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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8155736" data-attributes="member: 6790260">My approach to handing out artifacts is:1. Don't let them be world-endingly powerful, just dangerous or special. World-ending MacGuffins feel coercive. Things that the party can clearly see how they have a specific, dangerous use or which do something you really don't want falling in the wrong hands.2. Don't give the players complete and functional artifacts. Something incomplete or non-functional drives interest in making it useful, leading to new quests and new revelations. It may also let the player shape the artifact's direction or function.In the game I run, most artifacts are symbols as well as tools, and symbols have real power. Symbolic victories change the nature and direction of the world, and symbolic items can fundamentally alter attitudes and behaviors. Many of these tools also have great practical power; for example, the Heart of the Sirocco (a grapefruit-sized powerfully-enchanated, wind-aspected raw emerald) has allowed the Sultana to make the trade-winds around the main city always favorable, and now that the party has given her the Storm's Eye (similar in size, but more "solid geode"-like, and lightning-aspected), she implicitly has the ability to control the weather for the region. The Sultana is a smart and generally benevolent ruler, however, so she uses these powers carefully and sparingly, knowing that neither magic nor the elemental spirits are forces to be trifled with.But, though "weather control" is definitely a special and potentially-dangerous power, the symbolic power she now holds over elemental things? Yeah, that will be a HUGE deal for political relations with Jinnistan, the genie "nation" in the elemental otherworld (Al-Akirah). The Sultana has effectively made herself (and, implicitly, her descendants) a power equal to the likes of millennia-old genie-rajahs. That's a huge friggin' deal. Suddenly, the fact that she is a highly eligible bachelorette will go from "interesting, with the potential for surprises" to "something every sultana and princeling has on their mind," once it becomes common knowledge that she has this power. (Both the party and the Sultana have been very careful to keep these things under wraps.)Symbols raise armies, change religions, slay vast and terrible spirits, transform fiends, and resurrect nations. All without needing to be more than a particularly fancy stick with a sharp bit on the end, or a rock that controls the wind. Never doubt the power of a symbol in the right place, at the right time.(The fancy stick is actually a living acacia branch, its symbolism linking druidry to the heavens as well as the earth.)</blockquote>

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