Welcome to another Musings Saturday where tonight I am looking into the future to see what I can do in making magic items magical again. A bit of a weird statement but hear me out. With spells like Identify out there I wanted to try and make magical item identification more meaningful. Yes it’s a niche spell and there are dozens of better spells to pick out there but I still dislike it.
What further reduces the magical-ness of Magic Items is that, it shouldn’t be a surprise by now, has this little rule about “Short or long rests to study and identify the item.” Now in most situations this is… fine. It’s not great but for me its taking away the mystery and majesty of magic items.
For example:
Elenore studied the silver inlay in the blade before her. The smiths had really outdone themselves with this blade this time. Reaching out to he weave she started to fill her sanctum with the sound of her piercing voice. The notes, words and rhythm were critical in creating the magical blades of her elven commune and she was a master at it. Having studied for centuries and practices for as many hours as men can only dream to live through she was peerless in her craft.
As the notes mingled with her harness on the weave she directed the magic into the blade that began to thrum with power. A moon-blue glow began to shine across the polished surface of the blade and as her elven song reaches its crescendo she forced all the captured magic from the weave through her final notes into the blade. Willing the blade to absorb the power she watched as the sword bounced across the altar before clanging loudly on the floor as the last of her power entered it. Breathing heavily she took a few moments to rest before she, weakly, retrieved the blade and studied it.
She had managed to capture one of the few elven songs that had been with her people since the dawn of their race. This blade was a masterwork and there would never be anything like it again, in the history of the world.
Two hundred years later, Tom the Menacing sat by a fire looking at the curved blade before him. As the fire danced across the blade he understood what it was. “Ah, Elenore’s Songsword of the Autumn Twilight. Sweet!”
Now that didn’t feel too meaningful for a bladed with such a history. What I hope to experiment over the next few months is an attempt to make these moments a bit… more.
Making Magic Items Magical again
341MaMaItMaAg
The basics.
Each item type, Armour, Weapons, Potions, Rings, Rods, Scrolls, Staffs, Wands and Wondrous Items is classified on how hard it would be to identify such a thing. Potions are easiest (take a sip and find out!) but Rings, by my reasoning, would be hardest to identify due to the nature of them.
The below is a quick justification on this order:
Potions – give a sip and you can normally tell. If not some may have labels… Maybe?
Scrolls – if you can read or decipher it. More powerful scrolls will be harder to understand but lower level or common spell scroll should be a simple affair as deciphering the inscription.
Weapons, generally swinging it around for a few days will tell you what it can do, but normally they have ornamental decorations as people put effort and pride into a fine blade. So they will have an inscription about flame or something to reveal its nature to the owner.
Armour – A bit harder than weapons. Perhaps there will be inscriptions on the armour but you may only find out what they do once it happens (like taking less damage, ignoring frost or acid, behing harder to hit and so forth). It’s very circumstantial to find out what they do.
Wondrous Items (cloaks, pouches, Trinkets etc.) Some are easy (Driftglobe, bag of holding) but some may be impossible without using the item (Quaal’s Feather Token). But it takes some tinkering to work out what they do and sometimes its a “too late” if you accidently use one once. So time and care goes into working these babies out.
Rods, Staffs, Wands – you know its magical but what does it do and how do you access that magic, or what it is? Some could be straight forward but is it verbally summoned, somatic? Right circumstance? What about how do you know what spells it has or charges? Yeah – a bit harder.
Rings – So this is hard. How would your character know that a ring with a squiggly line around the centre protects you from poison. It’s very unlikely that someone wrote inscriptions or a manual on the inside of the ring. Trial by error is also fraught with issues. Even if you are bitten by a viper and you are immune to its poison you may just think you lucked out “wow, that was lucky it didn’t inject venom” – Very difficult to work out most rings.
Before I bombard you with tables I will stop us there. Each category has a DC (starts mid-late teens and early 20s for the harder categories) and works its way up above 30 and into the 40s. The reasoning behind this is that the longer you use an item, or experiment or spend time around it and using it then the greater chance of success you will have on identifying that wand of fireballs.
Understanding languages, wearing/wielding/using an item, a thorough investigation using tools and dedicated knowledge, attempting to activate it, watching it being activated before you swiped it from that merchant or street performer or Big Bad guy and even Luck can come into play when trying to identify a magic item.
This isn’t to make it harder or impossible to make identifying magic items – but to make them feel more magic and open up chances for narrative descriptions of that moment that Tom the Menacing realised he was holding the last blade crafted by the master blade-singer Elenore Moonbrow.
Just something to think about…
Thanks for dropping by for a sneak peak into my madness this weekend. If you are interested in what this system looks like I will be posting it later on after I have thrown it at my party to be ‘live tested’ a few times. Don’t forget to come back next week and lastly, as always, don’t forget to roll with advantage,
The Brazen Wolfe
Brazen Wolfe Tabletop 