Magic Items
If you’d like to share some magic items that you’ve made with the rest of the community (to be covered on the next Feedback Friday stream), share them below!
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I very much enjoyed deploying the Arming Sword of Leadership in my game, the players got a big kick out of it. It has an fun power and led to an interesting cultural/social interaction.
This is the notation I use on all my magic items, we play in a home-brew game so I’ll sort of explain things below–but you don’t need to understand the mechanics.
Arming Sword of Leadership
This arming sword has a simple flat cross guard and a hilt wrapped in black leather.
(Miracle—Ignimius) Res: 50% ID: +10%
• +8% to Hit, +3 to Dam, +0 to Speed
• Owner’s height increases by 4 inches.
(Miracle—Ignimius) means that the item was imbued by ‘priest magic’ not wizard magic. “Ignimius” denotes the specific faith.
Res is basically to item’s saving throw.
ID is a modifier that is basically how easy or hard it is to learn the item’s powers
Each bullet point is a magical property of the item.
All the players liked that a magic item called the Arming Sword of Leadership didn’t increase charisma, or some kind of leadership skill. It just makes you taller. Sort of a joke, maybe a witticism, almost social commentary…Whatever it was everyone liked it
How I used the item:
The party is high level having played for about a year. They killed a Hydra. This sword was in the lair. The bonus to hit and damage are ok, nothing great, but everyone thought it would be fun to have a sword that makes them taller. No one thinks about the odd wording that ‘the owner’ of the sword that is made taller.
A few weeks later no one is thinking about the sword. The character that owns the sword is informed that a baron from a few counties over is bringing criminal charges again him, saying that the PC cursed him. The party has never heard of this guy and has no idea why the Baron thinks he was cursed by the PC. Of course, during the trial, it comes to light that the ‘curse’ the Baron is talking about is that he suddenly became 4 inches shorter. He used divination to find out what happened to him. But divination always being unclear and finicky the Baron was only told who was responsible.
One of the baron’s ancestors owned the sword and was long ago killed trying to slay the hydra, when he died his eldest son inherited his property (including the sword even though it was 100 miles away). The ‘ownership’ transferred from father to son over the generations. So, every time the old baron died and a new one inherited the title (and ownership of the sword) the new Baron grew 4 inches! Obviously, this became thought of as a supernatural manifestation of that person’s divine right to rule.
So now a PC is in a court case with the Baron, who is not at all interested in hearing that his family’s supernatural height is not in fact a divine blessing, as everyone in their county believes, but is just some weird technicality of a pretty minor magic item lost hundreds of years ago.
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It’s always seemed weird to me that there are so many magic daggers and so few magic items that solve actual problems people have on a day-to-day basis. Do the people making magic items really want to increase the chance that can stab someone by 5%? Rings of Protection from Dysentery should be way more common than Rings of Protection from Acid .
This is my favorite magic item from the campaign I’m in now (GMed by DMMC).
Fire Poker of Home Protection
This ornate fire poker has a bronze and wooden handle and a black iron body, it is 30 inches long and stout.
(Miracle–Ignimius) Res: 15% ID: +25%
• If this item is kept and used in a dwelling with a fireplace, the structure of that dwelling will be incapable of burning or otherwise being damaged by fire. Items and creatures in the dwelling are not protected.
We found the fire poker very early in the campaign and it has come up twice so for. In our eighth session two PCs knew some of our enemies were staking out the house they rented. They decided to start a small structural fire so they could sneak away in the hub-bub. When the house didn’t catch fire, they panicked and thought the bad guys somehow heard them planning and used magic to stop the fire. After like 5 minutes of panic someone remembered the fire poker.
By the 27th session we had moved the fire poker to an estate outside of town. We were defending it from some orcs that were raiding the area and we wheels around a corner to find a group of orcs staring dumb founded at a fire they started under a thatched roof wondering why the flames weren’t spreading.
Two nice moments of levity. But also, I really like when decisions or events are established but then doesn’t actually come up for months. It makes the game feel real and is my favorite party of this hobby.
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Those are some great items! I love the practicality! I’ll post one of my own later.
Regarding magic items, I can see some logic to the emphasis on combat and war. What are the odds your house burns down? Probably very very low. What are the odds some monster or raving maniac tries to gut you like a fish and wear your skin as a cap? A lot higher in the average D&D-style fantasy setting.
Since I usually run pretty grounded games, I always think about magic items stemming from great need and desperation (think the barrow blade from LotR). House fires probably don’t rate in the same way. That said, I love the idea of really practical magic in a setting that is more rich with it (and it’s less weird) than in the settings I usually run. Or it’s just the product of a very practical-minded mage. After all, sometimes the monsters, or even the local villagers, show up at your door with pitchforks and torches…
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Very interesting! I feel like we must be conceptualizing fictional worlds differently. Surely the odds a house burns down must be very very high, and the odds of being turned into a skin cap must be very very low. Its just that houses burn down ‘off screen’ and maniacs make people into caps ‘on-screen’.
I agree it is natural for magic items to be made to help with combat and war because they are so high-stakes.
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I’m a fan of showering my players with simple consumable items, like the Pot of Bees.
A faint buzzing can be heard coming from this wax sealed clay pot about 6 inches in diameter. The pot can be thrown up to 20 feet as an action, and on shattering, opens a portal to the elemental plane of bees, summoning a swarm of (very angry) bees that will begin attacking the nearest creature.
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In ye olde fantasy world, you think? I guess we do have very different ideas! 
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@nonenothing I think our ‘ye olde fantasy’ world is much more ‘ye olde’ and much less ‘fantasy’ then most. 
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Interestingly, I did a bit of searching around and some (probably very) loose numbers popped up suggesting that the odds of a house fire are on the order of 12-20% over 100 year or the lifetime of the house. This isn’t necessary total burn downs but bad enough fires to get called in. Now, I have no idea of those numbers are on the money or not but it does fit my conception. Maybe in the old world, it would be much higher but, given that electric mishaps are the most common source of fires today, maybe it ends up being about a wash with the dominance of fuel burning in ancient homes…
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Here’s my item…
The Book of Kallas Lightbringer
This was a magic book that held the spirit of an ancient philosopher monk named, Kallas Lightbringer. Originally, the book was created to preserve the knowledge and history of a holy school and monastery. Kallas sacrificed himself to become an immortal guide to future knowledge seekers. Unfortunately, the monastery was, not long after, abandoned and subsequently forgotten and, over the millennia, his mind trapped in the book, Kallas went quite mad.
In the game, when the sarcophagus that interred Kallas’s body was disturbed and the book taken, it broke part of the binding enchantments, allowing some of Kallas to bind to the mind of one of the party. Kallas lived there for a time until he found a way to escape entirely.
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I can’t find any good data online. But here is some quotes from "The Problem of Fire in Nineteenth Century British Cities: the Case of Glasgow "
British urban historiography overwhelmingly associates fire with medieval and early modern times.
Constructed of wooden houses with thatched roofs, closely packed into a small area, fire was a
permanent fear facing cities…(Jones, Porter and Turner 1984)
The database suggested a dramatic reduction in the number of multiple-house fires after 1760, a
view since corroborated by Borsay (1989)…
Another from “Life in the Middle Ages”
In rural areas, most homes had open
hearths set in the middle of rooms built of tinder-dry wood, their floors
covered with flammable straw, and their roofs made of thatch. Clothes
left to dry hanging next to fireplaces were in danger of catching fire, as
were chimneys clogged with soot. Candles and oil lamps could easily set
fire to objects they touched.78
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That’s fun. Particularly if the PC carrying it falls down a 10 foot pit trap and breaks it!
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Yeah, I’m aware but I always figured it was somewhat offset by everyone being in close proximity to everything— given these were mostly one room with everyone wedged inside. That said, I’ve done ZERO research in it apart from positing on those modern numbers earlier today so no doubt you are correct. However, I still wonder, if in a mechanical sense, what the odds would be day to day, compared to the sorts of checks we make in TTRPGs. Would it be more than a 1 in 6 chance day to day?
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Nice,
Have you used this? Did you make up game mechanics for what it means when Kallas’ mind was bound to a PC, and how he can escape?
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Oh, yes, this was from a game I ran a handful of years ago. At first there were no particular mechanics, Kallas was happy in a corner of the character’s mind and contributed little more than idle chatter mostly.
This changed, however, when that character was struck down by an owlbear and Kallas offered to revive them for a more active presence in the character’s mind. The character agreed and I think I used some kind of x in 6 chance to determine if Kallas stayed in the backseat.
Eventually, the party accidentally awoke a sort of semi-sentient war machine (think a walker from War of the Worlds) and Kallas realized that he could escape into the machine’s gear-brain and he did, making off in the machine.
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Ah, no clearly a house fire doesn’t have a 1 in 6 chance per day of happening.
This might be the real misunderstanding. I don’t think that the rules that govern what happens to adventurers on adventures in indicative of the culture at large. Adventurer go dangerous places and do dangerous things.
An average person in my world has never seen a monster, but the average town dweller has probably seen several house fires. And the odds that the average town is destroyed by a fire started by a cow kicking over a lantern is greater then the chances of being destroyed by a dragon (etc.).
Of course these are fictional worlds we are taking about so if in your world dragons have a 5% chance per year of attacking and cows have a 1% chance of attacking per year then that’s the reality and their is nothing wrong with that.
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That definitely sounds that the middle of a story not the end of one!!
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Poor Kallas. No sooner has he agreed to become a formless immortal librarian then the monastery is abandoned and he’s trapped in a book forever.
Does Kallas work for the corporation I do?
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I think where are worlds differ isn’t so much in this but more in: has the average people seen more violence (from any side) or damaging fires (regardless of reason)? I guess I think, in my worlds, of there being a lot more violence, whether from conventional wars, banditry, predations from the nobility, and the like, before we even factor in fantastical happenings, than fires. As you said though, it’s not a right or wrong thing, just the peculiarities of our individual flavors.
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Unfortunately, that game didn’t finish so the ultimate fate of Kallas is unknown!
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