Magic Item Creation

[Messageboard Golem]

Excalibur. The One Ring of Power. Merlin’s Staff. Gandalf’s sword Glamdring. The Spear of Destiny. All names for objects of legend. Objects of power. To speak the name of one of these items is to evoke images of great deeds done, of dragons, of heroism and of terrible villainy. The true power of magic items comes not from their ability to work miracles but from their ability to evoke wonder in all of us.

It is no wonder then, that magic items continue to dominate the imaginations of both fantasy readers and, more importantly, fantasy gamers. Who among us does not remember the first time their character, at the successful conclusion of a hard fought adventure, lifted a new sword and pulled it, glittering and smoking in the dim light, from its bejewelled sheath? Who among us does not recall with fondness the first time their wizard pointed a staff, uttered a few cryptic phrases and caused the world to erupt in fire? And who among us, for that matter, does not feel a sudden thrill each and every time a simple detect magic spell wreathes the treasury in cold, blue possibility?

Yes, magical items have a long and storied and wondrous history in fantasy gaming and the future holds limitless possibility, particularly now that d20 gives us rules that allow our characters to construct their own items of power.

This book, the Encyclopaedia Arcana Magic Items is dedicated to the expansion and exploration of all the possibilities of magic items in fantasy role playing. Within these pages, you will find many new options to take the magic items of your characters and your campaigns to the next level. There are new powers, new feats and even a few new prestige classes, all focused on the use and creation of magic items. There are rules for expanding the role of intelligent magic items and for placing unique qualities and drawbacks in your magic items. Most importantly, there is a new system, the Mythic System, which supplements the basic rules for creating magical items and allows you to forge items of power in a way which is more in line with the stories and legends of old. With the Mythic System, when you want to create a flaming sword, it matters less that you know how to cast burning hands then it does that you know where to go to pluck a tail feather from the phoenix. With the Mythic System, your swordsmen and rogues will be able to take a more direct hand in constructing what will be their most prized possessions, giving them a greater sense of ownership and accomplishment.

No two magic items should ever be the same and thanks to this book, and to your imagination, they never will be again.

Magic Items is the latest in Mongoose Publishing’s long Encyclopaedia Arcana line, presenting a new look at one of the most critical components of any fantasy game, the magic item. Designed to be slotted seamlessly into any fantasy-based D20 system, these sourcebooks enhance and expand every element of arcane magic, adding a whole new dimension to your campaigns. Each book of the Encyclopaedia Arcana line is not just intended for the Game Master to enhance his campaign, however. Players themselves will find full details on how to use the new magic systems with new or existing characters, greatly increasing the wealth of options they are presented with in the Core Rulebooks.

 

[John Cooper]

Encyclopaedia Arcane: Magic Item Creation - Forging Legendary Power
By Patrick Younts
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 1023
64 pages, $14.95

The latest in the popular series of magic-based books, Magic Item Creation examines all aspects of, well, magic item creation. It not only adds to the existing method of creating magic items as detailed in the Dungeon Master's Guide and Player's Handbook, but also adds another whole way of going about the whole business: the Mythic System, allowing even non-spellcasters to get in on the action!

The cover is a piece by Larry Elmore, depicting a wizard or sorcerer levitating a sword in front of him while shooting electricity from his fingertips down its entire length. The color scheme is nice, with a blue and yellow sky behind the green-clad figure, and Larry does a nice job on the shading in the face and among the folds of his garment. (He even makes the tabard look velvety.) There's not a whole lot of background besides sky - just a few bare trees, if you look closely - but the detailing on the figure is rather nice: there's a pattern on the trim of the wizard's garment that reminds me of that along Marvel comic book superhero (and Sorcerer Supreme) Doctor Strange's cloak.

Both inside covers are devoted to ads for magazines: Signs & Portents on the front, and the usual Dragon and Dungeon on the back.

As for interior art, this time we have 13 different artists providing a total of 31 individual illustrations. I was very impressed with the artwork this time, not just in the quality of the individual pieces but that so many of them had apparently been specially commissioned for this book. Often, in a gaming book, you'll find artwork that "sort of kind of" fits the topic; Mongoose has employed this tactic on many books in the past, and there's nothing wrong with doing so (I imagine it's less expensive to use pre-existing artwork than commissioning specific pieces), but it really adds to the book when the artwork fits so well. To provide a few examples, I think it's rather obvious that the warty elf wearing the predominant gemstone necklace on page 17 is not just some stock artwork "off the shelf" as it were but rather a specific rendering of Cavellan's Gem of Great Insight, which has the unfortunate side effect of causing advanced aging and warty protrusions in the body of its wearer. Likewise, I doubt that Mongoose happened to have a picture of an otherwise attractive woman with a bad case of male pattern baldness hanging around to fortuitously fit in with the concept of the "baldness" magic item quirk. The winged arrow on page 5 is quite obviously endowed with the Heaven's Wrath special ability, and the spellcaster on page 13 is obviously wielding a staff with the faceless special quality. This really goes a long way toward making the artwork "work" for a given book, and I applaud the decision to go the extra effort. However, a few of the pieces of artwork appearing in the book seem either very simplistic - line drawings with little of no shading, as on page 33 - or are a detail of a larger work "cropped down" to its current size (I can find no other explanation for the foot and leg above the skull on page 22).

Magic Item Creation is laid out as follows:

• Introduction: explaining the "Encyclopaedia Arcane" line and this book in particular, followed by a page of fiction
• New Armor, Shield, and Weapon Abilities: 17 new weapon enhancements, 2 new specific magic weapons, 12 new armor and shield enhancements, and a new specific magic armor and new magic shield
• Magic Item Quirks: major and minor "tweaks" to magic items that make them more memorable (22 minor quirks, 17 major positive quirks, and 15 major negative quirks), plus 3 sample items
• New Intelligent Item Options: creating intelligent items (even things like rings and wondrous items), intelligent item powers and special purposes, weaknesses, and a sample intelligent item, the carpet of Arad-Albed
• Prestige Classes: 4 prestige classes dealing with magic items: the Bonded Champion (usually a nonspellcaster), Bonded Master (spellcaster with an ever-more-powerful magic item in the place of a familiar), Unbound (magic-hater who destroys magic items), and Master Crafter (spellcaster who loses the ability to cast spells other than in magic item creation)
• Magic Item Feats: 12 feats useful to those who create magic items
• The Mythic System: using exotic materials in the place of spells and/or experience points in creating magic items, plus using divine sponsorship to allow someone without spellcasting ability to craft a magic item
• Help for Games Masters: determining the availability of magic items in a campaign (and the ramifications of the different levels), and integrating the Mythic System into a campaign and using it as the basis for adventures and campaigns, followed by a page of fiction following up where the last one left off
• Designer's Notes: Patrick's thoughts on the current magic item creation process and how that helped him decide to create the Mythic System
• Rules Summary: 2 pages of charts and a list of all the quirks detailed elsewhere in the book

I have praised Patrick's writing abilities before, and he deserves as much praise here as for others of his works - perhaps more so, for he's cut back tremendously on what I termed "over-flowery language." Patrick has done an excellent job in examining the existing magic item rules, seeing what was missing, and developing rules to "plug in the gaps" as it were. He also has a keen eye for game balance and does a fine job in ensuring that his new rules do not do anything to unbalance a campaign.

The new weapon, armor and shield enhancements look like they'll add all sorts of interesting possibilities to any game world, and while overall I think he did a great job on them, I have a few questions and concerns. The idiocy weapon enhancement seems like it might be a tad bit overpowered, as a weapon with this power deals one point of temporary Intelligence damage when it hits a creature, apparently without a save. Give an idiocy weapon to a high-level fighter (with multiple attacks each round), and he can strip away a wizard's higher level spells in no time at all! (Ditto with the ruinous enhancement, which does the same thing to sorcerers by stripping away their Charisma.) In both cases, I think a saving throw would make the enhancement a bit more balanced. Also, there doesn't seem to be a listed Fortitude DC given for the true death weapon enhancement, to avoid the disintegration effect. (It states that a Fortitude save is allowed, just doesn't give a target DC.)

The intelligent item section was well done, but while I was pleased to see the possibility of having intelligent rings, staves, and the like, overall there seems to be a bit less innovation in this section - it reads very much like the intelligent item section in the Dungeon Master's Guide, as far as the steps toward determining an intelligent item's powers and purposes go. Still, the material is laid out in an easy-to-follow fashion; the only problem I noticed is in the Intelligent Item Senses chart, where a roll of 8-9 on a d20 and a roll of 10-11 result in the exact same thing (120 ft. vision and hearing) - I'm not sure whether that should have just been combined to a roll of 8-11, or if a 10-11 should have resulted in 120 ft. vision and hearing plus something else in addition. Also, I'm a bit curious as to how often an intelligent item's dedicated power can be used, as some of them (ice storm, for instance) seem awfully powerful to be throwing around round after round. I imagine there'd be a limit on how often they can be used, but none is given.

The prestige classes were well thought out - I've generally been impressed with Patrick's prestige classes; he's one of the best I've seen at keeping them balanced - although I agree that the magic-hating Unbound really should be relegated to "NPC only" status. (An Unbound would make a pretty powerful enemy at higher levels, too, as he gains the ability to "shrug off" the effects of quite a great deal of magic. Imagine the look on the wizard PC's face when the Unbound walks unharmed through the defensive wall of fire spell and even the normally infallible magic missiles fail to damage him!)

The Mythic System is really the touchstone of the whole book, though. Bits and pieces of the concept have shown up elsewhere since d20 hit; just a short while back there was a "power components" article in Dragon that touched on using monster body parts to supplement spellcasting when creating magic items. Patrick goes much farther, though, not only in tweaking the game formulae (the monster must have a CR greater than or equal to three times the caster level of a wizard creating a weapon attack bonus, for example, so you'd need a monster body part from something with a CR 9+ to use for a +3 weapon), but in also creating a viable (and quite logical) way for nonspellcasters to create magic items, again without interfering with game balance. This chapter is only 9 pages long, but it's arguably the most important 9 pages in the whole book.

Editing and proofreading, provided by Ian Belcher and Mark Quennell respectively, was not perfect but not too bad: while typos and punctuation errors cropped up time and again, the most common seemed to be spacing errors (extra spaces between words), and as far as errors go, those have got to be the most harmless of all. Still, they might want to bone up on the difference between "affect" and "effect" (and "acquire" and "require") and decide whether to use "staffs" or "staves" as the plural of "staff" and then use it throughout (as it is, they chose to use both about equally). On the Bonded Item Familiar's Special Abilities sidebar, I'm fairly certain that a bonded ring would grant its master a +2 bonus to Craft checks when making rings, not rods as listed (surely that's a "copy and paste" error). Also, the way the following sentence is worded - "A character can be bonded to a maximum of one ring, rod, staff, and wand" - makes it sound as if a character can be bonded four times over, one to each type of item, but that should be an "or wand" at the end as the rules clearly state you only get one bonded item (just like a sorcerer or wizard normally only gets one familiar). Finally, twice on page 49 the examples talk about "the effective bonus of the enchantment x 5" when it should be "x 3" (as even the numbers in the example show: a +5 effective enhancement requires a caster of 15th level or higher). Little things, to be sure, but they should have been caught before publication.

A final quibble: the concept of "true names" shows up more than once, especially in the section on the Mythic System, as one of the component types is the "esoteric component," where to create a magic item the crafter might need to capture the shadow of an invisible stalker for a ring of greater invisibility or the true name of life for a staff of resurrection. True names are covered in great detail in another Patrick Younts work, The Quintessential Sorcerer, but nowhere in this book is that mentioned. A brief recap or at least a point in the right direction might have been in order.

Still, Magic Item Creation is by and large a success that does exactly what it set out to do: enhance the existing rules for creating magic items, both in greater flexibility (new weapon, armor and shield enhancements, feats, etc.) and entirely new ways of doing things (the Mythic System). I give it a strong "4 (Good)."