Loot! ...er, Artifacts and Soul Objects
As has been mentioned in several other threads over the years, my campaign used different terminology for items than the "core" IH. There were several reasons for this, mostly stemming from the fact that my setting was designed from the days of 2nd Edition to allow PCs to (at least potentially) create artifacts; if you've read all of the above posts in this thread then you know already that I always did my utmost to preserve as much of my old games as possible when bringing the setting into new rules systems. I write this explanation now because it will be relevant to discussions about the powerful artifacts that shaped my game, as well as the setting it took place within.
So, to begin: in 2nd Edition the only official explanations which were offered for how items get created made it inordinately difficult and time-consuming to do so- it was essentially intended that PCs should not be given the ability to make items of their own, as far as I could tell. Characters were required to undertake quests for incredibly rare ingredients, up to and including physically impossible objects such as "essence of love" or the "heart of a cloud." Often, to construct even a fairly low-powered item such as Wings of Flying, multiple quests would be necessary. In addition, and this was the real killer, the
Enchant An Item spell required the caster to actually sacrifice CON points to cast it and make an item- meaning that a PC would be making himself less healthy and more prone to die, and thus less suitable for adventuring in the first place, to make even one item. Finally, only Wizards had the
Enchant spell- priests or other caster-types couldn't make items at all without a Wizard's help. Of course, all of this then begs the question: if these things are so hard to create, why the Hells would anybody actually go to the trouble of doing it? Clearly examples of such items already exist, so where did they come from? Something was badly missing.
3rd Edition solved the problem in what I considered an elegant and satisfying manner: rare ingredients were still assumed to be required, but it was all abstracted into a simple gp cost, which was directly tied to how powerful the spells were for making the item. Also, although a personal sacrifice was still necessary for the item crafting, it now cost XP rather than CON- which meant that not only was the cost much less severe in the short term (since most characters in a position to actually craft items would have lots of XP), but it wasn't a permanent loss, since more XP could be gained through adventuring. I wholeheartedly embraced the new approach and started figuring out how to translate my old items into the new edition's mechanics.
But I encountered a problem when it came to translating one of my critical 2nd Edition innovations into 3rd: the
Enchant An Artifact spell. See, in 2nd Edition, I came up with rules to allow casting of 10th-level (and a few higher) spells; one of these was the artifact-creation spell. I was doing this translation before the Epic-Level Handbook was even a mote in WotC's collective eye, let alone announced, so I had to make my own system of beyond-9th-level spells and incorporate the artifact rules in with that somehow. That system of magic, which I called Ultramagic, was an integral part of my campaign, but it's not relevant here except in that I clearly couldn't make an
Enchant An Artifact Ultraspell since the 3E paradigm had eliminated its lower-level antecedent. 3E item crafting was done through feats- so clearly I needed to make one.
But along with this a new snag reared its ugly head: artifacts were no longer a singular category! We now had Minor and Major Artifacts to deal with. What was the difference between these categories? Well, in the DMG, there apparently wasn't one, except that Minor Artifacts exist as multiple copies and Major ones don't. That was a most unsatisfying way to operate, for me, so I needed to come up with a proper definition between the categories- and not just that, but one which would let me decide how many new feats to make! My eventual solution was to define a "Minor" artifact as being simply an item that breaks the arbitrary limits of non-artifacts- that is, a +6 or better weapon, a wondrous item using a metamagicked 9th-level spell, and so on. A "Major" artifact would then be an item which really contained greater-than-mortal level power, in the form of an Ultraspell or psionic Ultrapower. I then created two new feats, Craft Minor and Craft Major Artifact, which would be "meta-feats" that affected how the character's other item crafting feats worked. That is, Craft Minor allows the character to break the limits of basic items, while Craft Major allows the character to put real earth-shaking powers into an item (like that cute little
Nuke spell I've mentioned in other threads). Finally, every single Major Artifact- whether its crafter wants it to be or not- is sentient. They don't always (or even usually) communicate with people around them, even their own wielders, but they can use their own powers if it suits them, and they have a funny way of refusing to work or Just Going Away when their purposes call for such.
Enter the ELH. When that came along, it defined a new system for greater-than-9th-level spells which was radically different from my system of Ultraspells, and furthermore defined ways to create "epic" items which was fundamentally at odds with my own Craft Artifact feats. There was also the slight issue that the ELH actually defined a new category of items which were
not artifacts (because PCs still couldn't make those) and yet were greater than normal items. I resolved the essential conflict by noting the congruence between these new "Epic Items" and my own definition of Minor Artifacts- basically, my Minor Artifacts were exactly what WotC was now calling an Epic item. So for my game, I postulated that the "Craft Epic [X]" feats were unnecessary, and that Craft Minor Artifact would still be used in the place of all of them; furthermore, because my rules for artifact crafting said that Minor Artifacts cost 5 times what a regular item cost, and Major Artifacts cost 10 times as much, I kept my cost multipliers in place instead of using the ELH ones- which suddenly meant that most of the ELH items cost only about half as much in my game. But I clearly needed a system, now, to deal with these newfangled Epic spells in items, since it would make no sense to allow Ultraspells to be made into items but not Epics (most of which were less powerful than most Ultraspells). Eventually I adapted the system of mitigating factors and reverse-engineered it based on spell-level equivalence, to come up with the new rules for putting Epic spells into items.
Now, enter the Immortal's Handbook. UK promised to eventually deliver rules for PCs crafting artifacts, and more importantly, put the rule in place to limit gods to only four items. Well, since I had my own system already, the artifact rules would clearly be irrelevant until I had them to compare with mine; of course, we never did see the rules he had in mind for 3.X, since that was to be part of Grimoire which was never released. But the second rule put a new snag into things- my own Epic NPCs and NPC deities already featured lots of items, in many cases already going way beyond the limit of 4. Clearly something had to change. Again.
The resolution to this conflict came when I saw the rules for Resonance- which among other things discuss items called "soul objects" which contain portions of the creator's power in the form of QP. Given my already-discussed pseudoscientific paradigm for what gods are, coupled with the fact that in UK's system the god's artifacts grow with the god as it gains DR and HD, it was immediately clear that the only possible way items could do that in my setting was if the "artifacts" were really part of the deity all along.
And so, the term "Soul Object" was redefined in my game to mean something quite different from what UK meant when using it: a Soul Object would specifically be an item that a deity crafted out of part of its own soul, which took the physical form of a Major Artifact with powers defined by the deity at creation time, and which would be capable (via the connection to the living deity) of growing and changing its power set as the deity itself grew and changed. Deities would be limited to having four Soul Objects, just as the IH specified, but there would be no limit on items or artifacts crafted in the usual manner with the preexisting rules. Furthermore, every deity would be capable of crafting Soul Objects for itself, but only those deities who had the standard feats would be capable of crafting items or artifacts that were
not Soul Objects. Since Soul Objects were invariably Major Artifacts regardless of what powers they contained, they'd all be sentient and capable of independent action when necessary, but since they were literally part of the creator's own soul, they would never act against their creator under any circumstances.
So, to summarize the end result of all these years of cobbling stuff together:
Magic Items < Minor Artifacts < Major Artifacts < Soul Objects. There's some overlap, power-wise, between the various categories, but over the long term that's how things work out. This was proven quite well in my divine game, wherein the majority of PCs after reaching a certain level of power never bothered with regular items, or even Minor Artifacts for that matter, but instead came to rely almost exclusively on their own Soul Objects and a few extra-powerful items (often Soul Objects of other gods or still greater beings) picked up on their travels.
Next post, now that I've explained the concept of Soul Objects in my game, I'll detail some of the most important ones that cropped up in the actual campaign. See, the most interesting part about Soul Objects or other artifacts is considering what happens when a being like the First One of Entropy crafts one.
