A brief summary of Glen Cook's "The Swordbearer" off the top of my head. I'll go back and edit it once I've gotten home and have access to my copy.
****Note, there are a number of copies available through Used book sellers on Amazon.com. It's an absolutely first rate fantasy novel*****
Old world, described as being old enough that if you have sufficient power and look hard enough that there is something nasty buried almost everywhere.
There are a handful of "named" items, The Sword of the title (forget it's name), a shield, staff, a diadem that reads minds. Most are associated with a particular "God" or historical figure, usually having played some crucial role in events. However, there are also items lurking that have been long forgotten to history. Items tied to a "God" usually inflict some degree of control over the bearer so that they are occasionally forced to act in ways that the "God" desires, typically serving some obscure long term goal.
The Sword of the title, is essentially a Stormbringer clone, but it does have a twist. The souls of those it kills are retained within the sword and the swordbearer can talk to them and learn from them and even utilize some of their skills.
However, the soul sucking does have some serious drawbacks. There are entities call Toal, which are vaguely similar to a death knight, spirits that inhabit corpses. When the one is killed by the swordbearer, the entity can either flee the corpse or be sucked into the sword if the swordbearer is not careful. One of the Toal that was slain by the sword, nearly takes over the swordbearer and does kill the soul of a previous swordbearer who's body it had inhabited.
The Sword does act to preserve the life of it's bearer, but the swordbearer must learn to use the powers of the sword. So he does not get to do everything right away. At first he could only get some extra energy to fight, be healed of diseases (polio) and the sword would assist him in combat. The defensive functions seemed to be quite strong even at the outset though. By the end of the novel, he can fully tap the abilities, skills and knowledge of the souls he's taken, fight almost without pause (at least as long as he has a supply of people to kill), chop down pretty much anything and kill the spirits of the Toal in psychic combat after slaying the bodies.
Most of the named items seem to follow similar growth paths, though the more powerful the user is, the quicker the adaption is.
Magic items however aren't simply artifacts though, it is a fairly high magic world in that every general and major leader is going to have some kind of magic weapons and armor, but generally they seem to be of the simple + variety, though say they might be as much as +5, they won't have any "special" abilites. So the plain jane stuff is moderately available to those with power and influence, but if you want something with additional abilites (Flaming, defending, wounding, etc...) those are generally found only in Named items or the top ranked badguys.
The Toal for example, usually have some moderately unique items, one had a Lance that caused a withering death, which even the most powerful magics could only moderate. The most powerful caster in the book (no divine/arcane split) when hit by it could only save his life and wasn't able to do anything to heal the arm withered by the lance.
