hand out interesting rewards, something to tuck away until you have a use for it. Read through the various cloaks, you may even find inspiration for a whole adventure based around one.

This pdf is 16 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD and 2 pages of ads, leaving 11 pages for the cloaks.

The first page of the pdf features a nice, old-school table where you could roll d%s to randomly assign cloaks to treasure. They cloaks range in price from 800 Gp to a whopping 180000 Gp.

If I have not miscounted, including variations you actually get 70 cloaks in this pdf, so let's dive in!

The cloaks often come in three variations, lesser, greater and superior (LGS - usually the better a cloak is, the more often you can use it and the less actions it takes to use, e.g. a swift action instead of a standard one, etc.) and many DC-dependant abilities scale with the wearers, keeping the cloaks interesting throughout the levels. All come with Aura, Price, Cost and Construction requirements.

The cloaks are as follows:

-Cloak of Authority (LGS): Bonus to social skills + charm monster, G+S: Undetectable charm

-Cloak of clinging Shadows (LGS): Entangling shadow ribbons

-Cloak of Conflict: Usable as a grappling & constricting weapon

-Cloak of Deception and Resistance: additional template addable to cloaks, granting from +1 to +5 to all saves

-Cloak of Distortion(LGS): Distorts space so that incoming attacks may hit nearby targets instead of you.

-Cloak of Distraction (LGS): Lets a creature lose its actions for one round, staring at the cloak.

-Cloak of Dusk and Dust (LGS): Quench lights and fatigue creatures

-Cloak of Dusk's Curtain (LGS): Creates a curtain of shadows that grants concealment and entangles creatures trying to pass it.

-Cloak of Echoes(LGS): Makes creatures with blindsense and tremorsense oblivious to the wearer. Thank you for that one, been waiting for something along those lines.

-Cloak of Eldritch Deception(LGS): Makes foes believe you failed saves against their spells. Nice one!

-Cloak of Heraldry (LGS): Shadow-magic-like quasi-real attacks from the cloaks heraldry.

-Cloak of Hidden Wounds (LGS): Makes enemies believe you succeeded in withstanding just about everything when you really were hurt. Another nice one!

-Cloak of Loveliness (LGS): Blinding Beauty and Sanctuary.

-Cloak of Mirrors: Creates improved mirror images.

-Cloak of Refuge: Creates a hard to find shelter.

-Cloak of the Assassin (LGS): Poisons your weapons.

-Cloak of the Beast (L, Standard,GS): Works as Beast Shape I, II, III and IV, respectively.

-Cloak of the Contrary (LGS): Wearer is unpleasant and forced to lie but can detect lies without roll.

-Cloak of the Counterfeit Pit (LGS): Knocks targets prone by making them believe they fall in an infinite pit.

-Cloak of the Doppelganger (LGS): Emulate class features and monster abilities.

-Cloak of the Dreaded (LGS): Makes subjects cower due to panic.

-Cloak of the False Ending: If the wearer would die, this cloak creates a greater shadow conjuration of the remains, masks the wearer and negates the death-causing spell or effect. Nice one for recurring villains!

-Cloak of the Fugitive (LGS): Makes tracking the wearer next to impossible.

-Cloak of the Innocuous (LGS): Temporarily transforms weapons that hit you into harmless objects.

-Cloak of the Phantom (LGS): Makes you incorporeal.

-Cloak of the Unknowable: As Greater Invisibility, but also fools all kinds of other senses and spells. Another nice one.

-Cloak of the Untrue Swarm (LGS): Illusion of swarm makes targets nauseated.

-Cloak of the Void: Invisibility to Darkvision and minor spell resistance to [light]-descriptor spells.

-Cloak of Vanishing (LGS): Teleport and Invisibility.

Finally, we get my personal favorite, a unique cloak called Trickery's Cowl. Its powers can be unlocked via money and certain rituals at given levels and it rocks:

From a humble +1 bonus to all saves, +5 to disguise and bluff, permanent disguise self and a selection of chosen who see through the illusions, we later get over the cloaks 4 stages misdirection, mirage arcana, veil and screen and up to +5 to all saves and +15 to disguise and bluff. I just love unique magic items that get better at higher levels and this one is right up my alley. I want more of the kind!

Conclusion: Layout adheres to the two-column RiP-standard and the (btw. original) artwork is b/w and definitely ok for the price - especially the illustration of the Cloak of the Beast and Trickery's Cowl caught my fancy. Unfortunately, not all cloaks get their own illustrations, but oh well. Editing is not perfect: Albeit I encountered no glaring typos/grammatical inconsistencies, I found some instances of superfluous commas and punctuations, in Trickery's Cowl's write-up there are two. That being said, I love the "Legacy Cloak" (no, it does not carry the stupid penalties or feat requirements of the 3.5. legacy item system) and some of the other cloaks are simply clever and/or cool and gold for DMs who wish to give their villains an additional edge. I'd usually go for 3 or 3.5 stars, but due to the clever writing and low price, I'll settle for 4 stars.