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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nellisir" data-source="post: 5790072" data-attributes="member: 70">I was a little surprised to get my issue and find out my article had doubled in size.  Gnomish magical items...now with halflings!Obviously based off of the ring of faerie, from Unearthed Arcana (pg 93).  I make no claims of originality.  I just thought (think) they are nice, sort of basic/utility magic items.I remember creating it for a campaign I ran, but not how often it got used.A lot.  Not as many as there are limited shape-shifting spells in PF and later 3e and 4e (I think), but a lot.You could do horribly broken things with polymorphing and size changing in 2e.  It was beautiful.  I loved it.  And lets face it, what gnome doesn't dream of growing ten feet tall and stomping goblins?Utilitarian.  Why should elves have all the fun?  I like my gnomes magical.Didn't have a thing to do with the edition change.  Just seemed logical, that strength-boosting items should do -something- no matter how strong you were.Elves and dwarves get the vast majority of "racial" items.  I didn't want to do a collection of one-off, wacky, marginally useful items.  I wanted to make a sort of solid core of gnomish magic, stuff that would actually be useful to gnomes and player characters.Yeah...I think I had a bugger of a time pricing it.  It's more of a story item than anything.A) they can talk to them, B) similar habitats, C) badgers are (represented as) more attractive than weasels, and no one takes ground squirrels seriously.  I could have used foxes, now that I think of it.  Foxes would be cool.Not sure if this one ever got use in my campaign.Based on a magic item from one of Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" novels.Serendipity.  I vaguely recall this being a sort of "fill in the gap" item, that there was some kind of "slashing" special weapon, and a "bludgeoning" special weapon, and this was the "piercing" special weapon, but I can't find anything to support this.  That sort of thing all became standardized and templated, essentially, with 3e.I don't think I ever gave my PCs one of these; too afraid of what they'd do with it.  I think of it as a bit of DM's cheat, myself.I love the image of a wall of these rooting into the ground, though.  I don't know if I thought about mass production.  It's not like there was a serious dearth of magical items in the world.  And given that this was towards the tail-end of 2e, there were lots of ways to make magic items (though they did all required high-level casters). Also, 2e magic item creation actually got you xp, I think.It was an easy gimme.  Dragon did cut one or two -really- boring weapons (I think they did, at least...I can't find them in my article submission. Maybe I revised it?)This came out in August, and was the issue on display at Gen Con 1999, which was a) the only year I went, and b) the announcement of 3e.  Big fun.</blockquote>

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