Houserule - Cloak Modifiers

Rule: Balanced, Blade-Edged, Fine, Meteoric, and Mirrored shield modifiers are allowed for cloaks

In DFRPG, cloaks are essentially a variant shield. You wield a cloak in the same way a bullfighter uses his cape. A cloak provides a Defense Bonus and can Block attacks. It can also be used to Feint and to Grapple (at reach C and 1). As a trade-off, a failed block with a cloak allows the attacker to the original hit location or target your cloak arm.

There are special modifiers you can purchase for shields but, per Adventurers p.107, all but one (Ornate) are off-limits for cloaks. Looking at the options, however, it seems like the prohibition is based on what is considered realistic rather than game rules or balance.

I have no problem allowing Balanced, Fine, Meteoric, or Mirrored as options for cloaks. Balanced cloaks are better designed and weighted to improved function. Fine are made from lighter but equally strong materials. Meteoric are woven with threads of meteoric iron that prevent burning and magic. As for Mirrored, I find it easy to imagine a cloth with a mirror-reflective coating but it would be more difficult to aim that attack in the manner of a rigid shield when using floppy cloth. But I am willing to overlook that small issue as I doubt it will arise in play more than a handful of times.

Dwarven and Orichalcum, however, remain off-limits. While you could contrive a similar scheme as Meteoric to explain the use of the materials, their effects (other than fireproof) are useless for cloaks.

Update (03Aug2021): Blade-Edged from DF8 p.35 is allowed for cloaks. Compared to an edged cape (DF8 p.32), a Blade-Edged Cloak costs considerably more ($60 vs $600 for light or $1500 for heavy), suffers a -1 penalty to attack, and changes the damage from thr(0.5) cut to sw-2 cut.

Throwing (DF8 p.35) is off-limits. Tossing a piece of cloth at someone is not dealing damage and even a blade-edged cloak is not going to have sufficient bulk or rotation to deal injury.