D&D 5E Kickstarter for Lost Artifacts of Greyghast (A 5e Magic Item Compendium)

[TheScribbler]

This went up on Kickstarter yesterday, thought it might be of interest (and, full disclosure, I have been brought on to edit the text).

Lost Artifacts of Greyghast Kickstarter

The KS video isn't particularly serious until a few minutes in, but all the necessary information is there and in the campaign description.

Many-Sided Dice--creators of the popular "Magic Items That Are Better Than Nothing" and "Traps to Worry Your Players" series--is proud to present their first published product for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Hundreds of magic items for your D&D game await. Every single one with rich backstories, mechanics for interesting Identification using our Variant Rules or your own, and mechanics that will give your characters vibrant and unique new ways of interacting with the game and adventuring without breaking campaigns due to out of control power levels.

We're convinced the items in our book will add layers of depth, fun, and function to virtually any setting and nearly any game.

Why settle for boring "+1 swords" or ridiculous "staff that does some spells from the PHB" when you can have items that make characters part of a larger history and world that allow them to embrace whole new ways of role-playing their characters?

Lost Artifacts of Greyghast is the compendium for you.

Here's the rundown on the design philosophy of the book:
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Three major things set the items in our book apart from other compendiums, either in the great wide world of homebrew content or real products out there today:

First... our philosophy about what makes a magic item great.

We believe, and always have for all of our games, that the great takeaways from the experience aren't just whether a number showed up on a dice or how optimal one's build for their character was, it's the stories you tell after the game is over--the War Stories. And if you've been around RPGs long enough, you know what I'm talking about. The best parts of any game are the things you talk about years later, still.

And, from that, it's rare to fall in love with a +1 sword. You don't very often hear stories about the incredible wand that could cast some spells from the Wizard Spell List a few times a day. They're useful items and you want them in your game, but they're not the sorts of things you'll end up wrapping your character around and hear players tell stories about long after the game ends.

That's our goal. An item should be unique, memorable, and something that gets talked about and mused over from the moment it shows up to well after it leaves your game world or campaign.

Second... the extra content that comes with each one.

We designed each item in our compendium to have its own backstory and history. These items are called Lost Artifacts of Greyghast because we think of them as the remnants of ancient cultures in your world, weapons of destiny created by long gone heroes, forbidden wonders lost to time. There may only ever be one in your whole world and whether more or less "powerful", it has an Origin and a purpose it was created for.

Naturally, you don't have to use our Origin or history and can insert your own; but what sets us apart from other collections of magic items is that we give you--the DM--loads of rich, available, and well-written resources to use to build a better game. It's not just an index of items, it's half-a-campaign setting just waiting on your own world to give it context.

That brings hundreds of ideas to your fingertips for new Factions, new Adventures, new Dungeons, new worldbuilding elements. The items in this book kick off with flavorful stories of someone that once owned it and something they once did. The history of the item helps you fit it into your world in a meaningful way, giving players not just "a sword" but a sword from a particular time, made by a particular cult, in service to a particular master... and that sword drifted through the world, lost and found again by new champions. And now, it is theirs.

Virtually every item in the compendium requires a unique attunement, special to it and it alone. These attunements will provide you with whole quest arcs for your campaign in order to complete (like "travel between two cities" or "speak the name of a long dead Archrduid" to attune) and things for your players to do, learn, risk, or develop. We're so convinced you'll love the ideas you get from the attunements that we believe it'll make you want to invent your own for every item you'll ever create yourself.

And third... we believe mechanics should give players new options and keep the game playable.

A great item gives your player new things to do with their character and not just add basic +1 bonuses, grant spells already in the game, or change damage types for the sake of it. Offering a shortsword with +0, +1, +2, and +3 variations is not offering four separate items. Having magic arrows that each do a different type of damage (fire, cold, etc.) is not having a dozen arrows to choose from.

A wand or staff that casts a theme set of spells (fire spells from the book, mind-altering spells from the book, etc.) is boring. Done. And many collections are filled with these sorts of things. We aren't.

Our items push the rules a little, give players new features to interact with or tactics to try in combat--and none of it is game-breaking or campaign wrecking. Some of our items have more dramatic and exciting effects, do great damage and/or allow a character vastly exceed what they can normally do... but all have been play-tested, balanced, and added to this compendium as "Safe for Play" items that may not be as amazingly powerful as a +3 Vorpal Sword of Wounding and Returning, but it'll be a magic item your player will wrap their character around and have a hard time letting go of.

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This is from the first update:

The Shattered Standard of Wex

We wanted to make an item that would first make Warlocks and Druids (an odd combination) perk their ears up when they heard anyone mention its history. The names, of course, are changeable (but can also be included in your own world's history--perhaps so long ago, they refer to nothing still around).

The idea being some sad item--a basic wooden shield--whose truly most epic experience or turn in the world was long ago in a battle between forces that cannot ever reconcile, truly.... the Unreal and Alien power of the Great Old Ones and the very Real and Natural power of our Universe in the form of Druidic magic. And whatever weapons of great destiny and power existed in that war--that must have raged across the land, blighting and destroying everything--are all gone.

Only this humble and broken thing remains.

And having been left in that place for so long... ages... eons?... soaking up the chaotic swirl of forces deep in the strange air and soil and water...? It has been changed by them. Both. It is an artifact that might win the respect of a wandering cultist or witch or magus or druid or greenseer or spirit... because they know of that obscure cataclysm. This is a surviving piece of a history the world cares and knows almost nothing of.

Then again? Maybe those sorts see it as perverse. An insult that it still exists. An artifacts of a war that nobody won. Whose hatreds still simmer even thousands of years later...

The mechanics? Smooth. Safe for a game, any game.

It counts as a +1 shield at the best of times... but only with a Reaction to activate in the event of danger. Which means it's not quiiiiiiiiiiite as good as a normal +1 shield because it "costs" a Reaction. A tiny cost, but a cost.

And, the "cost" of a Reaction to keep up a Resistance to Necrotic (Warlocky) or Poison (Druidy) damage is great... but that's 2 of 15 damage types that don't come up all the time and to have it costs that Reaction which makes one's offense (Opportunity Attacks) less common.

This item has been in two of my games and one player was a Warlock and one a Druid. Both held onto it as long as they could. Even when a "better" shield came along. Because they connected to it. They "got" it. The Warlock kept it as a sign of the dangers of letting his Patron do too much in this world--would delight in scenes with other cultists that recognize it, telling them the story behind it. The Druid used it well unto their 12th level--way, way later than I thought he would. He just fell in love with how serious it was. Unlike generic magic items, this meant something and he dedicated himself to eradicating Aberrations and Cultists and whatnot and used this shield as his standard... his "flag" almost.

That's what a little care and attention can do with a magic item. Maybe they're not super-optimal for the math game of every dungeon crawl, but when you get a player that wants to keep the flavor well past needing the mechanics...?

That's how you create a good story.

The Warlock died with it--that was my first game with it. He died fighting a Beholder in an icy cavern at the far end of the world. The Druid (a completely other game afterward) found it on the corpse of a dead warlock in an icy cavern at the far end of the world... and wondered how the Shattered Standard of Wex (I gave him the Origin) ended up in this place.

The Warlock player joined that second game as a new character after that and loved that the "lost artifact" lived on.

If I can point to an example of why we wrote them this way and crafted them this way...

THIS is why.

 

[Yunru]

Initial backing price seems quite high but eh, I'll back it.

 

[TheScribbler]

Yeah, but it looks like it's going to be 350+ pages with art for every item, which probably makes for a heck of a book. There is a ton of stuff here, and so many of the items seem like the sort of thing that a story arc or even campaign could be built around/use to draw in the characters.