Open main menu

Dungeons and Dragons Wiki β

Changes

Book of Elements (3.5e Sourcebook)/Magic Items

190 bytes added, 19:46, 17 October 2010
m
footer
{{Tocright}}
=Magic Items=
{{quote|''I need to borrow your pants. It's for the petrification trap. Honest.''}}
===Wealth By Level===
Wealth by level is a terrible idea. It limits the kinds of adventures you can play by requiring the PCs to be rich, but not too rich, and it unacceptably strains the world's versimilitude verisimilitude when it comes to crafting, trading, or other possible adventures. So we're getting rid of it. By mid-teen levels, the eight-item limit and the limitations of scaling items should hopefully restrict players to level-appropriate power. Characters should probably get at least one permanent minor item each, every level 3rd and after. As they gain more levels, their treasures should likewise increase, with lesser items coming online around 5th level and so on, medium items somewhere around 7th to 9th level, and so on.
Parties that face and kill a lot of humanoid NPCs should, naturally, have more treasure. This is actually fine, since the main concern you have is your ability to use all your items. PCs in such a situation, then, just get a bigger batcave than other characters, and have more of their item slots filled with top-tier items, just not necessarily items they want. Humanoid NPCs can also be equipped the same as PCs without doubling your wealth and power, which is awesome.
==Portals==
Portals are the major way of getting around the planes, and its it's appropriate that something be given about them here. The Create Portal feat given in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting is hilariously bad, since it required the ability to cast an 8th level spell, and you could just replicate it with [[SRD:Craft Wondrous Item|Craft Wondrous Item]] and custom items anyway. A portal may take the form of a literal portal, a doorway that connects two places, or they can be a teleportation circle or area of floor, or a room that teleports when the door is closed or a button is pressed, whatever, no matter what spell you actually use. Sometimes they're all glowy and/or covered in runes, sometimes they're no different from the rest of the floor. This latter kind are usually thought of as traps.
So, instead, portals are created with the [[Fortress Mage (3.5e Feat)|Fortress Mage]] or [[Magical Artifice (3.5e Feat)|Magical Artifice]] feats. A portal to a specific place on the same plane takes the [[SRD:Teleport|''Teleport'']] spell (although [[SRD:Greater Teleport|''Greater Teleport'']], [[SRD:Teleportation Circle|''Teleportation Circle'']], and anything similar are acceptable alternatives). A portal to another plane takes [[SRD:Plane Shift|''Plane Shift'']] at minimum, although [[SRD:Gate|''Gate'']] can be used. Also, portals to a preset destination are perfectly accurate (no matter how inaccurate the spell used is), although you have to teleport to the destination as part of crafting the portal. That is, you have to find a way, not necessarily in one hop, to teleport from point A to point B and then get back in a hurry. You can stay the night and prepare spells at Point B if you want, but not much more. Portals work through barriers that would block normal teleportation, although not being able to teleport directly make teleporting to build the portal more difficult. A portal with a single destination costs 30,000 GP in planar currency to create, each way; a portal with variable destinations adds 15,000 GP worth per additional destination. That's cost to create; base price is twice that, so it takes one day for each 500 GP in the cost to create, unless you have a way to build it faster. The second half of a two-way portal only costs half what the first half did.
Portals can be keyed to require a specific item or kind of item, password, time, or whatever to operate. They're a lot like glyphs, that way, and can be keyed to anything a provided ''detect'' spell can detect or anything else that can be put into a glyph. Adding such an effect to a portal costs 1000 GP per spell level per caster level, using the parameters for the detect spell (not the portal itself), with 0-level spells counting as 1/2 level. Some portals can also be keyed to require a specific spell to be cast on them. Generally, any portal will stay open for a few (1d4+1) rounds or minutes (depending on the portal) after being opened with a key, but some require the key for any operation. The latter variety costs an extra 10,000 GP worth of planar currencies.
Keys are often used as controls for this portals to multiple destinations; a portal might lead to one destination with one key and another destination entirely with a second. A portal might also have multiple different keys for the same destination that work independently, or a three-part key that it only needs two of, or whatever. Regardless of key, a Use Magic Device check can emulate pretty much any key a portal may have, even objects (typically DC 30, DC 40 for one-of-a-kind objects) or ancestry (DC 30), or even specific times (DC 20 for times that happen at least once per day, 25 if once per month, 30 if once per year, 40 for once per decade, 50 for once per century, and so on). A portal with an unknown key can be activated with Use Magic Device at a -10 penalty; in that case, a portal with multiple destinations leads to a random one.
There's was a pretty awful Gygaxian trick to have a portal that leads to two places at the same time, one for creatures and the other for objects, so you go through and you're naked and your stuff's somewhere else. That's bad for the game, and those portals don't exist. Carried or worn objects always go where the creature using them goes. A portal still might take a rock that you toss through it to one place and send you to another; that's just a keyed multiple portal.
There are also naturally-occuring occurring portals. These can open pretty much at random, from almost any point A to almost any point B. They behave fairly similarly to artificial portals, except even more arbitrary. While a created portal would have its destination set and be keyed to fit the needs of its creator, a natural portal is simply a rift connecting two arbitrary points, with no guarantees that that destination is useful, that it has a way back, or that the key (if it has one) makes immediate sense. Ancestry is very rare as a naturally-occuring portal key, although ancestry-based natural portals do exist, mostly in and to areas with ties to a specific ancestral line, usually with one end in a divinely-morphic plane.
Spells exist to tell you this information about portals. You can also use [[SRD:Identify|''Identify'']] or [[SRD:Analyze Dweomer|''Analyze Dweomer'']] exactly as if they were magic items, which they are.
 
----
{{Book of Elements Breadcrumb}}<br>
[[../Elementals of Style|← Previous: Elementals of Style]] <div align=right>[[../The Inner Planes|Next: The Inner Planes →]]</div>
0
edits