Guest Post: Forging New Legends from Old

Artifacts are awesome and there are artifacts great and classic provided for you to use straight out of various published products. But if you’re a storytelling focused DM like I am then what are the odds that your story and the story of any of those artifacts are going to be a perfect fit? Pretty slim unless you designed your story with a specific artifact in mind.

There is a lot of advice in various products on designing things like monsters, but very little on items and even less on artifacts, so here’s a chance to glimpse into the process I’ve used to create a few artifacts.

This article is inspired by a conversation I had on Twitter where I ended up making an artifact for someone called Timbala, the Orucs Slayer, a sword that once slayed the Prince of Undeath himself (he got over it, as he’s apt to do). So I’ll use Timbala as an example.

Step one, beg, borrow, and steal. Like I mentioned before. There are already a bunch of really good artifacts out there. So find one that has some key components similar to the one you want to make. For Timbala I knew I was making a sword that wanted to kill a specific sort of creature and I knew I wanted it to be a Paragon tier artifact.

So after digging around through the D&D Compendium I found something sort of close and used that as my template. Did I copy it and then just tweak? No, I went well beyond that (although if you find something close enough, do it that way, seriously, it’s super-simple).

So as you look at your template it gives you an idea of about how many powers and properties an artifact of that sort and tier should have and you can imitate that in order to create your item, but with a connection to your story and tailored to your needs.

In the case of Timbala I started to develop some story after talking to the DM of the campaign that was going to use it. I decided that Timbala was a long ago hero who defeated Orcus before the gods were well known in the world. He needed to be exotic and interesting to capture some of the long ago feel. So I avoided a greatsword or longsword, and went with the less commonplace scimitar.

I imitated some properties of my template artifact and gave boosts to initiative and specific, story-focused skills. I also figured that Timbala, the warrior-before-he-became-a-sword was a leader amongst his people and I wanted to capture that by adding some Leader-like abilities. So it has an encounter power to grant temporary hit points and give buffs for attacking its favored enemies, demons.

When I looked at powers that could be added as the artifact grows I continued to use the template for balance, but continued to focus on the story as well. Sometimes it’s just taking what you have and growing it to a higher bonus and sometimes it was a matter of sticking with the theme...make it better at killing demons or allow it to have Leader-like abilities.

When it came time to deciding the Concordance track it was a matter of looking to the story and figuring out just how important that aspect was going to be to the item. Killing demons, defending law and order, these are things that Timbala will like. Creating chaos, killing lawful good creatures, this is going to make Timbala mad. The one bit that seems a bit odd is that you get a bonus in Concordance for being trained in Arcana...but when you consider that Arcana is the skill needed to make monster knowledge checks against elemental creatures, like Demons, it starts to come together.

As I worked on the mechanics of this artifact I also ended up developing the story at the same time. The connection between the hero Timbala and the artifact-sword, it’s personality, how it behaves along the Concordance track and when it moves on. These are all natural extensions of the story implied by the mechanics.

I can’t tell you what came first, the fluff or the crunch when it comes to the details of the item, they all started flowing together for me at the same time. I didn’t add any mechanics without it making story sense and I didn’t add any story without mechanics to add gravitas to that aspect of the item.

Have you ever created an artifact before or even used one straight from the books? How do you integrate artifacts into your story? Leave a comment and let me know.

Click here to download the PDF of Timbala, the Orcus Slayer and check out Sly Flourish where I have an article focused on how to integrate artifacts into your game as a DM and Temporary Hit Points to see how players can use artifacts to guide character growth.

Jeff Greiner is the publisher of TemporaryHitPoints.com and producer of TheTomeShow.com and a big geek who loves D&D and hates Orcus. He can be found on twitter as @Squach.