[Midgard] Making Magic Items Rare and Curses

[Prak]

I was doing some shower thinking about Midgard, my desire for cursing to be a thing, and keeping a limit on magic items in any given campaign. Need to kind of think out loud here/solicit opinions

So, I have a few observations/goals with regards to magic items and curses-
Observation 1- Magic items are common in Norse myth, virtually every story or character has at least one, but comparatively scarce relative to D&D
Observation 2- Curses are also common in Norse myth, pretty much every story deals with one or more, but compared to D&D, curses grow on fucking trees, like castles in England.
Observation 3- Weapons in Norse myth are unique and often have names--Mjolnir, Gungnir, Gram, etc.
Goal 1- Magic items should be more than "Increase chance of hitting/not being hit 5-25%," especially since the abbreviated level span means that, if the flat bonus were to scale to level, you'd actually only get up to 15%. No one's excited by a +X weapon, the same way no one is excited about eating gruel, no matter how much it fulfills your nutritional needs.
Goal 2- Magic items should actually be fucking rare, at least compared to D&D, and not just because the setting says so. It doesn't matter what the setting says if the PCs are just running around fully loaded down with magic pouring out of their pants. So magic item creation needs to be limited, but not so much that players just rely on what the DM hands them. That said, it's fully in the source material that you might seriously break your magic sword and just grab another from the horde of the monster you're fighting.
Goal 3- Dwarves are the artifice race. In norse myth, pretty much any magic item you care about and know the origin of came from the Svartalfar. So however the magic item creation system works out, dwarves should have some kind of advantage.
Goal 4- Players should be able to curse their enemies, and not just on their deaths, and there should be a compelling reason to do so, but they shouldn't be cursing every person they see for any or no reason with impunity.

[OgreBattle]

Can characters start off as magic users? Magical smiths like Weyland are also archtypical of the mythology you're drawing from.

Is this a system for one-shots or continuous leveling up and fighting bigger and bigger monsters?

[OgreBattle]

Can characters start off as magic users? Magical smiths like Weyland are also archtypical of the mythology you're drawing from.

Is this a system for one-shots or continuous leveling up and fighting bigger and bigger monsters?

[Longes]

Goal 2- Magic items should actually be fucking rare, at least compared to D&D, and not just because the setting says so. It doesn't matter what the setting says if the PCs are just running around fully loaded down with magic pouring out of their pants. So magic item creation needs to be limited, but not so much that players just rely on what the DM hands them. That said, it's fully in the source material that you might seriously break your magic sword and just grab another from the horde of the monster you're fighting.

Simple solution: make magic items a class feature. So eigth level runecaster gets himself a runesword, and a fifth level trollslayer gets himself a blessed spear, or something like that. You'll have to make up reasons for why you only ever have one class magic item at a time, but that's not such a big problem.

[Stahlseele]

Remember that not all named weapons were really magical, but mainly only thought to be so. They were exceptionally well made versions of your bog standard weapons. Sometimes even with flaws. Mjolnir was massively flawed in that the handle was much shorter than it was intended to be for example.
But it was still massively superior in that a) it withstood thors immense strength without breaking or shattering when used and b) came back to him when thrown. Which is a mostly useless feature of a HAMMER that you use to CLOBBER people with and not usually throw at other people. The lightning and thunder stuff was Thors power, not the Hammer, if i remember correctly.
And these weapons were not all that common either.
Just remember that all of these stories which feature these weapons are always about the same 2 dozend or so characters and were usually gained through some sort of arcane quest.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

If you have random advancement perks like in After Sundown or Mordheim, you could have one where a magic item in your possession becomes more potent, otherwise a mundane item of your choice becomes magical. This makes looting magical weapons when yours breaks isn't unreasonable, but items of great narrative leverage are uncommon. And the chance of breakage means that people won't pool their Karma for magic items.

[Prak]

Wow, ok, so people started responding as I was adding to the first post.

Magic is intended to be skill based, so, yes, people can start off as runesmiths and such. Ideally it's meant for campaigns, albeit comparatively short ones not generally going past ten levels, but I do want there to be a "Ur a God Now" tier beyond that.

Save for classes that give the ability to make items or have some form of patronage, I'm not overly fond of "Sword as Class Feature," and don't think it really fits here. I could be wrong.

Most of the gods have an item that's blatantly magical--Frigga's cloak, Mjolnir, Odin's spear Gungnir, Freyja's dancing sword, Heimdall's horn that can be heard throughout the nine realms and beckons Ragnarok, Laevatein--which is thought to be Loki's sword or possibly magic staff, Draupnir which breaks gold economies over it's knee, and so on. So magic items are common, but they're not "I have magic armour, a cloak, a headband, a belt, two rings, a necklace, a..." D&D common. ...though Thor does have Mjolnir, his gauntlets and belt, his chariot and two goats, and I might be missing something...

But yes, most of those come from some form of quest, and generally speaking, they aren't things you'd replace. Thor's not going to put Mjolnir on a shelf because he found a hammer that's more magic, and Odin's not going to hand off Gungnir because he finds a spear that alwayser strikes truer.

In Norse Myth, it looks like great accuracy is just the basic effect of a weapon being magic, and I'll probably port in Tome's scaling bonus, but you're never going to find a sword that's "just" magic. It'll cleave anvils in twain, always slay a man before it's resheathed, or have some other quality.

One idea I had was having a table of random effects with stuff like "glows in the presence of [thing]" and "ignores hardness" and so on. The first idea was that when you say you're making a magic item, you roll on that table, and being a better crafter means you have more control over the result, and doing reagent quests does too. So a dwarf would get two rolls they could choose between, enchanting a goat hide has a special table of possible results, and so on. Now, I don't think I want to make item crafting that random. I might have a Random Defect table for cases like Mjolnir where you successfully craft the item, but something got screwed up, and a Random Side Trait table for stuff like Sting glowing blue in the presence of orcs.

The bit about "exceptionally well made items" also reminded me that I was thinking about adding a tier above Masterwork called Legendary to cover "this thing works really well for it's basic purpose." I'm not sure where I want to go with that, though.

Anyway, so, I'm leaning towards Magic having a basic meaning for each sort of item one might make magic. A magic weapon is just better at hitting and damaging, a magic ring increases your rep, a magic cloak makes you stealthier, and so on, but then any magic item also has at least one actual power.

The obvious place to start is the runes. So a weapon can carry the Kenaz rune will shine like a torch and burns things, and better specimens of the type are also more effective against chaos. One carrying the Lagaz rune can rebuke fire creatures, and possibly cleanse tainted objects and sites.

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Hm, this has me thinking about a rune based crafting system where just putting a rune on something (in the right way, ie, with a Runesmith skill check, not just painting it on) makes it magical, and thus inherently better at it's basic function, but then each rune also carries some kind of effect based on what it's put on, so you can make a Kenaz wand and it's basically an everburning torch, or you can make a Kenaz sword which provides light and does fire damage, or a Kenaz cloak that protects against cold and chaos, and so on. In fact, putting Kenaz on any clothing is probably a protective effect.

This won't work purely on it's own, since it's a bit hard to justify Frigga's hawk cloak purely on runes, unless I say one (possibly dagaz) covers transformation and that you can put it on a cloak or shirt made from an animal to create an item that turns you into that kind of animal.

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Ok, lets look at the function of magic items in a game- Perhaps the most basic one is to artificially fuck with your numbers/powers to allow you to face bigger/different threats without changing your character. However, they also give you a way to hit that little "hey, I got new stuff!" button in your brain that doesn't require going up a level and gaining more inherent powers. In a story-sense, magic items give you a way to answer problems that a normal naked person can't which don't require much explanation--We can ask where the fuck Batman got T Rex Repellent, but at least we're not asking how in the fuck Batman repels T Rexes on his own, he has an item to do that. That last one is probably the least important, it's just an observation, and it mostly overlaps with the first.

So basically, magic items are there to allow people to take on different challenges, possibly bigger ones, and to reward the greed center of the brain. This means that there actually needs to be a reasonable number floating around, but it doesn't mean they need to be permanent. If you only face the frostpire once, it doesn't matter whether you have a Usable Once Only Anti-Frostpire charm, or an infinite use Flaming Ash Stake of Frostpire Extermination. So lets say that charms can be made from level one, and anyone with the relevant knowledge can bust out a "stay the fuck away, frostpires" garland of garlic with the kenaz rune burned into each cluster, and these charms burn out, or have fairly minor effects (frostpires must make a dc 15 will save to close with someone wearing said charm), but they also don't cost anything to make except for time. Charms can be the province of Alfkin, Lagrkin and Men, because Dvurskin wouldn't deign to use their racial craft to make disposable items.

Then you have Treasures, which are permanently enchanted items, often using the runes and specific ingredients. If you want to make Gleipnir, you need to first fetch the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird, and you need to have like a +14 craft mod, and it costs a significant chunk of XP, but it'll bind fucking anything.

Actually that's a good example that can be generalized-- to do the impossible, you need four impossible things and two improbable things, and it's going to cost a craftsman's lifetime of experience (but fortunately you can share that cost with ten journeymen). I'm not entirely sure how I want to mechanically codify that sort of requirement, but it's something to work with. I can have item tiers, and one is "do the impossible- kill the unkillable, bind the unbindable, etc" and different tiers require different sorts of ingredients, like Impossible- hen's teeth, mountain roots, cat's footfalls, etc, and Improbably- Bear sinews, bird spittle, etc. Probably a poor, too MTP direction to go, but it's there, and it's at least probably not the worst magic item system you could print.

Ok, at the very least, I need to go through the PHB and make a list of the magic I want in Midgard, collapsing effects as I go (the whole Cure line can just be be "Cure" with an effect that scales to your ranks in magic healing, for example). Once I do that, I can split shit into the magic categories and assign runes to effects, and then I can try to figure out how I want to handle item traits.


But at the least, you level by accumulating 1000n XP, where n is your current level, and you can spend XP you've accumulated in the past without affecting your advancement rate, because if you accumulate 100xp, and spend 50, the system only cares that you've acquired 100xp, not whether you still have it. And there will be charms and folk magic that doesn't cost XP.



Curses-
I'm thinking about having curses cost XP too, since you're creating a magical effect that sits there until it's broken or run it's course. So basically you're enchanting a person or thing. Cursing should probably be it's own skill, and the power level of curse you can lay is dependent upon your rank in Cursing, and you roll Curse opposed by their Will save or something, and if they succeed your curse fails to manifest and you don't spend the xp (or you only spend a portion of it).

Curses can be made important by establishing that only monsters are fought to the death, not people. People are fought to surrender or retreat, because you can fucking ransom captives back to their people. There can be duels to the death, but the stakes need to be pretty high for you killing the other guy to be considered reasonable, and in some, if not a lot of cases, you're better off dueling to submission rather than death, because then the guy is shamed and indebted to you.

....so there needs to be some kind of Favours aspect.

But my point is that curses are meaningful because you're actually expected to *not* kill your opponents, and they'll generally be a way for the loser to get back at the victor, like when King Wosname captured two dwarves and told them to make him a magic fucking sword, so they cursed the sword.

But then there's the question of why you don't kill people, because there's this expectation that losers may curse winners. But then again, someone cursing you doesn't make killing them less dishonorable, and a reasonable person would refrain from killing people to encourage them from not cursing him, because it's not like death breaks the curse, and if death curses are a thing then you might get off easy if you just humiliate an opponent, whereas if you kill them, they've got fuck all to lose and might curse you harder, and they might lift the curse if you treat them well as a captive and return them to their people.

Yeah, I like this.

[Omegonthesane]

You probably want people to have a motive beyond "politeness" to relieve someone of a curse. Maybe Curses on people give the XP investment back when the curse runs its course - either when you decide you are no longer so annoyed at King Steve that you want him to always have a pretentious hipster moustache made of boils, or when David Xanatos has rebuilt the castle above the clouds (or when the frog has reached first base with royalty, or whatever).

Which raises another question, do you want curse escape clauses to be a thing?

[Prak]

Yeah, that's probably a good idea, with the "curses are intangible magic items" thing that I'm already doing.

In the source material, I don't think curse escape clauses are much of a thing, but they can run their course. If you curse a sword to cause Three Great Evils and Kill a Man Everytime it's Unsheathed, there's a defined duration to at least part of that curse--three evils and it's done.

But I also really like the Gargoyles, so I'm cool with curse escape clauses. They can lessen the xp cost of laying the curse.

[Orion]

Save for classes that give the ability to make items or have some form of patronage

Proposal: All classes have the ability to make items or some form of patronage.

[Stahlseele]

Note the OR there.
I don't really see the warrior class making weapons for themselves, especially if it would make the crafter class mostly redundant . .

[Prak]

I'm using racial classes for Midgard, so Dwarf, Elf, Man, Hobbit, not Artificer, Ranger, Barbarian, Thief.

[Stahlseele]

OK, that's the first time i have seen races dubbed classes . .

[Prak]

Well, when I was talking about how to do a d20 game based on LotR, people pointed out that the important part of the characters is not their profession, but their race. Bilbo's called a burglar, but he's selected not because he skulks around and steals shit, but because hobbits are naturally stealthy. Legolas isn't an archer par excellance because he's a ranger, it's because he's an elf.

And the idea stuck when I transitioned away from focusing on reproducing Middle Earth as a game and towards a game based on Norse Myth that happened to be inspired by LotR. Characters have professions, which just describe their starting skill set and proficiencies, and Essences, which improve as they gain experience and describe their deepening elf-ishness/dwarfiness/Berserker totemism deal.

Everyone will have a type HD--humanoid, dragon, elemental, whatever--which gives some hp and a couple save bonuses.

Then they have a level of a racial Essence--Manligr(human), Alfkin(elf), Dvurskin(dwarf), etc.

As they level, there will be advanced and legendary Essences too, like Berserkr, Drekiblodr(dragon-blooded), and others I haven't thought of yet, but probably at least one to do with giants.

[Grek]

Uh, Prak. The races as classes trope isn't in effect in Norse Myth. Norse gods and heros pretty clearly run off some sort of point buy system and don't have classes at all.

[Prak]

They also don't have mixed parties of spellcasters and rogues and warriors that are a mix of elves, dwarves and humans. They're pretty much solely "god/human goes around kicking ass, either solo or with one other guy who is also a warrior."

The closest Norse Myth gets to the typical D&D party is either the handful of times that stories were about Loki, Thor and Odin going and doing something.

Midgard isn't a D&D setting, it's a d20+mods v. TN system that uses D&D as a vague base, but replaces BAB with combat skills and spellcasting classes with spellcasting skills.

So the "classes" of Midgard are going to do things like "Hey, you're a very dwarfy dwarf, you can make magic weapons now" and "you are the elfiest elf that ever elfed, you can control the forest flora (or something. I'm still trying to figure out what the Alfar did)" while your ability to swing a battle axe or throw a fireball are reliant on how many ranks you put into Batter or Channeling, respectively. If you want to play mini-Odin you're a Manligr with max ranks in Batter, one or more spellcasting skills, and have a magic spear.