Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Holmes & Cook: Magic Item Tables

A few notes: I decided to try and find different titles for Current and Intermediary. Although they are quite functional, I didn't much care for them. Thus, the following tables will use the term Common for Current and Quondam for Intermediary. The latter actually means "that once was" in addition to being a cool potential name for a lost civilization.

One thing that I like very much about these tables is that they infer a back story for each item and for the treasure hoard that they are a part of. Rather than merely asking the utilitarian "how would the denizens of this dungeon use this?" these tables also suggest "why is an item from this particular era here?"

BTW, apologies for only providing .pngs of these tables. They are complicated enough that they are beyond my limited ability in .hmtl to provide any other way:


4 comments:

Alex Osias said...

Quondam! Excellent -- we actually used that in our campaign for items that were not only ancient, but also thought lost.

There was a character who collected such thing -- a Master Quondam -- that we approached for such items.

Erin Smale said...

Interesting approach - I do very much like the idea of parsing magic items by historical period. Identifying 3 eras and stating that the further back one goes, the more powerful the items, instantly blankets the setting with a good deal of inferred background.

Not sure about the naming, as it doesn't seem to provide the right connotation - to me, it implies more ancient than "intermediary." Why not Modern, Classical, and Ancient?

FrDave said...

@Erin

...

...because I didn't think to...

Jim said...

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing!!