Creating Magic Weapons in A Dungeon Game
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I feel like I’ve been trying to “solve” magic items in a dungeon game for years – because I have. I’ve been thinking about how they’re going to work for literal years and still haven’t quite got there.
Actually writing the weapons isn’t the hard part. I know exactly what I want them to do. They’re all intelligent, and they all have at least one cool thing that they do. They sort of function in the same way as monsters in that regard, where each of them has a way in which they break the rules of the game.
Designing them is fairly straightforward, but where things get tricky is in giving GMs the means to design their own. A core design principle I try to upload when I work on stuff for a dungeon game is that I would rather provide tools to allow you to expand the game and build your own things that work with it, rather than just slapping down a book containing a bunch of magic weapons that you may or may not ever actually utilise.
Of course, Little Miss Scope Creep is always present in my mind, saying “but you could write a book of magic weapons and write the tools to allow GMs to make their own”. And this is why we still don’t have a magic weapons book or creation system for the game, because I want to do both and can’t figure out how to.
So what’s the difficulty? The difficulty comes from figuring out what the generation tools for these things should look like and how they should work. If I’m going to write a tool to create things for the game, I want it to be the same tool that I use to create things for the game. I very firmly don’t want magic weapons that confer the equivalent of a +1 bonus, because that’s boring. They should all do something unique. But it’s very hard to write tables that generate unique effects that are also re-usable. You either end up exhausting the utility of the tables – i.e. you see all of the “unique” things, and thus no longer get unique results – or else there’s a point on the table that instructs you to now draw the rest of the fucking owl.
There are a couple of already-extant magic weapons in a dungeon game, hidden inside The Moss Mother’s Maze. The game has evolved slightly since that adventure was written and I’m taking a more structured approach to stocking dungeons with treasure, but those items still reflect my main philosophy that magic weapons should be cool and unique. Here’s what they look like.
Hadratha
Magic longsword. (Medium melee weapon).
When you roll damage you can Exert 1 point of Cunning to add an additional damage die. You can do this as many times as you like on each attack, provided you have the Cunning to pay.
Sacrificing Cunning strengthens Hadratha, with the following effects.
| Total Cunning Sacrificed | Effect |
|---|---|
| 2 | Hadratha reveals herself to her wielder, speaking to them mentally. |
| 4 | Hadratha resists being discarded. Make a Cunning save to use a different weapon in combat. Make this save at Disadvantage if you intended to discard Hadratha permanently. |
| 6 | Hadratha’s thirst for violence is palpable to those who encounter you. +3 to reaction rolls when you are present. |
| 7 | You can make two strikes when you attack with Hadratha. |
| 9 | Each time you strike with Hadratha and don’t Exert to deal additional damage, make a Cunning save. On a failure you Exert 1 point of Cunning, with the normal effect. |
| 12 | Hadratha is strong enough to become corporeal. At a time of her choosing she steps out of the blade and takes physical form. The blade becomes an ordinary weapon with no special qualities. |
Hadratha Given Flesh
HD 6 AC 7
Deals damage directly to Cunning.
Can choose for her attacks to hit without making an attack roll. She can do this up to 12 times, after which point she loses this ability forever.
Cursed Spear
Large melee weapon.
While you wield it you can’t be killed by violence.
Curse: The Moss Mother always know the location of the spear. When it is removed from this chamber the GM rolls 1d20 secretly. This is the current location of the Moss Mother. Do not roll for encounters again. Each Turn she moves one room closer to the spear, taking the most direct route. Her approach can be heard throughout the maze.
These really occupy two extremes. Hadratha has intelligence and a fairly complex set of abilities. The cursed spear has a simple ability, and a curse that only really has meaning within the dungeon in which it’s discovered. The question now is, how do I construct tools that yield results that fall somewhere within this spectrum of magic weapons?
I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, and I don’t think I’m going to solve that problem today. This post is really just me coming back to touch the issue again, with a view to finally cracking this nut. I’d love to hear thoughts about how to approach this, though, should you have any.
