PC's Generating Magic Items in a Low Magic Item Campaign

[ocircuit82]

I was just reading House rules for a low magic item campaign by SteveC, and I have a similar dilemma.

My PC's love to roll their own magic items. It is time consuming but they love the thrill of scoring something good. Don't we all?
However I am running a Campaign set in the Warhammer fantasy world, where magic items are very powerful, yet they are rare.
In Warhammer, characters are broken down into 4 progressions. And I have assigned character levels accordingly.

Rank & File level 1
Champion level 2 - 4
Hero level 5 - 8
Lord level 9 - 12

The level cap for my PC's is set at 12 because the level of a lord in warhammer is not equal to the extreme power of a D20 20th level PC.
Noone can go toe to toe with the Warhammer Greater Daemon and hope to live!
In Warhammer magic items are purchased using a points buy system as seen below. They cost around 25 for a weak, 50 for a powerful and up to 100 points for a very powerful item.

Rank & File 0 points
Champion 0 points
Hero 50 points
Lord 100 points

My Campaign has been going great, except that the PC's are now starting to get a few items and they are only at level 4. By the time they are at level 10 I can forsee them having to ditch itmes in favour of better ones at an alarming rate!
Ideally, I would want my PC's to have less items yet more powerful ones. I would love it if they could only carry a limit to their treasure as well..

Question: Is there a way that I could change the randomly generated items to yield less items, but more powerful items that could keep the balance of Wealth by Level in the DMG?

 

[Vlos]

Well you would basically have to create custom tables to roll against. This would probably be a lot of work.

Usually in a lower magic item game I would suspect the level of wealth to be lower as well.

Another thought would be to have the PC's use up their magic items. This can be done in several ways.
01) They get stolen (not fun for the PCs especially if it happens too often).
02) Limited use items (make the items charged)
03) Wear and tear on items (they break more often)
04) Sacrifice, Since magic is low in the game some things may require magic items to be sacrificed to power other magic items/spells/portals/etc. In 1st ed your major artifacts almost always required sacrifices of some type.
05) Henchmen, since Warhammer setting I would think they are building armies, thus would donate to the underlings.
06) Use permament items to power boost. Sort of like the video games, where you get a power (an item) and you can use the item all the time, but in times of trouble (dire need) you can sacrifice the item to get a much more powerful effect (similar to the item) but its drained afterwards. So for example your PCs are fighting a warlord who summons a Greater Daemon, as stated the PCs have no chance of living, unless... they call upon the powers of their items to defeat the demon, but in doing so the items use the last of their magic and end up drained shortly after the encounter.

Just some thoughts.