The Book of Artifacts

 

This just arrived for me, a print-on-demand product from DTRPG.

It's pretty much what it says on the cover: a whole bunch of magical artifacts for AD&D2e. It also includes some notes on the use of artifacts within an AD&D2e campaign, and a bunch of tables with which to generate the various random powers the artifacts are supposed to have.

I like the concept of these artifacts in a campaign. They tend to be ridiculously powerful and unbalancing, but at least they're each unique. I'm not a huge fan of the vast number of generic +1 swords and Potions of Healing and what-not that tend to give player characters their superhero powers.  I think magical doo-dads should be a bit special, or else they just become a stand-in for modern or sci-fi technology.

Plus, I like the idea that magical things should be just a little bit perilous to the user. Knowing that using an object of Mighty Arcane Power™ might make your legs fall off means that employing it becomes a meaningful action, not just a handy deus ex machina. 

Will I actually use any of the contents of this book? Probably.  They're a hoot.

The key is to make sure that they don't stick around long enough for a character to make them the major part of their personality, or else players will get quite upset when they're taken away, one way or another. Unless that would be amusing to me.... in which case, we'll see. 

Library in Miniature

 

I'm not sure what the function of this piece of jewellery is: maybe a belt buckle, or a wristwatch with a spring-cover.... I don't know.

However, in a D&D game, this is obviously a portable wizard's library, magically compressed into some kind of little stasis bubble. The wizard could, with the appropriate commands, enlarge it again and free it from its stasis, refer to any of the volumes or items on the shelves, and then shrink it back down again and return it to his pocket or pouch.

I imagine it would be a highly sought-after item for a travelling magician, though with the particular down-side that one's entire library could be stolen by some random pickpocket.

Apparatus-like Mechanism of Kwalish-ish

I'm in the process of building a digital model of a magical doo-dad similar to, but crucially not identical to, nor actually called the Apparatus of Kwalish.

The players in my AD&D campaign have one, and they don't seem likely to give it up willingly. Having a 3d-printed model of it would be quite cool, I think.

However, just how easy it will be to actually print this thing is yet to be seen. It will be doable, certainly, but I suspect I might have to cut it up quite a bit.

This afternoon has been spent building the pilot's chair.

Here's the view (so far) from behind.

The body is actually fully enclosed.
The panels are separate and removable
for access to the interior.

Later...

Right, I've got the outer shell of the tail pretty much done, though I'd like to do something a bit more interesting with the flippers. At the moment they're a bit flat and boring... maybe a few ribs or something. Just how to go about that I'm not yet quite sure.

Underneath those plates I want to put a bunch of clockwork-looking stuff, cogs and push-rods and the like.

Next Day

Added a bit of panel detail to the tail fins
to make them a bit less bland and featureless

And underneath... CLOCKWORK!
(Don't look too close, it's just a bunch of garbage really).

A Bit Later

Pilot's control panel

Seen from the passenger compartment

I've now done the pilot's control panel. The levers and stuff are all pretty chunky, as I've built them with a view to FDM printing. They'll look quite a bit more delicate in physical form.

Flame Tongueish

This promo image for the Hellboy reboot movie led me to think about a variant on that old D&D chestnut, the Flame Tongue magic sword.

Essentially, it would have a sort of Heat Metal effect on the blade, as in the Druidic spell. The longer it is wielded by its user, the hotter the blade becomes and the more heat damage it will inflict in addition to its sharpened-metal-bar damage. The heat damage would start out in the first round as an additional d3, then 2d3 in the second round, 3d3 in the 3rd, and tops out at +4d3 heat damage thereafter.

The twist (not much of a twist really) is that the heat will also gradually propagate through the grip, burning the hand of the wielder if they're not immune to that sort of damage. I'd run it on an increasing scale — say, no heat damage in the first round, then +1 point of damage per round (i.e. 1 point, then 2 points, then 3 points, an so on) until it's doing as much heat damage to its wielder as it could to a target (i.e. 12 points per round of burning). The wielder, in addition to taking the damage, would have to make a Will save at -1 per 2 points of heat damage, to not involuntarily drop the sword.

The sword cools when not being held at twice the rate it heats up.

Limited-Use Magical Doo-Dads

There's a system for determining whether or not your magical gizmo still works or not that I read somewhere some time ago, and that I rather like.

Rather than giving it a set number of charges remaining, you assign to it a die — anything from a d2 to a d1,000,000,000,000.

Every time the macguffin is used, the die is rolled: if a 1 turns up, it fizzles, fails to operate, and is out of charges from that point.

This system has two advantages:

• First, it adds a degree of uncertainty to the use of magical gew-gaws. I don't imagine them coming with a little read-out showing exactly how much fuel is left in the tank, and I don't think the characters using the thing should have that information either.
• Second, it reduces the amount of record-keeping that either the player or the GM has to remember to keep track of.

The easiest thing, from the GM's point of view, is to just let the player know which die they should be rolling to activate the thingumajig. The down-side to that (if it is, in fact, a down-side) is that it gives them some information about the state of charge of the doohickey.

The slightly more tiresome method is for the GM to secretly roll the die every time they attempt to use the framistat. The possibility here is that an unscrupulous GM might take advantage of the secrecy to remove from his or her campaign a magical splandlefloopit that is causing them irritation.

My personal choice would generally be the former, but that's mainly because I'm really very lazy.

Magic items: Sentient potion bottles

This is an illustration by Willy Pogany from 1909, when he illustrated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I've never really read the Rubaiyat myself, but judging by Pogany's illustrations, it's roughly 90% about naked dancing girls. Anyway.

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These bottles were originally a set, but have long since been scattered to the four corners of the world through the vicissitudes of the years. Each one creates its own unique magical elixir (select potion type randomly, 1d3 doses per day), and each has its own personality. Some are cheerful and helpful, some are surly and obstructive, some are just supremely ennué. Most tend to be free with advice, even when that advice is just "Go fuck yourself".

They appear to be made of coloured translucent glass, but are considerably tougher than any normal glass. They are certainly not indestructible, however (AC 10, 1-6 d6 hit-points) and can be broken or melted with sufficient destructive persistence. They will heal damage like other living creatures, but do so at just one hit-point per day — they cannot benefit from healing magic, though a Mending spell might return a hit-point or two, depending on the generosity of the GM.

Spell Book record sheet

I have created an A5 PDF for tracking the contents of a character's (or NPC's) spellbooks.

In my campaign, a standard spellbook is 100 pages, and each spell requires one page per spell-level* to inscribe. Therefore, the number of spells that can be written into a spellbook depends on the levels of the spells involved.

This file includes an array of check-boxes on the front page to indicate how many pages have been filled, and rows for the spell names, spell levels (and thus pages filled by them), casting/preparation time, and material components.

Using this form, it's a simple matter to keep track of which spell is in which book, how many books the character (or NPC) needs, and... and...

And probably some other stuff.

It should be handy for the DM too, for generating spellbooks-as-loot. The sheet can just be handed to the player when they manage to get past all the traps guarding the book. Or, if they don't... then not.

The PDF can be downloaded here. It's about 289KB.

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* Note: I've converted all the spells into 20 spell levels, so for normal campaigns that would be more like two pages per spell level.

Magical Skull Mask

Magical skull

Huh? Huh? How can this not be a magic item?