1st Ed. Style Artifacts

Something I noticed while playing with my friends the other night was the fact that the original artifacts in the DMG varied in power from campaign to campaign. Each artifact had specific powers, then the GM rolled to see what it's specific powers were in his game.

Whereas now, as far as I can tell, each artifact has one set of powers and that's it. Just like a mundane weapon.

This seems...less cool to me. The fact that the players could look at the artifact and imagine what it's full powers might be, without ever knowing, was pretty cool. The fact that you could see it had 8 level 5 powers meant something. It was enticing. Made people want to go out and find the damn thing.

Is anyone still doing artifacts the old way? Are there any rules for grafting the old way onto current artifacts?

Hell, I always customize major artifacts.

And I run 'em as potential world-breakers, historical events to come. Not like the "medium big magic items" they are in the 3.5 books. :\

mattcolville said:

Is anyone still doing artifacts the old way? Are there any rules for grafting the old way onto current artifacts?

Click to expand...

Absofreakin' lutely.

There were a couple of major artifacts in my homebrew which were created with the 1e DMG in hand, then ported to 3e.

francisca said:

Absofreakin' lutely.

There were a couple of major artifacts in my homebrew which were created with the 1e DMG in hand, then ported to 3e.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I'd do. Ah well, more work for me!

the Jester said:

Hell, I always customize major artifacts.

And I run 'em as potential world-breakers, historical events to come. Not like the "medium big magic items" they are in the 3.5 books. :\

Click to expand...

I would consider those minor artifacts .

I was heavily influenced by MERPs in the way that I handle magical items. MERPs items just seemed vastly cooler than ordinary D&D vanilla magic items. The vast majority of items I introduce into a game are in some way unique. Characters never know what any item that they find does. So in a sense, I get that benefit of the item being mysterious out of almost every item. The way I figured it at the time, is that magic item creation was so labor intensive, that nobody would bother with plain old generic items. Under 3rd edition rules, that's not the case, but I still try to maintain that aura of mystery and specialness around every item.

I've never actually introduced an artifact into my games. I've introduced quite a few things in the 'minor artifact' range, but its always seemed to me that true artifacts were just not meant to be found. But, if I did introduce a major artifact into the games, I would definately be influenced in a large degree by the tables in the 1st edition DMG, as well as the treatment of the Cup and Talisman of Al'Akbar in 'Day of Al'Akbar' and the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords in 'Axe of the Dwarvish Lords'. In fact, if you open up my ratty old DMG, you'll find where I filled out several artifacts. For example, apparantly at one time I decided the Sword of Kos should have the following powers:

I: A B Q JJ TT
II: C D
III: F
IV: E V
V: B G
VI: M

d20 artifacts suck. Badly. My DM and I were just talking about that the other day; we were batting around ideas for making a system like the 1E one for artifacts. I think it would be something like gods - if it's a minor artifact, it gets so many powers from the minor column, and so many from the major; medium would get more, and major would get more. And of course, all artifacts should have a side effect...

All my artifacts are custom made. I don't have a list of powers either... I decide what I think the item does, and what it's drawbacks are, and I put 'em in! They're all majorly special in a particular way, and not all of them have horrific drawbacks. In fact, I've got one in a game with no drawbacks whatsoever... well, none exept the players can't figure out exactly how to work the thing, and that is a pretty big drawback. But fun to, as they work it out.