The Gaming Den

I want to run a campaign where all of the players play intelligent items. The concept is something like this: A kid picks up a sword, and over time, he becomes the sword's previous owner. Find Excalibur, become King Arthur. Find Gae Bolg, become Cu Chulainn. Find Draupnir, become Odin. The items will basically be who the guys at the table will be playing, although some struggles for control between the items and the PCs who are being possessed, cursed or in a symbiotic relationship with could be interesting.

The initial PCs are going to be 1st level commoners, but stuff can happen that will make the intelligent items change owners. For example, let's say the PCs get attacked by bandits and all die. The bandits would try on the gear and get their minds taken over and the players would now play the bandits, who are slowly having their minds taken over by the items. I like the idea of a system where you can play different characters many times but still retain the same personality and a few signature abilities.

The intelligent item system in the DMG isn't set up for this kind of thing. I've heard of the Weapons of Legacy system but I've also heard that it sucks. I think I need to invent a new system, but I've never created RPG homebrew before. Where should I start?

Honestly, I don't know how much of a new "system" you need.

You could just have your players create their original owners in all their glory to start. Then have them choose some smallish number of powers that they can manifest from their weapons. (Hopefully said powers would be things the characters could normally do and/or are thematically appropriate like Divine Power or something for "warior" items.

Then just do experience as you normally would or wouldn't, and every time the wielders would normally level up, give them some of the traits of the original owners.

You'd probably wanna make sure that everything would be level appropriate, though-If a wielder is getting to 17th level, whatever powers he gains should be good for 17th level, not 17-(whatever his base level is)

Weapons of Legacy provides a framework for a character to unlock powers (through feat expenditures) in an item as they level. I don't know, but it doesn't sound like this is what you're going for here.

I think a method based on the WoL system would work, though. You draw up a list of powers for each character, 1-20. Use whatever guidelines suit the powerlevel of the campaign to ensure they're campaign- and level-appropriate. The powers unlock automatically based on the epicness of the wielder (ie, level).

You can make that "powers" concept as wide and varied as you want. It could just be external powers, or include overwritten stats, or "lose a level in a spellcasting class and gain a level in Warblade plus these abilities".

It's obviously a heavy front-end, but I think that would give you what you're looking for.