Heya a guy in my group wants to play a mage who enchants hammers and then throws them and they return to him.

9 thoughts on “Heya a guy in my group wants to play a mage who enchants hammers and then throws them and they return to him.”

1. Does he want just one hammer or multiple? If he wants multiple, just give him the hammers as thrown weapons: use the volley move with STR or DEX, and ammo tracks the amount of hammers he has left. If he just wants to use one hammer at a time, do the same, but replace the 7-9 result of “mark off 1 ammo” with “you lose possession of your hammer” or something functionally similar.

   Unfortunately, a mage’s damage die is d4 which makes this a bit underpowered compared to his magic missile spell. If you want to bring it to roughly equal level, give him an extra level 1 ongoing spell that gives him +1d4 damage on thrown weapons and returns them to him. You might want to fudge it a bit depending on how the rest of the party feels about his free ability, but this should be about right.

2. When you throw a magical hammer, roll +con

   On a 10+ three foes are clocked stooge style.

   On a 7-9 Moe and Larry duck; only Curly takes the blow.

   On a miss, Thor sues you for copyright infringement.

3. Hmm… I would just deal with it as volley action and have the hammers have charges. Charges determined by the enchanting roll. Damage by class.

4. Does he actually want to be a Mage, or just a magic user of some sort? If the latter, someone here just recently posted a link to the Spellsword class, which is all about enchanting one’s own weapon to do cool stuff. I’d take a look at that.

5. Assuming vanilla class list: If he plays a Human Wizard, at level 1 he can learn the Cleric spell ‘Magic Weapon’ which grants +1d4 damage to his weapon, evening the damage out with Magic Missile. It says nothing about any other effects, but you can work the ‘returning hammer’ thing into the fiction of that spell.

   That’s a pretty sweet bonus to get for free, but it also opens up some interesting ways to treat partial successes and total failures (with attack rolls, as well as the initial casting). For partial success on a volley, maybe instead of teleporting, it flies back at you, smashing through things, or at breakneck speeds. Defy Danger to catch it. Partial success casting magic weapon, maybe he ALSO has to choose between the extra damage and the returning effect, on top of the normal choices.

6. We are using class warfare.

7. The Magic Missile spell is adequate for it: “What does your missile look like?” “It is Thor’s Hammer.” Done.

   Otherwise he should be a fighter and his signature weapon should be “Thor’s Hammer” with the tags “Thrown, Near, Forceful”. Use the normal Hack and Slash move, but in the near range.

8. (I knew of a wizard whose magic missile was a volley of silver dining forks.)

9. Having thrown boomerangs, I suggest your player invest heavily in catching skill. Boomerangs hurt, but hammers…geez!

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