But as far as artifacts are concerned, I think there is a greater challenge in possessing one than simply finding it. You have to remember that these things have been sought for millenia, and there are people who use all manner of magical detection/scrying to locate such items.
Once an artifact is recovered, however, it sets off a cascade effect not unlike like a medieval version of Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There's very little stopping evil wizards and epic-level warriors from challenging you for your artifact.
As for finding an aritifact, I believe that it should be a once in a lifetime event, not a perrenial occurrence. Artifacts are lost for a reason and people are, more often than not, happier about them remaining lost than the alternative. Which is to say, balance is a precarious thing, and once it tips, well...
Personally, I prefer low-magic campaigns that advance at a slower rate than most. I marvel at the discovery of potential magic items. I enjoy the process of uncovering the identity of a mysterious object.
Consequently, I've never possessed an artifact, but that doesn't stop a PC from trying...
Originally posted by Blomble Snoutenherder
[b]I'll agree that a good DM would be cautious to introduce an artifact into a campaign, not to mention remaining sensitive to its prolonged presence in the game world. /B]
If you're interested in some DM materials on how to introduce artifacts into a campaign, see my Canonfire! article of "b-sides" cut from the Dragon 294 Living Greyhawk Journal article on artifacts (co-written with Erik Mona).
The CF! article's at http://www.canonfire.com/htmlnew/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=268
Suffice it say that this was not a well thought-out plan on our parts, as we were TPK'd the next session by said newly uber-powerful bugbear. That was my only experience with an Artifact-level item.
After a long and dangerous fight, turned it into a spear, rolled a 20 and kebabed her :D
Dancing with glee...
"Poison save!" says the GM
Feeling confident with some quite good saves vs poison, think I needed a 6 on the dice or something. Roll a 1, dead, oh well :embarrass
Thems the breaks, along with the rod, which broke soon after.
Apart from that the character has 3 others in her possesion, mostly because no one else wanted anything to do with them. Which is probably the wiser course of action...
A Staff of the Magi, dragged out of a dead drow archwizards hands when she was about level 15, he comes back as a lich around level 16 and tries to get it back but he eventually gets smoked after a particually savage wizard duel which rampages through the Guild of Wizardry.
I sort of got 'banned' for a few years after that one...
Pity the SoTM kinda sucks in 3E, it used to be bloody good in 2E
Tome of Iggwilv
This no one wanted anything to do with so I ended up with it by default, not really an artifact as such but you cant really have the "True Names" of any demon or devil being available for anyone to peruse. This may come in handy when Llolth comes back for vengence some day on my skeeny butt.
Prison of Zagig
Now this has to be one of the coolest minor artifacts ever made, sadly I dont think it ever made it into 3E and doubt it ever will. Basically you find out someones/somethings "True Name" (see above) or a considerable history of them then, command them to "Get inna da box!", provided they dont have a lot of spell resistance theyre stuck in there until you let them out.
The last resident was a Wyrm underdark dragon, who I beguiled into telling me a bit about herself, which I had too as I was soon to be lunch. Thankfully dragons are vain beasties and proceeded to wax lyrical about her thousands of years of marauding and exploits.
There after the dragon was poked daily with sharp sticks and teased on a pretty regular basis until it eventually flipped out and went crazy from the confinement.
But, alls well that ends well, eventually I let it out... in the Forgotten Realms where I figure it might eat some munchkins or soon to be munchkins
He went to a cleric of the same faith and asked him to study the weapon in hopes that he might glean something of its power. The cleric appeared the next morning, pale and trembling from what he had to report. Turns out it was more than just a mace.
But before the dwarf could reclaim the weapon, it suddenly vanished. Only later was it reported that the mace had been seen leaving the temple in the comapny of a bearded, white-haired man who had somehow entered the temple unnoticed.
Leif Valehaven rogue warrior played since 1996 cut off his hand and fixed the hand of Vecna to it in the adveture "Die Vecna Die"
A great adventure by the way! but after the module they Dm pretty much took him as an NPC... Made for great legend and lore for our campaign world.... I lost a great character!!!
Ecla
In Esmerin (Greyhawk Adventures, pp. 101-102), we encountered the Giant's Eye, which we had to destroy to escape (it was a real brute). It transformed one of our barbarian characters into a satyr, so we had to find the Throne of the Gods to reverse the effects. Some years back, we destroyed the Blood Obelisk of Aerdy (Atlas of the Flanaess, pp. 70-71), a battle that claimed the lives of more than one character. They encountered the Obsidian Man of Urik (scared the hell out of them!) and discovered that Tenser has the Death Rock (although they had no idea what it was; Tenser is trying to figure out how to destroy it).
We also have some artifacts devised by myself and others, plus a few from other (gasp!) systems as well... as should be obvious, my campaign is pretty high-level (many characters are 18+) and Oerth is highly magical. It's obviously not for everyone, but we've made it work (it also helps that the players have a tendency to rely on their wits and skills and their own abilities and do not heavily depend on other things to do their work). After reading the previous posts, it seems that artifacts are not all that commonplace in other campaigns (and after a quarter of a century of gaming, I hope they don't seem too commonplace in mine!).
They also found the first three parts of the Rod of Seven Parts and the Demonomicon of Iggwilv. They defeated Drelzna but didn't notice that that lantern hanging above her was anything special!
I suspect that any campaign rife with pcs carrying artifacts may be fudging the rules on the side effects - lol.
I'll stick to my humble Wand of Shadow Conjuration.
Hmm.. my Nyrondese gaming team once found (quite by accident.. or was it?
) the (now-infamous) Dices of Zagyg, an artefact of my own devising. After using it once, they tried their darnest never to touch it again. At the same time, they were unwilling to get rid of it for fear of what others might use them for. All in all, the toughest part became preventing the group's gnome from .. ahem .. "borrowing" them on a regular basis.Actually, after a while, any time something went spectacularly wrong, their first reaction was always to jump on the gnome and check his pockets to make sure he wasn't responsible!
Back when I ran my "Iuz must go down!" campaign, another team quested for some of the (2e - Book of Artifacts) Orbs of Dragonkind. When they finally got their hands on one, it came out as the Red Orb with the "desperate" personality. They managed to turn this to their advantage when they convinced the orb that they planned on taking on the Old One directly. Since the spirit believed fighting a (demi-)god could only end in disaster for them and (possibly) an early release for itself, it went along.
They had some fun turning Dorakaa into a volcano.. until Iuz showed up, arguably angry at seeing his capital turned into molten lava
Aaah, those were the days...
Whoa! Somebody has been casting Raise Dead Thread apparently :D
Hmm.. my Nyrondese gaming team once found (quite by accident.. or was it?
Actually, after a while, any time something went spectacularly wrong, their first reaction was always to jump on the gnome and check his pockets to make sure he wasn't responsible!
Back when I ran my "Iuz must go down!" campaign, another team quested for some of the (2e - Book of Artifacts) Orbs of Dragonkind. When they finally got their hands on one, it came out as the Red Orb with the "desperate" personality. They managed to turn this to their advantage when they convinced the orb that they planned on taking on the Old One directly. Since the spirit believed fighting a (demi-)god could only end in disaster for them and (possibly) an early release for itself, it went along.
They had some fun turning Dorakaa into a volcano.. until Iuz showed up, arguably angry at seeing his capital turned into molten lava
Aaah, those were the days...
Could we trouble you for some stats on those Dice of Zagyg? I am getting ready to start an Age of Worms campaign and wouldn't mind something to sneak in on my new players. I haven't run for them before but last group did some interesting things with a Deck of Many Things and then never touched it again.
I would love to see how your Dice of Zagyg work. Sounds like the Mad-Archmage might have come up with another winner!
In Scoti Garbedis old game, I managed to get ahold of a Deck of Many Things, despite the LG dwarves in the party who wanted to destroy the damn thing. We never did make much use of it.
I once ran City Beyond the Gate and some of my players got the Mace of St. Cuthbert for a short time.
In Scoti Garbedis old game, I managed to get ahold of a Deck of Many Things, despite the LG dwarves in the party who wanted to destroy the damn thing. We never did make much use of it.
Didn't make much use of it????? I remember you drawing a magic hand crossbow from it, an orc being evaporated or sent to limbo, another character getting three wishes, his wishes turning against him.. leaving him a drooling idiot and another character was cured of having her soul sucked from her body and both were cured of lycanthropy due to those wishes. I would say that is quite a bit. Yeah, it all happened in a period of less than 72 hours for the characters but I believe the dwarves had good reason to be scared of it, after that.
Could we trouble you for some stats on those Dice of Zagyg? I am getting ready to start an Age of Worms campaign and wouldn't mind something to sneak in on my new players. I haven't run for them before but last group did some interesting things with a Deck of Many Things and then never touched it again.
I would love to see how your Dice of Zagyg work. Sounds like the Mad-Archmage might have come up with another winner!
Sure thing Scoti. T'was simple, really (as are all good things)
The dices were two d10, each carved in bone. One was white as snow and the other red as.. er.. a tomato :D (never mind from where.. or rather what it came from)
Numbers (inlaid in gold) were engraved on each dice. The number "0" however was replaced by Zagyg's own symbol (the rune of insanity).
The results were random but I wasn't happy with a single table because, after a while, the players would inevitably figure out which number was tied to effect X, Y, or Z. Thus, I cheated.. sort of.
Whenever they rolled the dices, they would come up with a number in-between 01 and (1)00. At the same time, I would roll 2d6 behind my DM's screen.
The first d6 would tell me which of the two d10 represented the tens. IIRC 1, 3 and 5 meant the red dice. 2, 4, and 6 the white dice.
The second d6 would tell me on which table to look for the result of the roll.
I had compiled 6 different tables of random results:
1 - table from the DMG's wand of wonder
2 - table from Dragon #171 ("101 surprises in a bag of beans" / p.95)
3 to 6 - one of the 4 alternate wand of wonder's tables from Dragon #147 ("Wow your players!" / p.39)
That gave me some 600 different possible results, and the fact that the players didn't even know which way to read the dices only added to the randomness of the roll.
It worked perfectly since they never managed to understand how it worked nor from where I checked the results.
Given Zagyg is not evil and has a great sense of humor, I had decided to go along with each result, no matter how fantastic or embarrassing it could be. Note that some of these results can be tremendous boons to the players but it was only fair as they could be downright dramatic too.
They had a gnome rogue/illusionist in the team that fast became addicted to them. To the point where the party's paladin had to keep a 24/7 vigil to make sure he wouldn't roll the dices in secret (the artifact being highly chaotic, the paladin couldn't bear to carry it on his person).
I remember a game session where the players were all deep inside a marsh, almost all unconscious due to wounds, and things looked grim indeed (TPK grim). Lo and behold, the gnome decided to use the dices to "improve" on their situation. While everyone groaned around the table, the gnome's player began rolling. The results were.. ah.. surprising to say the least.
IIRC he rolled some 10 times (a record!) in a row and the results combined to create a floating island (part of the marsh, really) with a perfect lawn, a palatial tent, an irrate fire elemental, an animated catapult, a statue that was insulting him constantly, and some other things I don't remember. Oh, aye, and a (flawed) wishing well!
Long story short, they got off the "island" and returned home vowing never to tell anyone they were responsible. Months later, they learnt a neighboring kingdom had problems because of a dragon that had secured a "floating lair" from which it launched periodic attacks on settlements
In short, I had great fun with it
EDIT: forgot to add that, since the dices drew their powers from Zagyg, the "effects" they created were always treated as cast by a 20th-lvl spellcaster.
(but do keep in mind those weren't 3e effects, so you may need to "adapt" them a fair bit)
About a year ago, I ran a campaign in which the PCs were assembling the rod of seven parts to use as a weapon against Iuz. They finally found all seven pieces and assembled the rod, but before they could turn it on Iuz, they were "summoned" through a gate to a passenger ship on the Atlantic Ocean, circa 1930, by an insane but well-meaning professor of occult studies, who had accidentally awakened Cthulhu. An epic battle ensued (I used the rather impressive stats for Cthulhu given in the d20 Call of Cthulhu book), and the rod was used to destroy Cthulhu (resulting in its seperation and scattering across the Earth). The much-relieved professor then gratefully returned the PCs not to Oerth, but to a parallel prime material plane that had been conquered by titans with class levels (making the 30+ level PCs little fish in a big pond once more).
I suspect that any campaign rife with pcs carrying artifacts may be fudging the rules on the side effects - lol.
You're half right... that's why almost all the artifacts we have are stored in a vault and are never used (and Orcus doesn't need to have his Wand back either, lol); we know full well the consequences of possession of artifacts. Since anyone who owns the Iron Bow of Gesen will eventually transform into "a wild horseman of the steppes," the archer knew something was happening immediately as the first stage of the transformation began a few weeks later. He circumvented that by having a barbarian arms bearer (close enough, I reasoned), and touches the Iron Bow only when he needs to use it, which is quite rarely, actually; he deals out far more damage with his regular longbow and uses the Iron Bow mainly to shoot arrows of slaying or lightning bolts. It was original thinking, and I figured that was fair enough since the Iron Bow itself sees very little use and so yes, I fudged a little on that one because I thought it was such a cool artifact for an archer to have...
That is awesome, i am gonna have to look up those alternate tables and have some fun!
I have those tables somewhere. I'll start looking.
This is all 2nd Ed right: 2nd Ed DMG etc?
Oh, I forgot: YOINK — stolen for my campaign!
This is all 2nd Ed right: 2nd Ed DMG etc?
Yup. So was my campaign (at the time, that is).
Oh, I forgot: YOINK — stolen for my campaign!
Eh, that's the one item I don't mind seeing stolen. The more infamy it gathers across campaigns, the better
