Getting a Hand Up

The Possessed Hand Feat and You

I don’t talk about mechanics a lot of the time; that gets covered on a lot of other blogs. Sometimes, however, a little bit of mechanics really catches your eye so much so that you just have to build a character around it. This week I want to talk about an amazing feat that I’ve only just recently become aware of. I’m talking about the Possessed Hand feat, and of course, the later tiers in the feat tree here and here.

I first learned of the feat when one of my players asked to use it. I only really looked over the first one in the line of feats so I didn’t realize all the possibilities. What this player did, though, was show me the role-playing possibilities of this feat. His hand was possessed by the ghost of friend and former occult hunting party member who he was unable to save during a particularly bad hunt.

There are tons of other ways to get some good roleplay opportunities out of this feat; you could go full on Idle Hands and have the hand possessed by an evil force. This would make a most interesting story for a paladin. Perhaps he couldn’t destroy or banish and evil, so to stop its rampage he had the evil entity bound to his hand.

Not every entity that is bound to the hand has to be malign. The spirit could be there to protect the person it’s attached to. A parent, sibling, or friend who swore to protect the character on their deathbed may very well possess the hand to look over them.  Or maybe a class like the witch, which uses a patron entity, could send a spirit to look over the conduit of its will. The possibilities are truly endless.

But what really gets me – where I find something truly fun – is the final feat in the line. As if the name of the feat wasn’t cool enough “Hand’s Detachment” the fact that the hand becomes your familiar is just icing on the cake. If you don’t have a familiar class feature it’s a little underwhelming, lacking many of the core familiar abilities, but if you have a class that does get a familiar, you gain all the abilities. This includes speak with animals of its type even if it doesn’t have animals of its type, and this is a key ability because you can then take archetypes for your familiar hand.

This of course spawned a great idea, or at least I thought so. I’d like to make a Halfling fighter with the eldritch guardian archetype. Then you give the familiar the mauler achetype, which at 3rd level allows the familiar to grow to medium size. Your familiar also shares all of your combat feats. With your hand now being medium sized, your small sized Halfling can now ride it into battle.

And there you have it, some fun with one of the new mechanics from Haunted Heroes Handbook. Have you ever made a character with a possessed hand? What entity would you have possessing your hand? Would the hand be possessed against the characters will? Or would he have purposefully bound a spirit to it?

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