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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Seramus" data-source="post: 8504091" data-attributes="member: 6812658">My favorite setting tweak is that Emotion = Magic. Magic items cannot simply be forged, but are born from moments of middling to great emotional impact. Imagine a family killed by goblins, and the lone survivor beneath a bed clutching a knife in her hand. The knife soaks in the fear, determination, and desire for revenge to become a magic knife that yearns to cut goblins like butter.Acts of incredible kindness and terror alike can give birth to magic items. Some of these even happen to the items of PCs as they experience major events in the campaign.One villain became the advisor to a lord and guided him to make selfish fiscal decisions. This dragged the people into gaping poverty for a decade, just so the suffering would make useful or profitable items. The advisor arranged for a town to be wiped out, but to save a few people with strong attachments to survive.Then the advisor quit his job and arranged to become a mentor to the survivors. He gave them a few of the items soaked in poverty and told them how the lord was responsible.Afterwards, he left for another kingdom to start the cycle over again, while quietly bankrolling the survivors to continue their war until the lord was toppled and the land became a fractured anarchic mess.The advisor stages a surprise twist. The real culprit the whole time is the lord of a second kingdom. So the survivors patch together the unruly lands and build them back into a kingdom to march on the innocent kingdom.Halfway through the war, with countless people dead, farmland salted, and betrayals revealed, they unite with the innocent kingdom to march on the advisor and his current kingdom.But the advisor had been busy, and had a new set of survivors determined to defeat these revenge filled attackers. In the final battle, with so many sacrifices made, the first survivors kill the second survivors.The monologue happens. The survivors seethe with anger, the air is fresh with the crushed hopes of the second survivors trying to protect their homes, the wailing of the wounded hangs heavy in the air, and countless people across all three kingdoms know their loved ones are not coming home and there's not enough food to last the winter.The advisor's heart becomes a magic item then and there - one of stone. His pact with Orcus is complete. Enough people were silenced forever, or suffering, that he was gifted his lichdom.He rips his own heart out, still as marble, and has it plane shifted away. Then the final battle starts.He was a bit of a dick, is what I'm saying.</blockquote>

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