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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMZ2112" data-source="post: 6560933" data-attributes="member: 78752">No, no, you're doing it wrong.  If you use shears instead of a sword you get three blocks of wool instead of one and you can reshear the sheep later.If you're taking dungeon mastery advice from the Hound it's going to take more than this thread to save you.I think that in most cases that would be unusual, and in the few cases where it does occur it would surprise me if the name sticks.  Swords are named for deeds, or if not for deeds than for the vanity of their wielders.  Either way, the swordsmith probably doesn't get a say, even if he wants one.The smith who forged Orcrist might have called it that, and its wielder might have called it that, but no one /else/ called it that until it had killed a /lot/ of goblins.You don't need to generate treasure non-randomly to use unique weapon names.  It's purely a question of the rarity of magic weapons, and whether rare or not, random generation is still an option.  If you've got a campaign setting with mass-produced magic weapons, then yeah, a lot of them are not going to have stories, are not going to have been wielded by anyone remarkable, and are going to be identified by plus (or material, in your system).  But my questions for you are these -- if they're truly that common, why aren't your PCs already armed with them?  Why has someone bothered to hoard them?  Why hasn't your world's weaponsmithing industry been driven under by used sword salesmen, with their Pomade of Holding, tacky Cravats of Charisma, and cheap Tweed Tunics of Transacting?If weapons are rare enough that people bother to name them, then you can assume that virtually anything you randomly generate was named at one time or another.  But there's no onus on the dungeon master to come up with a name on the fly -- magic items don't identify themselves.  The dungeon master has the length and breadth of the window between discovery and Identify being cast to think up a suitable name.Glamdring and Orcrist didn't have their names etched on the blades, to the best of my knowledge.  Gandalf knew of them by reputation.  You can doubt that, but certainly the Goblin King identified both weapons without ever getting close enough to read the runes on the hilt.TL;DR: The question of whether magic weapons in your game should be individually named or not is a function of their rarity and your group's playstyle, and absolutely not a function of the use of a random treasure generation system.</blockquote>

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