ideas for leveled magic items?

[Bran Blackbyrd]

I've thought a little about levelled items for my lapsed campaign, but don't have much general advice I could put into words.

One trick you culd use is dormancy.

One way to do this is with an intelligent item that reveals it's powers piecemeal, or perhaps slowly becomes more sentient. eg it starts of with a detect x power, then reveals useful powers over time. And after months or years of increasing power and occasional one off effects or buonuses, the srord/item talks to the PC and the fun and agendas escalate from there.

Or dormant powers cold reveal themselves at great need. For example, a suit of fire-resistant armour which has lain in the cornwer of a tomb for centuries might not protect the wearer against normal fire until it's been re-activated by dragon-fire. That'd make for a nice tense moment, and the pc could suddenly find himself with fire-resistant armour and maybe a lttle extra enhancement or flavourful powers.

The awakening of intelligence in the item could be the result of a catastrophic event like that, or the laying of it's former owners ghost to rest, or some intereaction between the soul of the owner and a receptive empty sword.

The item doesn't have to start off with the potentila to be levelled, of course. A magical disaster can make the change or contact with an outsider (more chance for agendas and plot and fun) could result in an exchange of services for powers manifested through the item. That would be one way to deal with the mechanic (from Dragon magaxine) of paying xp for levelled treasure.

Personally, there are a lot more ways to 'level' magic items without paying xp and normally I'd use those and account for that when looking at value of items for each character.

Anyway, hope the ideas help.

This is exactly what I was planning on doing with a sword in my campaign. It belongs to the Paladin, and it belonged to his father before he died. This is a low magic campaign, so I don't want him to have a new sword everytime he should receive a better item. Magic weapons aren't supposed to be that plentiful.
So what I wanted was sort of an intelligent paladin's sword. It would start out as a masterwork sword and once it is sure the bearer's intentions are pure, it will begin to allow access to more of it's powers. So it can grow with the user. In this case, the paladin doen't even know it's magical, so it really works well.

 

[Will]

Another important note that almost everybody seems to miss.

Look at DMG page 246, the last paragraph (adding abilities to an item). I think it neatly takes care of many objections, with some creativity.

In short, in standard D&D you don't _have_ to drop items. You just sell new items to improve old ones.

It's already a standard core rule.