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→Crafting Magic Items: crafting rules!
== Crafting Magic Items ==
Building a magic item is a big deal. It is a way to expand one's power and a way to transfer power to your lessers, and in many ways the life of an adventurer revolves around the acquisition of magical loot. If magic item creation is too easy, adventuring is less fun, and if its too hard then people won't do it and resent the system and DM.
We know that the current rules don't work. Gold and XP costs are things that have little meaning in even a low-level game, and players are notorious for finding ways around them by taking metagame classes like the Artificer, by having cohorts pay those costs, or even by giving morals the finger and having mindcontrolled captured spellcasters do it. That's before we even get to ''[[SRD:Wish|wishes]]'', powerful outsiders, or craziness like the Dark Craft and soul rules.
There is one thing that hurts characters: time. Adventures and stories happen along a timeline, and players may or may not be able to stop during an adventure to build just the right item for an adventure. Even "downtime", the time between adventures, is limited because powerful characters attract powerful enemies and predators. Heroes that say "we'll just take a year off and make magic cloaks for everyone" are basically saying "we'll sit in the open and let our potential and actual enemies pick the time and place for any battles." DMs can throw enough intrigues in someone's way during that time that before the first cloak is built that the campaign is over.
Creating magic items just requires time. There's work that goes into enchanting a sword, forging a blade, smelting the steel, mining the ore, and all that just takes time. If a character is really dedicated, he really seriously can wander off into the hills collecting reddish stones and then heating them up until iron comes out and then hammering the molten metal into a blade and then enchanting it with his power and walking out of the hills with a magic sword. Various portions of this can be expedited by, for example, ''hiring other people'' to do a lot of that -- so a character can reasonably expect to throw down gold and buy himself a lot of that time back. But if you just have time, time will suffice. Exactly what magical goods are needed or helpful in magic item creation is highly variable campaign to campaign.
Thus, to create a magic a magic item, a character needs the following:
# The appropriate spell, and the ability to cast it, or some other class feature that allows them to bypass this (such as the [[Fighter, Tome (3.5e Class)|Fighter]]).
# Time equal to one week for every 1,000 gp in the item's value.
# Appropriate ingredients for creating the magic item.
For the purposes of on-camera magic item creation, having the correct magical ingredients lets you bypass all but a single week of the time step. Thus characters may go out and quest for whatever magical ingredients they need, and once they have them they can almost instantaneously make the magic items they want.
=== Iconic Forms ===
Let's face it: magic items are more fun when they come in recognizable forms. Seeing a wizard waving around a stick and knowing that it's a wand is more fun than trying to guess the effects of a glowing stone in his hand. Therefore, if you make an item in its iconic form, you gain the '''iconic form bonus'''. This lets you treat the item as if it were two caster levels lower, for the purposes of creation (so you can make magic items earlier) and activation (so it's easier for people to use). Also, creating such an item now only takes 2/3's the normal amount of time.
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