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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7327876" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION]Most of the magic items in my main 4e game are gifts from the gods - either literally (eg when the PCs teleported into Orcus's throne room, having stolen knowledge of the location from Vecna, the Raven Queen intercepted their teleport to bestow some gifts upon them - like James Bond visiting Q's room of gadgets) or, more commonly, implicitly in the form of power-ups of exsiting items (whether by the gods, or because the PCs have been victorious in a place of power, etc).Some items have been gifts from NPCs (eg the first neck item in the game was an amulet +1 gifted by one of the NPCs in Night's Dark Terror); some have been taken from NPCs (I think the first magic armour in the game was a coat of scale armour that the dwarf fighter took from the defeated hobgoblin chieftain in the same module).Sometimes magic benefits have been conferred upon a PC (eg the gods return the PC to life from death; the wizard was cured of a disease by some witches), and I count the cost of the ritual as treasure earned.After the PCs defeated beholders and a roper in the Underdark, they found a cache of items (inside the roper, I think) which were relics of an earlier member of the Order of the Bat (which is the secret drow cult of Corellon worshippers to which the drow sorcerer belongs) - these had been on the drow player's wish list!The Sword of Kas was taken by the PCs from an other planar "shadow" of the manor of a Nerathi mage, who had been working on it trying to devise ways to stop gnolls overrunning Nerath. When the PCs then met Kas, they returned it to him. But then took it back after, many sessions and levels later, they broke their alliance with him (ironic, that!) and defeated him.The PCs were given Whelm by Kas in exchange for the return of his sword (the paladin PC lost, so that the dwarf fighter PC might gain!); and later on the dwarf PC led a team of dwarven artificers in reforging it into Overwhelm - a dwarven thrower Mordenkrad.Recovering the Rod of Seven Parts/Sceptre of Law has been a recurring part of the campaign, and bits of that have been found all over the place - ones I remember include a piece hidden in a chache in an old Nerathi ruin; the ruling sceptre of the (fallen) city of Entekar, given as a gift to the PC by other refugees from the city; a piece embedded in the body of an elemental hydra; a piece in a vault within a duergar stronghold, which was recovered by the PCs (from inside a purple worm that had swallowed it) as part of the process of precipitating the downfall of that stronghold (when you remove the Sceptre of Law from a place, what else is going to happen?); a piece inside a godling that was spawned from the essence of Miska the Wolf-Spider mixed with a fragment of the Rod; and the seventh piece is on Carceri, where Miska is trapped. (That's all the parts but the 3rd; I can't remember where that one was found.) One consequence of parcelling out an implement in this sort of fashion is that it tends to "level up" slower than for the other PCs, as implement can't step up until the piece is found, and the piece can't be found without some appropriate bit of story occurring.So anyway, those ar some examples of how it's worked in my game.</blockquote>

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