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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kichwas" data-source="post: 9589227" data-attributes="member: 891">As others note, we'd need examples of what you consider interesting.I have a perspective that the moment you apply a system to magic it's no longer magical. But that's informed from some years in my youth among occult groups - those looney folks who believe magic is real and have the mood rings and Crowley autographs to back it up. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> People with a belief in a magical world have a radically different perspective on these things that makes the statement 'any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic to less advanced people' seem absurd. A complex enough galaxy never becomes a warm mood on Tuesday unless you can write like Douglas Adams. This is why I have a similar problem with the 'deities' of most fantasy tRPGs. No amount of super powers can make you just to the left of 13-o'Clock on the day after Saturday but before Sunday. A modern perspective that polytheistic people just believed their deities were Superman minus the cape completely misses the concept.Which is a way of saying that no game system will ever feel magical or wonderous. You need a different goal in mind for what a game system should achieve.What PF2E's magic item can often do very well is the idea of 'leveling up your gear' through story. Taking something like 'the family sword', and slowly turning it into an artifact of legend - attaching property and power up runes to it over the journey of a campaign.In that sense an interesting magic item becomes interesting from the story that old rusty sword dragged out of the barn during session 0 obtains over the journey of the game, and is eventually used in a glorious battle to stop the Whispering Tyrant.It is interesting because of what the players get to put into it as they power it up, and the stories that involves, rather than because of some flavor text on it's description from page XYZ of Treasure Book ABC.- This is also why I strongly dislike those 'automatic loreless bonuses' variant rules and am glad they're just variants.For me, an interesting magic item is about the story potential in it. If you want a published example, there's a certain book in a very hidden room in Abomination Vaults that comes with a massively long description of all the horrible things that will happen should someone decide it would have been better if they'd never gone into that room to begin with...- That's in an official Paizo dungeon, it's an official PF2E magic item, and it does a better job at being interesting than what I see out of mose game systems. And I'm not even a fan of the module it appears in, because that module otherwise does a phenomenal job of making it way too easy for players to press the 'skip' button on story and lore.</blockquote>

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