Rod of the Shadowmaster (3.5e Equipment)

This rod makes your shadow magic more real, but it comes at the cost of your own reality.

Crafted from what seems to be darkness itself, this rod may feel real and have a cold, metallic texture, but it is visually blacker than the blackest black, reflecting not an iota of light at all. At its head, its smooth shaft breaks into a chaotic mess of tentacles, which, if you stare at it too long, appear to move of their own volition. Prized by shadowcraft mages all over, the rod is both boon and bane.

While wielding the rod, any shadow conjuration or evocation spell you cast (and its variants) have their reality increased by 20% on a failed save. However each time you use the rod in this method, your own reality decreases by 5%. The effect is subtle, as if someone desaturated your color and messed with the contrast slightly, and the user never notices it, for he always seems normal to himself. When you are partly unreal, you enjoy a miss chance equal to your unreality, and also have a failure chance to perform anything equal to the same amount. The effect is similar to blink, in that when you fail, you have briefly phased into the plane of shadows, and thus your attack or spell slips into the wrong plane.

You naturally recover 5% unreality per day, and the effects cannot be healed magically. If you exceed 50% unreality (55% or more), you must make a DC 20 Will save. On a failure, you transform into a shadow (or a greater shadow if you had more than 9 or more HD) and become an NPC. For every 5% you exceed, the saving DC goes up by +1. At 100% unreality, you transform without a save.

The rod has an addictive effect on its user. Even when aware of the problem at hand, any time he has any amount of unreality to his name, he must succeed on a Will save DC 20 to resist any attempts at discarding the rod from his person.


 * Prereqs: Craft Wondrous Item, shadow conjuration, shadow evocation
 * Cost to Create: 6,500gp, 520 XP, 13 Days