Anachronistic Weapons Aging Like Fine Wine

Everyone loves swords. And not just for fantasy games. In every game. No one cares if they’re anachronistic and don’t make sense. They’ll use them anyway. Swords in our modern games. Swords in our sci-fi games. Does it make sense that the mecha fights with a sword? No. No one cares.

It’s OK if it doesn’t make sense. It is more important for a game to be fun than to be realistic. But thinking about why swords are in the game can build verisimilitude that makes the game more engaging and interesting. So what kind of worldbuilding would support introducing old weapons into modern or futuristic games?

Ancient Weapons, Ample Power

Here is one idea. When a weapon is first created, it works as expected. The vast majority of weapons are destroyed, lost, or worn down to uselessness over time.

A few weapons survive though some combination of luck, craftsmanship, and careful preservation. Through magic or whatever equivalent supernormal force exists in the setting in question, these weapons slowly accumulate an animus of power. The longer they continue to exist in a usable state, the stronger they become. If they continue to see active use through the years, they accumulate power more quickly.

These need to be genuine weapons designed for use in combat. This does not include weapons designed for ceremonial or “parade” purposes – it only applies to weapons used in actual battle, with the intent to inflict harm. 

Such weapons become more deadly and powerful. But they’re not supernaturally durable, and can’t be substantially changed from their original construction; they can’t be reforged or re-engineered with more modern techniques and materials. Any repair or maintenance would have to stick to comparable materials and techniques from the weapon’s creation. A neanderthal’s obsidian axe would be immensely powerful because of its great age, but could only be used a few times before it would break. An ancient stone arrowhead would likewise be very powerful, but comparatively fragile.

In this world, this aspect of weapons is a relatively new discovery. Perhaps someone can mass-produce modern weapons that would take advantage of this quality in several hundred years, but that’s outside the scope of the game world. For the time being, those who wish to leverage the power of these ancient weapons must find the rare pieces in museums or private collections or ancient battlefields that survived to the present.

“Cursed” Magic Items From My Game

Last week: Auditing the Cursed Items of 5E D&D

I took a dive deep into my notes from the 5E games that I ran from 2017 to 2023 and came up with some interesting examples of "cursed" magic items, along with retrospective notes on how they were received. 

Storm Heresy Amulet (Magic, Amulet, Thunder, Lightning, Cursed). While attuned to this item, the wearer gains a +1 bonus to saving throws. They also gain resistance to fire and cold damage, as well as vulnerability to thunder and lightning damage. The item is cursed and cannot easily be removed or de-attuned.

This was one of the few items I found in my notes where the cursed status actually worked somewhat like how 5E's rules suggest, and prevent the wearer from de-attuning. In this instance it was applied to make it harder to swap item in and out, depending on the dangers faced. Note the +1 to saving throws makes the item compelling even if a PC expects that the resistances and vulnerabilities will be a wash.

Octopus Statue (Magic, Creepy). This small statue is clammy to the touch, and your breath smells faintly of seawater as long as you carry it. Once per day, if you roll a natural 8 on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you may reroll. You must use the new result. Each time you use this ability, tally one Coleoid Point.

Here’s a different drawback. The negative consequences of the item aren’t known until after considerable use. This one provides a nice bonus with a drawback of accumulating “points,” the effect of which is unknown… until the player accumulates too many. The player who found this item used it pretty judiciously, and never collected enough Coleoid Points for anything terrible to happen. If I recall correctly, it was either going to make them a were-octopus, or expose them to Aboleth influences. Possibly both!

Crown of the Dead (Magic, Necrotic, Attunement, Headgear). A creature attuned to the crown can assert control over a skeleton or zombie within 60 feet and issue commands to it as a bonus action. The wearer may control additional skeletons or zombies, but must make a concentration check at the end of each turn with DC = 12 + X, where X is the total number of undead controlled. The attuned creature takes on a semi-incorporeal appearance, is vulnerable to radiant damage, and has disadvantage on attack rolls, as well as Wisdom (perception) checks that rely on sight, while in sunlight. If the creature is reduced to 0 hit points while attuned to the crown, it dies immediately, without making death saving throws.

I count this one as a miss. Controlling low-level undead is fun, but that’s a lot of drawbacks. I like the flavor that using it keeps the wearer closer to death, but most 5E players are not willing to play so fast and loose with their characters' fates.

Frogkind Frock (Magic, Cloak, Attunement). The wearer of this cloak can breathe both air and fresh water. They must spend at least one hour per day immersed in water or mud or suffer a level of exhaustion that is not removed until they spend a long rest in water or mud. The wearer cannot de-attune from the cloak as long as they are exhausted.

This one did see a little bit of use, and I like the flavor of conditional de-attunement, but it’s a lotta work for one payoff (breathing water – and freshwater only, at that). If I were to do another pass at this one, I would give it another frog-related power like BIG JUMPS or a stretchy tongue.

Brass Eyeball (Magic, Attunement). While attuned to this item, a character can see anything that the eye can see. The eye has hardness 5 and 20 HP. If destroyed, the attuned person's eye is also destroyed.

I think this one was also met with a resounding “nope!” from the PCs. While it is potentially quite useful, attunement in particular might have been too much of an ask; after the PCs found more unambiguously positive magic items, it was easy to discard stuff like this, and not have to worry about big conditional drawbacks. This would resonate a bit more in a high-lethality old-school game, where the risk of death and dismemberment is so much more up-front, and the risk inherent in a double-edged magic item like this would seem much more reasonable. 

Abyssal Chain Belt (Abyssal, Fire, Attunement). This belt is made of broken halos linked together to form a chain. While attuned to this item, your strength increases by 2, to a maximum of 22. You have resistance to fire damage and 60' telepathy for purposes of speaking to fiends, who can act as if they have cast the Detect Thoughts spell on you while within 30'. Once per day, you may use a bonus action to ignite your hands, dealing an additional 3d6 fire damage on the next successful unarmed strike, grapple, or shove in the ensuing minute.

This one was a hit; one of the more daring players wore it for a good chunk of an extended campaign. Characters will go through a lot of trouble for a standing stat bonus, and giving fiends the ability to mindread the wearer led to some interesting situations. This has some of the same energy as the Demon Armor from the last post, but in a way that creates more interesting choices. 

Ancient Hourglass (Magic, Expendable, Transmutation) When you break this small hourglass and inhale the air from the empty half, you stop the flow of time for as long as you can hold your breath. The effect ends early if one of your actions or any effect you create during this period affects a creature other than you or an object being worn or carried by someone other than you. A Timekeeper will hunt you down in 12 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes, and 12 seconds to punish you for your crime against chronality.

Cursed items are mostly associated with gear that the player is expected to hold onto for a long time, but the same principles can apply to expendable items as well. Stopping time is powerful (and I like the Dragonball Z idea of holding one’s breath to stop time). The eventual price of using this item is serious (the Timekeeper is a no-joke enemy).

Auditing the Cursed Items of 5E D&D

Last week: Discourses on Cursory Curses, and Better Ways to Tempt PCs with Terrible Power

Armor of Vulnerability

This armor grants resistance to one of bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage, but vulnerability to the other two types of damage. While it could come in handy in narrow situations, it’s a net loss for the average combatant. 

Tempting the PC: Tweak the armor to grant vulnerability to only one damage type instead of two. It becomes something like a lesser version of the Armor of Invulnerability, but is still quite powerful. This makes the armor a tempting tradeoff, and introduces an additional tactical dimension, where a PC might seek to avoid a monster dealing the damage in question.

Breaking the Curse: For some reason, this item’s description notes that the Identify spell will reveal the curse. That’s contrary to the general rules for curses, which indicate that Identify doesn’t reveal a curse. It’s fine for a specific rule to supersede a general one – that’s part of 5E’s basic design. But I have no idea why this particular distinction was made for this particular cursed item, as it doesn’t serve any particularly obvious purpose.

That aside, we need to make it much harder to get this accursed armor off. Say the armor can only be removed while the character is on the brink of death. This can be done slowly the conventional way, if the wearer can be kept alive long enough; or quickly, as a single action, with the Remove Curse spell. Treating Remove Curse as the spell to cast in the right conditions, rather than a general panacea, helps a lot.

Berserker Axe

The axe grants +1 to hit and damage, and an increase of 1 HP/level. But the drawback is enormous; a range of penalties, particularly a clause that forces the PC to attack at random on a saving throw, including nearby allies.

Tempting the PC: The advantage of the weapon should be much greater. The HP gain is legitimately tempting (in my experience, 5E players always want more HP). But players also hate losing agency over their character, so I think we would have to offer something more tempting. We don’t have to invent something out of whole cloth; weapons like the berserker axe are, of course, a familiar trope in fantasy media. Offer the PC effects like these, that greatly amplify their effectiveness in combat, and they will have to think long and hard about passing on the power.

Breaking the Curse: Let’s pick something that shows the character’s patience and control winning out. Passing the Wisdom saving throw three times in combat without attacking another creature breaks the axe’s hold on the wearer, allowing them to discard it.

Deck of Many Things (Euryale Card)

I am not sure if this one counts, as it’s not an attuned item, but I mention it for completeness. Euryale is one of the cards in the famous Deck of Many Things; most cards are beneficial, but a few are negative, and this one is pretty nasty, hitting the PC with a permanent -2 to all saving throws. Something a little spicier than a generic saving throw penalty might be more interesting, but it’s certainly a strong penalty, and the PC will feel cursed.

Tempting the PC: No change required. The risk/reward proposition of the Deck of Many Things is tempting enough already.

Breaking the Curse: No major change required here either, as the condition is suitably high (only the magic of a god or another specific card in the deck can fix it). That said, the DM should make solving it through a god’s magic suitably difficult; a cleric should not just be able to spam Divine Intervention until the curse goes away. 

Demon Armor 

This is actually pretty appealing to a low-level character capable of wearing heavy armor; plate +1 is nothing to sneeze at, even if the other abilities (fluency in Abyssal and some unarmed strike damage) don’t come in handy often. The drawbacks, while situational, are severe (disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws versus demons). 

Tempting the PC: 5E loves to give out unarmed attacks, particularly as features for various ancestries; but with rare exceptions, most classes want characters to use weapons or magic, not unarmed strikes. Replace this ability with something that grants fire damage or a similar benefit to the character’s weapon attacks would be a nice upgrade. As with the berserker axe, there are more tempting examples in other media; Berserker Armor is a more compelling example than the rather modest benefits here, or the cursed armor from Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine (see second paragraph under “Grim and Grotty” here for an idea).

Breaking the Curse: Remove Curse appears again here, making the armor trivial to remove during rest, as long as the group has access to a cleric. Add a saving throw with an escalating DC based on how long the character has worn the armor, or how many times it has saved them from damage, to make it scarier to wear. For extra spice, perhaps a devil (as the sworn enemy of demons) could help a character remove the armor. Of course, dealing with devils brings its own complications…

Shield of Missile Attraction 

OK, this one is weird.

The shield offers resistance to damage from ranged attacks (that’s good!), but it’s also cursed (that’s bad). But it can draw fire away from your allies (that’s good!)... and it sends those attacks at you (that’s bad).

Many shield-carrying characters are tanks who want to take hits meant for squishier party members anyway. And the resistance means they’ll take less damage when those attacks do get past their superior AC. Moreso than the other cursed 5E items, this one is pretty close to being more obviously upside than downside. The biggest drawback is probably that the shield wearer will sometimes interfere with allied fire. My longest-running 5E group included an archer who was constantly sniping at enemies in melee with their allies, so this certainly would have come up as a problem.

Tempting the PC: Expand the range so that the shield covers a bigger area; 10’ is arbitrarily small. If you want to make it really spicy, change it from “ranged weapon attacks” to “ranged attacks” generally. At higher levels, ranged weapon attacks come up a lot less as most enemies are either melee heavies or employing magic (if you’ve ever played (or DM’d for) a 5E monk, think about how the Deflect Missiles ability came up less and less as they reached higher levels).

And please change the name. The coldly clinical and overtly descriptive name of “Shield of Missile Attraction” is a weirdly literal holdover from early D&D (it may even go back to Gygax himself, as he oscillated between evocative names loyal to Appendix N fiction, and names that sound like they belong on the cover of a user manual).

Call it the Shield of the Bloodied Defender of Grix or something fancy like that, and give it a backstory about a martyred paladin who died pierced by 999 arrows while holding off an army so his allies could escape.

Breaking the Curse: Find the remains of that paladin who first bore the shield and remove the Arrow of Hero Slaying still embedded in his remains to free his soul. Rather than just allowing the PC to drop the shield, give it an added ability to choose whether to attract or pass on any given attack.

Sword of Vengeance

This one is a boring +1 sword that piles on a bunch of restrictions, principally forcing the PC to repeatedly attack someone who damaged them. Restricting a character’s choices isn’t as fun as the designer’s think it is. In an authored narrative work, this can be a powerful tool for telling a story. In a game, this is frustrating and boring for many players, especially when their character is forced to do the same thing round after round. RPGs are about making choices. Be very wary of things that give players few or no choices.

Tempting the PC: This one is a close cousin to the berserker’s axe, and the same kinds of improvements apply. Give the sword some additional powers, like adding a Vampiric Touch on a finishing blow, or a movement bonus that kicks in when the sword’s wielder is pursuing an enemy that damaged them.

Breaking the Curse: This one actually says “You can break the curse in the usual ways.” Yaaawn. We’re beating a dead zebra at this point, but there should not be “usual ways” of dealing with curses, like something on your to-do list between picking up dry cleaning and mailing some letters. The ways should always be unique. 

The Sword of Vengeance offers a slightly more interesting alternative in that PCs can use the Banishment spell to expel the vengeful spirit. It’s cool that the players get a “clean” +1 sword out of the deal, but a one-time casting of a fourth-level spell isn’t that high of a bar to clear, and a +1 sword gets discarded pretty early in 5E’s high-powered adventuring world. To break the curse, a PC should have to investigate who the spirit was in life, learn why it sought vengeance, and do something to right its wrongs (or perform a compensatory action elsewhere in the world). Much more interesting. 

Axe of the Dwarvish Lords

Finally, we have an artifact. It’s suitably impressive, encompassing the effects of several lesser magic items that are quite good on their own.

Tempting the PC: No problem here. This is an artifact, a +3 weapon, with a whole suite of useful abilities. It’s suitable as a final gear upgrade for a tier 4 PC finishing a 1-20 campaign.

Breaking the Curse: The curse here is more interesting than some of the previous entries; it transforms non-dwarves to make them gradually more dwarf-like in appearance. This certainly tells a more interesting story than a -1 to some rolls, but is a non-factor for a PC who doesn’t care about character aesthetics. A more interesting curse might involve playing into the folklore aspects of mythological dwarves; an insatiable lust for gold, or a desire to carve great works on the sides of mountains, or tunnel into the depths of the earth. 

Despite the epic magic involved, Remove Curse still does the job just as well. Artifacts like the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords include instructions for their destruction, so consider simply saying that the only way to break the curse is to destroy the axe (or something similarly difficult). That will make a PC pause before running wild with this epic weapon.

Next Week: “Cursed” Magic Items From My Home Game

Discourses on Cursory Curses, and Better Ways to Tempt PCs with Terrible Power

When a player new to modern D&D finds something confusing – vestigial rules, or weirdly specific mechanics – they may wonder why the writers put them in the game. A veteran player will just shake their head knowingly, and cite – chapter and verse – the edition or supplement that set the precedent that later designers felt compelled to follow, even if the game’s fundamental playstyle had since moved on.

D&D 5E.14 is the ultimate compromise edition. This is both its strength and its weakness. In contrast to D&D 4E, which was a stark break from previous editions, 5E sought to embrace and preserve room for any and every concept, playstyle, and idea from the game's history. So while cursed items don’t fit within 5E’s typical play culture – here they are anyway, conspicuous, purposeless, staring up at their ashamed creators. “Why, Wizards of the Coast? Why do we exist?” The cursed magic items receive no satisfactory answer.

The 5E.14 DMG contains a mere half-dozen cursed items. It’s not hard to imagine why 5E’s writers didn’t make more. To begin with, they are no fun. “A curse should be a surprise to the item's user when the curse's effects are revealed,” the DMG advises. This does not comport with modern play styles at most tables. "Gotcha" cursed items feel like a holdover from an adversarial style of play that worked in the tournament environment of early D&D, but made less and less sense as the play culture moved further and further away from that early model.

Sure, we could just leave the cursed items out of the game. I’m sure that’s what many (most?) 5E groups do. But how would we change them if we wanted to fix them instead? 

The Lure of Power

Cursed items in folklore and fantasy stories aren’t like 5E’s cursed items. They don’t masquerade as useful things until a character picks them up and the GM/storyteller shouts “it's cursed!” Instead, they offer legitimate power… at a price ultimately too dear to pay.

So the first part of the cursed item fix is “tempting the PC.” The cursed item must offer legitimate advantages. It must do things the PC normally couldn’t do. It should be a fast track to power.

Curse Removal Made (Too) Easy

Antagonist:

“Cursed be the hand that made these fatal holes!
Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it!
Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence!
More direful hap betide that hated wretch,
That makes us wretched by the death of thee,
Than I can wish to adders, spiders, toads,
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives!”

PC:

“I cast Remove Curse.”

Antagonist:

“Oh. Crap. Well, carry on then.” 

Removing a cursed item is too easy in 5E. If a party member stumbles into attunement with a cursed item, they only need to cast Remove Curse, a third-level spell, to remove it again. Clerics typically have access to all spells each time they take a long rest, so there isn’t a “spells known” opportunity cost here, as there would be for a wizard. A fifth-level cleric can select the spell on a long rest and cast it without much trouble (no material components required). In practice, most of these cursed items won’t bedevil their victims for more than a night’s sleep. So the second part of the fix is brainstorming ways to “break the curse” that are more interesting than casting a relatively low-level, catch-all spell.

Let’s tour through the cursed magic items from the 5E.14 DMG and think up some potential fixes.

Next week: Auditing the Cursed Items of 5E D&D

Detectable Magic Is No Magic At All

I have a long, long list of complaints with D&D 5E’s spell list. Perhaps I will someday finish the entire alphabet, but it is more likely that my mind will crumble into dust before that particular project is ever completed. So let’s jump ahead and deal with one particularly troublesome spell: Detect Magic.

In 5E, Detect Magic is a 1st-level spell that can be cast as a ritual (which essentially means that it is free, as long as time isn’t of the essence). At higher levels, even the non-ritual version is pretty easy to deploy liberally, as full caster classes have an abundance of lower-level spell slots, which they rarely exhaust.

Put simply, Detect Magic is a spell that makes magic less magical. The unknown can trivially be flagged, categorized, and quantified. The status of a haunting hallway, mysterious monster, or nefarious NPC can often be quickly and easily diagnosed. Magic is decidedly mundane, ordinary, and known. (The spell Identify is also a problem for the same reasons, but at least has the dignity to restrict itself to one object per casting.)

I'll concede there is some logic to 5E's approach here. If every spell and magical item in the game follows the same taxonomic logic, players can understand how to interact with those effects. It supports the idea that the game’s schools of magic pervade everything magical within the world, and in running 5E, I have occasionally found that underlying taxonomy useful in interpreting my players’ proposed solutions to their problems.

But the spell incentivizes players to approach situations with a standard operating procedure. Much like Guidance – another problem spell, which is almost always correct to cast in any situation calling for an ability check, as long as action economy isn’t a factor – Detect Magic becomes the always-correct first step to evaluate an unknown situation. And that can be an easy way out of avoiding the more challenging process of manually engaging with the fiction.

I didn’t know how much this bothered me until players in my Knave game found magic items. The Knave rules also include a Detect Magic spell, but the game’s levelless approach to spells puts the opportunity cost of the spell on par with every other spell; and, of course, since magic in Knave is limited to spellbooks, players must physically obtain the spell, rather than selecting it during character creation or while leveling up. So a DM has the choice to simply not offer Detect Magic in a game where it would be disruptive.

The first truly magical object my players found in our Knave game was a glove that could invert hot and cold temperatures. If they could have cast Detect Magic and Identify on it, it would have been easy to tease out its exact mechanical function and limitations. But magic is magical in Knave because it is not easy to unpack logically. Its mechanics and functions are not obvious. So the PCs could only learn how it worked through trial and error.

That trial and error process, and the accompanying sense that PCs are tampering with the unknown, pushed the game closer to the Appendix N fiction that predated and influenced D&D and its descendants. And it’s a much more magical place to be.

Governing in Magical Fantasy World: Thrones

Like many (most?) medium-magic settings, the 5E D&D game I wrapped up last year assumed that artifacts and powerful magic items were mostly created in the distant past. Some of these supremely powerful items are essentially canned versions of adventuring magic. A Holy Avenger or Staff of the Magi was created for adventurers to use to fight monsters, or otherwise pursue adventurer-type goals.

But many other powerful items were created to solve more quotidian problems, or deal with day-to-day concerns. And that includes the problem of leadership and building stable societies in a world of chaos, magic, and monsters.

Consider, for example, Lunar Thrones.

Lunar Thrones are stationary artifacts that bestow a range of always-on spell-like abilities to an attuned ruler. Each Throne possesses different characteristics; abjuration and divination are common, including spells like Zone of Truth, Anti-Magic Aura, Planar Binding, Dimensional Anchor, and Hallow. The throne grants a spellcasting DC ranging from 15 to 20 depending on its potency, unless the attuned ruler already has a higher DC from class levels.

There are serious drawbacks to ruling from a Throne. It takes weeks to attune to a Throne. The attuned ruler also may not leave the vicinity of the throne without de-attuning from it; de-attuning causes a “hangover” effect, depending on the Throne, similar to the final clause in Raise Dead, or the last paragraph in Wish. The precise range one can travel while maintaining attunement varies from Throne to Throne, but is never greater than about a mile, and in many instances, is much smaller. Thrones also produce low-level side effects that are deleterious to the ruler's physical or mental well-being (for example, see the Minor Detrimental Properties table from 2014 DMG, pg. 220).

The Thrones provide significant magical protection, but were not designed to protect against physical force or other non-magical intervention, and they do not have offensive powers of any kind. Because the ruler can't retreat, relocate, or go into exile without losing control of the Throne, they are as vulnerable as an ordinary ruler to conventional takeover by force of arms, poisoning, or other tactics. So a Throne ruler is usually still reliant on a conventional military force and methods of projecting political and economic power to protect themselves. Scholars theorize that this is a feature, not a bug, in the eyes of whoever created the Thrones; to ensure there are ways to dethrone a ruler who becomes a tyrant.

Some societies have decided that the Thrones are worse than the problems they were meant to address, and have hidden their Thrones, buried them, or moved en masse away from them, to escape the succession of conquerors warring over them. Thrones are as resilient as other artifacts, and can only be destroyed through extreme and unusual measures.

Magic Itemization: Attuning to the Results

Previously: Streamlining 5E’s Designs

As much as I don’t care for the fiddliness of 5E’s charged and per-day use magic items, I recognize their purpose. They're meat to serve as a fine-tuning dial, allowing more nuance than the very broad sweep of attunement and expendables.

So some items may benefit from further constraints or complications, beyond just the three buckets of attunement, expendability, and once-per-day use. What else can we do?

Let’s return to Electric Bastionland’s principles for oddities:

1. One use only, disposable.
2. Limited number of charges. 
3. Random chance of depletion on each use. 
4. Large and clunky, or even immobile. 
5. A creature instead of an object. 
6. Requiring a very specific uncommon input, such as a fresh corpse.
7. Occupying a specific part of the body that can’t hold multiple things, like goggles, or gloves.

The middle three guidelines create some new space we can leverage. Below I've listed some thoughts on how we can use them, as well as a few more ideas inspired by the oddities.

Random Chance of Depletion

Similar to a usage die. Generally an improvement on charged items, because there’s no tracking – the chance of depletion always stays the same. Useful for items that have limited uses, but should feel unpredictable.

Large, Clunky, Immobile

Another good one. Think about the difference between finding a traditional crystal ball, as opposed to magical spring that simulates the same effect. The former is a useful magic item with few or no drawbacks. The latter is a resource that calls into question distance and time versus other priorities (“can we afford to visit the spring”?) invites resource trade-offs (“should we Teleport to visit the spring?”) and incentivizes downtime (“think of all the things we can scry if we spend a week at the spring”).

Creature (or Faction)

This can be useful too. Instead of a vial of Oil of Sharpness, how about a seed that grows into a Sword Palm, which produces a 1d2-2 fruit per month that can be drained for equivalent magic that must be used immediately? As with Large, Clunky, Immobile, by de-tool-ifying the magic item, we can incentivize downtime, base-building, and domain creation. Instead of a flying carpet, why not a whistle to signal aarakocra allies who can ferry characters from place to place – at the cost of faction intrigue? Or a temperamental flying mount? Removing the compactness and convenience of the inert item forces choices.

Fragile  

Building on the Electric Bastionland list, I’ll add a few more ideas of my own.

I’m still experimenting with fragility. Fragile objects are somewhat like Random Chance of Depletion, except their termination isn’t tied to their use, but rather exposure to other conditions. 

Consider again the classic crystal ball mentioned above. What if it was as fragile as a fine dining crystal? Even simple combats or environmental hazards become difficult for a PC carrying such an object. Keeping it safe at home – or bringing it into danger – is a legitimate choice. 

The main drawback is the memory load; there has to be a trigger to remind the DM and/or the PC to check if the object breaks in situations where its in danger, but not actively in use.

Attracts Unwanted Attention

Another personal favorite. 5E has a few items like this, but could have more. For example, the Orb of Dragonkind requires a Charisma check; on a failure, it charms its user and can cast Suggestion at will. What does it suggest? Probably to use another one of the orb’s features and call dragons within 40 miles to the PC’s location. Uh-oh.

Cumulative Penalty or Cost

One way to simplify the rules baggage of a charge system is to simply convert the charges into another game currency already in use. An item that imposes a level of exhaustion has a clear and finite number of “charges,” insofar as characters can only take on so much exhaustion before dying. The same is true for hit points, ability score drain, and a dozen other things PCs already care about. Attack the character sheet.

Unpredictable or Uncertain Drawback

If the drawback isn’t cumulative, we should make it uncertain or hard to predict. Why? A fiendish battle axe that grants +2 to Strength and -2 to Wisdom is predictable. It’s a no-brainer for the barbarian who already chose Wisdom as a dump stat. A fiendish battle axe that grants +2 to Strength – but also disadvantage on Wisdom saving throws when fiends are nearby – is a different matter. 

Should the PC use it all the time, or only selectively? What can the PCs learn about possible threats before raiding the dungeon -- how likely is it that demons dwell there? The PC has a risk/reward calculation to make, and an incentive to be careful and thoughtful about the in-game environment. 

I have also used items with cumulative risk built in. For example, in my Gravestone Deep adventure, I included a magic item with the following clause: “Using [the item] more than once per day will result in a cumulative X-in-6 chance that [the devil] escapes, where X is equal to the number of attempts beyond the first.”

I don’t love this design, as it requires tracking the number of uses; but it definitely provides the push-your-luck aspect of play that I love.

Magic Itemization: Streamlining 5E’s Designs

If your game uses inventory slots, like Knave, you’re good, because everything is a choice. Even a magic item that is stronger than anything you already have compels a decision: what to drop to make room?

If your game is level-less, like Electric Bastionland, you’re good, because the game’s “oddities” are one of the only forms of diegetic advancement in a game where characters don’t have an intrinsic class advancement track. The guidelines for oddities are helpful for thinking about magic items generally:

1. One use only, disposable.
2. Limited number of charges. 
3. Random chance of depletion on each use. 
4. Large and clunky, or even immobile. 
5. A creature instead of an object. 
6. Requiring a very specific uncommon input, such as a fresh corpse.
7. Occupying a specific part of the body that can’t hold multiple things, like goggles, or gloves.

The first two and the last two will be familiar to D&D players. The middle three are probably underutilized in most D&D games. We’ll come back to those.

Speaking of D&D, if your game is 5E, it’s… complicated. There is little or no encumbrance tracking at most tables, and the game orients character advancement through class abilities. Whereas 3.5E and 4E treated magic items as part of a leveling system, 5E is agnostic about what role magic items should play, and their widely varying mechanical implementation reflects that ambiguity.

For example, the Fochlucan Bandore, an uncommon magic item in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, allows the attuned user to cast eight (!!) spells once per day each, most of which are quite powerful and routinely useful. A bard in 5E gets something like 1.5 spell slots per level, so finding this item is the equivalent of a handful of levels in spellcasting advancement.

When a discussion of instances like this appears on Reddit or Twitter, people are mostly focused on “balance” and “power level.” My issue is different, as I don’t care (much) about balance. I dislike 5E magic items because of the added layer of complexity, the implicit tracking, the subsystems and non-universal rules, and the distraction from the game’s emphasis on class advancement. Not that class advancement needs to be central to gameplay, but once 5E has decided to center it in that way, it makes the business of complex magic items a problem.

Consequently, I’ve streamlined how 5E magic items work, and plan to streamline further. Here’s a review of the principles of magic items in 5E, and consideration for how we can make them leaner and meaner.

Attunement

The game’s central mechanic for limiting the use of magic items. It usually appears on items that grant passive, always-on buffs or advantages, although certain items that grant a broad swath of abilities (like the aforementioned Fochlucan Bandore) also require it. Note that magic weapons typically don’t require attunement, because their use is already implicitly bounded by the action economy of combat.

Attunement is… OK. Like a lot of 5E’s mechanics, it’s a non-diegetic compromise between different styles of play over the previous editions. But three is an easy number to remember, and it compels PCs to make choices, so it’s OK. We can keep attunement.

Slots

Slots were king in 3.5E, following something like the classic ‘90s CRPG model of a body diagram with spots for boots, cloaks, helms, and so forth. This form still works well in video games – Disco Elysium, for all of its strange qualities, has a pretty familiar slot system for equipment. Slots have an appealing toyetic quality, as they make characters feel like customizable dolls or action figures.

5E nominally retains slots, but is less concerned with balancing around them (from the DMG: “a character might be able to wear a circlet under a helmet, for example, or be able to layer two cloaks”).

We will mostly ignore slots, except as a common sense judgment call on the part of the DM; i.e., we’re not tracking slots specifically, but don’t try to wear two magic hats at once (unless of course you have two heads, a non-zero possibility for a veteran adventurer).

Expendable

This category includes potions, ammunition, scrolls, and similar items. Some games do struggle with “rainy day” syndrome, where characters hoard items they will never use, but my players have been good about avoiding this. 

My only issue with expendable items is that a player in a tight spot will sometimes browse through everything in the inventory, as if they were in a point-and-click adventure game, hoping to find a solution to their current problem. “The answer is not on your character sheet” applies here. But the eureka moments, when an expendable item is used in an unusual or unexpected way, are worth it.

Expendable items also are much less likely to break games. If an unrestricted magic item trivializes combat or exploration, it’s a problem the DM needs to deal with. If a magic item that can be used only once trivializes a challenge, the choice of one and how to use it becomes the challenge.

We will keep expendable items; if anything, we should probably use them more often. They’re diegetic, they’re easy to understand, and of course, they compel players to make choices.

Charges and Once-Per-Day Usage

This is where things get tricky. If a magic item isn’t naturally bounded by action economy in combat; or expendable; or limited by attunement/slots, then it usually works on charges. Some items in the 5E DMG can only be used once per day, which essentially means they have a single charge. In many previous editions, charges were non-renewable, so charged items were just a form of expendable item. But most 5E items with charges recharge each day.

Charges are bad because they require two tracking actions; subtracting the charges on use, and then adding them back the next day (usually after completing a rest). Each item rechanges at its own rate, which means the PC will have to check the item description every time they rest to remind themselves of if it recharges at a fixed rate or on a die roll. The variability of the recharge in theory creates a resource management game. In practice, at least in my experience, it rarely factors into the PC’s decision to expend the last few charges. 

For example, the 5E DMG’s Mace of Terror has three charges, and regains 1d3 charges at dawn. Is any player going to conserve a third and final charge on Tuesday, on the off chance they roll low, and then have a particularly acute need to frighten people on Wednesday? No. The spread between empty and full is just too small to worry about, for an effect they probably don’t use every session.

I prefer magic items that – however strange they may be – have a sort of “common sense” reasoning behind them, or are just intuitive, or folklorically logical in a way that the player’s essentially memorize how they work and internalize them into their character. Charges work against that.

We’ll start by ruling that tracking any kind of variable numbers is ruled out. We keep once-per-day, because a binary, used-or-unused state is easy to remember, particularly if each gaming session covers a different day (an advantage of tying in-game passage of time to out-of-game time). Players can almost always remember if a particular item was used that same session. 

Next: Attuning to the Results

Magic Itemization: Smoke Bombs and Sip Tests

In reviewing my entry in his Wavestone Keep contest, Bryce Lynch raised an interesting question.

“I note an interesting thing while going over this: the one time magic item. What do you do with these in your game? A longsword with a one time use smoke bomb in the hilt, or a bottle of whiskey thatinduces vomiting … the ensuing vomit instantly hardening like a web spell. These sem, to me, like things that are to use in game in practice. How do you figure out what to do without voiding the magic items usefulness or communicate the effect in such a way it can be leveraged? Otherwise you’re just moria-gulping potions at random when you’re out food and hoping something good happens.”

This is worth considering on a few levels.

First, it is an example of how writing an adventure (or any gaming “tool”) reveals all kinds of assumptions we can easily gloss over when preparing material only for our own use. I have always used a lot of single-use items, and I usually describe them in a way that gives the PCs a good idea of what to expect before they’re used. 

For the sword with the smoke bomb in the hilt, I would describe a glass sphere swirling with smoke. If the character had a relevant background (for example, they were a thief) I might say they recognize this sort of device from past experience. Likewise, with the whiskey, I might also link to a character’s past or background, or use the “sip” rule wherein imbibable magic can be intuited by taste, without consuming it. Admittedly, the weird effect of the whiskey is a bit of a stretch (a retch stretch?) to plausibly anticipate. I may have gone too far in a few places.

But that's all my own internalized adjudication techniques. None of it is on the page, available for the purchaser to use. Which means its a blind spot that needs to be accounted for when creating something for publication.

Magic Itemization: How Will I Know?

Early on in my long-running 5E game, I created physical cards for magic items. Players appreciated having a physical, tangible rules reminder, and long-time players accumulated entire decks of cards bound by rubber bands. When we pivoted to online play in the pandemic, the cards were replaced with less evocative (but still useful) digital cards.

But I wasn’t completely satisfied with this method. Magic items were not mysterious or dangerous. There was a rush of excitement when the card was revealed, but it faded quickly as the players boiled the item down to in-game applications. The PCs forgot about many of the magic items they found before ever using them, particularly in virtual sessions. What if we could make magic items a bit more, well, magical? A bit more mysterious?

Untested Rule: Advanced Identification

From page 138 of the DMG:

The identify spell is the fastest way to reveal an item's properties. Alternatively, a character can focus on one magic item during a short rest, while being in physical contact with the item. At the end of the rest, the character learns the item's properties, as well as how to use them. 

Instead, we institute the following:

A character can focus on one magic item during a short rest, while in physical contact with the item. They learn any “tags” on the item, as well as the first sentence of its description. They may be able to use the item, inferring its workings from trial and error; but the DM does not confirm speculation nor reveal mechanical details, only observed effects.

When a spellcaster uses the Identify spell – or equivalent magic – they learn any “tags” on the item; the first sentence of its description; and the number of sentences within the description. The spellcaster may also make an Intelligence (Arcana) ability check (DC 10 for a common item, DC 13 uncommon, DC 16 rare, DC 19 very rare, DC 22 legendary, and DC 25 for an artifact). They learn a number of sentences beyond the first equal to the margin by which their result exceeded the DC. A spellcaster may re-attempt this check only if they spend uninterrupted time focused entirely on the magic item in question; one hour (common), one day (uncommon), one week (rare), one month (very rare), one year (legendary), or one decade (artifact).

Ultimately this may be too much rigamarole. A mini-game may be a game the first time it’s engaged with; by the 20th time, it can easily become rote work. But I think it would restore the mystery and danger to magic items; a risk-reward calculation for their use; and an incentive to engage with them during downtime.