Is there anywhere I can go to find a quick repository of Magical Items? I’m trying to find some interesting, but low power magical items to give to my players. I’m hoping for some stuff that will give them something fun to toy with, but also not imbalance the game or make my encounters feel too trivial. Again, a generator or codex-like place would be great.
Is there anywhere I can go to find a quick repository of Magical Items?
Is there anywhere I can go to find a quick repository of Magical Items?
It’s amazingly easy to write your own, but apart from the ones in the core book, Awful Good Games have three magic item supplements…
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I’ll agree with Matt Horam about it being fairly easy to write your own. I also think the lack of a magic item repository reinforces the idea that magic items are a big deal in DW. These aren’t just +1 to hit weapons.
Think about what scale of effect you are happy to allow, and the drawback, then just make one!
Even balance-breaking can be perceived as not so bad. So long as you limit any of the three point-costing aspects for powers in Everway:
Frequency of usefulness, limited by only allowing its use in particular environs or under very specific situations
Power of the thing. This is the most easily abused aspect of damned near anything in a game: if there aren’t explicit rules to guide the situation, rules lawyers and munchkins alike will beat you over the head with your own creation. This can be countered by making it a Daily available power (think tactical D&D variants) or even making it a one-and-done affair like quaffing a magic potion, or limited total uses, where they only get to ask the genie for three wishes and then the dude will not longer abide.
Versatility. If this same item proves useful in every single situation they find themselves in, it’s not a good option. (unless you curtail usage with some of the above-mentioned techniques) Now the initial illusion of a legitimate panacea is a fun idea, where the PC only realizes the burden of leaning on the thing a ways into doing so – maybe even “too late” to prevent [travesty X] from occurring, or similar. You could see this as struggling with loss of humanity in Vampire, or struggling with the Dark Side in Star Wars, the corrupting effect of the One Ring in Lotr, or loss of sanity in, like, I dunno, Cthulhu game or Don’t Rest Your Head.
And of course, if you come to regret doling out an item after the fact, you can always have it conveniently pick pocketed off the hero or broken in some fashion.
Don’t worry about balance. Make it awesome.
I for once adopted a video game approach to reskinning common magical object of different fantasy games and adding some drawback(s). The cRPG is Planescape:Torment and usually there’s a continual reskinning of scrolls, potions and the like.
These are two examples taken by a game in progress:
Rust hearts: these are enchanted coagulated troll blood. On eating this, you can regenerate all your wounds in half an hour. In this time you must choose two debilities from Weak, Shaky or Sick. [potion of regeneration]
Scarab shells: these are scarab shells engraved with a rune of power. On crunching one of these for a unarmored character grows a thick layer of insect-like armor which provides 3-armor (you can use no shield due to the thickness of your arms). After one hour the armor stiffens and become dead, and must be rippen apart to escape it. [scroll of armor]
Jason Cordova
Epic items are unstable things often I find, as likely to cause acts of catastrophe as they are wonder, it’s exciting when party members make the decision to risk it all on the fickle forces of the extreme arcane, ” in your hands you hold the sceptre of redemption, and draw forth it’s mighty essence, elated at your success you place it upon your dead comrade’s chest and await the infusing of life force into her. except… Something is wrong, her body shakes and writhes on the ground as if being tortured beyond the grave, panicked you try to pull the sceptre away to no avail, your arms and legs frozen solid unable to move. Your once comrade now beginning to smoke and decay to dust, you are helpless to do anything but watch the earth reclaim forcefully that which it is owed
Nathan Sharp Absolutely! Without these sorts of things, games like Blades in the Dark wouldn’t exist, being a setting built on the ruins of their previous game after the wizard blew it up.