Press The Beast

Winged Boots

Boots of Flight are among my favourite magic items, next to such esteemed peers as the +1 Sword and the Ring of Protection. I've had multiple campaigns where Boots of Flight, or similar flight granting boons, were prominent magic items for the party. In general I'm in favour of flexible flying, rather than the highly limited flight powers that are more common in modern OSR spaces. It really empowers the party and expands their capabilities in meaningful ways, allowing new tactics and taking on new threats. Besides, when you think of Hermes you don't think of him flying for 10 minutes a day or whatever. This is the kind of potency that I think magic items should have.

While people worry about unlimited flight breaking combat or exploration that has never been my experience. In particular I've heard worries about one guy flying in the air and raining down arrows, untouchable to enemies—in practice this isn't an issue. Archers normally shoot arrows from out of the range of their enemies; that's their function. The enemies can still kill the rest of the party. Besides that enemies have projectiles of their own, there are flying foes that can isolate a flying character and put them in tough spot, ground forces may have cover like a forest canopy or buildings, and of course players will often be in interior environments where flight is less useful. Such extreme mobility can help players put themselves in dangerous situation; the potency of the tool also creates risk. Basically flight is great, but unless the flying character has aerial allies with them they are still effectively tethered to the party.

The only new ruling I've thought to add is to clarify limits on how much weight the boots can carry, and to limit that more than I did in my last campaign, Devil's World Heroes. The party avoided multiple obstacles by ferrying up allies one at a time using flight. This isn't inherently bad: we had tense moments occur where the party decided to use this ferrying strategy while being pursued, or had encounters that occurred while the party was halfway through being ferried (this resulted in a PC death). However it's a lame mental image. Some asshole flying up and down is not a cool thing to imagine, so I've chosen to limit that capability more in future campaigns.

Winged Boots—Mischievous boots that grant the wearer freedom to fly, dash, glide, or hover as they wish. While the boots can sustain general flight for about 8 hours in a day, extreme bursts of speed or difficult maneuvers will tire the boots out quickly, the same way sprinting or doing consecutive backflips will tire out even the fittest man. The boots struggle to carry weights that would encumber the average man; this is embarrassing, so they will try anyway.

Some Unconventional Uses For Winged Boots: