Bastard Sword
You may never know the depth of my love for Cleric’s pajama hammers.
If you’ve never adventured with an intelligent item, I recommend you give it a try. I’ve got a bladebound magus in my current campaign, and his scimitar has been a great source of amusement. Lirima the Lovely Blade wants to be wielded by the world’s greatest warrior, and it’s her goal to mold her wielder into such a man…tiefling…whatever. If she has her way, there will be no skulking about with invisibility and other such cowardly stratagems. The couple of times the magus has failed his Will save vs. her ego he’s had to shout a pithy one-liner and hurl himself before the enemy all Dudley Do-Right style. And let me tell you, watching a Dex-based magus attempt to bull rush an ogre off a stairway is comedy gold.
Of course, it was less funny when the souls trapped in my wizard’s custom metamagic rod got the upper hand. They used his mouth to tell that party’s Big Stupid Fighter, “The rod is evil! You must destroy it!” Good riddance to those jerks anyway.
Any of you guys have a good intelligent item story? Let’s hear it in the comments!
We had a Rod of Orkus belonging to a cleric who in game refused to believe artifacts could be intelligent no matter what proof was presented him. Cue insanity.
“I may call down the wrath of my god to smite the wicked, banish the wicked to the Abyss, or sic celestial dire badgers on the wicked, but a talking stick? That’s the stuff of fantasy!”
Yeah. Down here in the Phoenix area, we have an entire resort for them.
https://www.talkingstickresort.com/
That… That’s really random.
We once had two intelligent items in a party at the same time; one had the soul of a noblewoman from the city we were playing in, who wanted to advance the city’s interests above all else. The other was the soul of a king from another country, who wanted to be wielded in glorious adventure. They despised each other.
Nice. I love some good intraparty bickering. Of course, the old “GM argues with himself” thing is tough to pull off in practice.
In exchange for trying out Call of Cthulhu once, our GM granted us a boon in our ongoing DnD game.
The Tiefling Swordmage’s player asked to receive her family’s legendary sword.
I asked to be able to voice the sword, which I did in my best Harvey Fierstein-esque chain-smoking Jewish grandmother voice.
After an extended periood with no combat “Oh, I understand. You’ve found some new weapon to wield, or you’re too busy with your friends to go murdering goblin hoards with me. I see. Leave me to rust in my sheath for weeks on end without so much as a peep.”
Another party member commented on her voice, “Here, let’s let a few dozen generations worth of teifling nobility channel hellfire through YOUR whole body for a millenia and we’ll see how YOU sound like.”
That is amazing. Once you move past Stormbringer and Crenshinibon, there’s no limit to the lolsy shenanigans of intelligent items. You’ve just got to treat them like any other character, you know?
Out of curiosity, where did you link to this comic from? I noticed that a bunch of people had stumbled across this one the other day.
There was a link on Rusty and Co.
Well then. I’ve got a fellow gaming comic to reach out to. Cheers for the heads up!
My friend gave my bard the sevon ribbons of fabulosity (we make up items on the fly half the time because planning is for suckers and people who know magic items) which gave me +2 charisma and +5 bluff (provided I was dancing while attempting to bluff) but regularly forced me to dance uncontrollably.
This led to me dancing through a dungeon, in complete blackness (with an additional +10 which he added while I was posessed to bluff) when I ran into a guard cast haunted fey aspect and made him think he had gone insane because a dancing monster with ribbons flying shouting about parties was attempting to intimidate him.
Heh. I always wondered how Hamlet’s dad pulled that mess off:
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/hb/hb_42.119.545.jpg
“Yeah son. I’m very dead. Avenge me and stuff.”
*snerk*
No real intelligent items story, though I once took a party through a 3-year long campaign without them discovering the magic sword was Bahamut in disguise. They found out at the end though. =) Can I ineterst you in the story of a hypochondriac Red Dragon looking for a Cleric?
I think that counts, lol.
Yeah, man. I very down for that story. What was the dragon’s primary health concern? Were they reading too much Web MD?
This is so awesome.
Thanks
😀
Part of recognizing the difference between a murderous intelligent magic item, and a kill-crazed party member, is realizing that they’re not mutually exclusive.
I was once in a party that hired on a fighter with a really crazy reputation of killing things that a fighter of his level had no business killing. At first he was polite and professional, his only idiosyncrasy was his insistence on a wielding a particular sword, and no other. It was a common-looking longsword, that aside from some intense magical readings and being an exceptionally good weapon for the type, had no other apparent qualities. We figured it was a family heirloom or something and chalked it up as a quirk of his character.
Then one day, the party’s rogue decided to part it from him in exchange for a nearly-identical nonmagic longsword. No sooner than the blade was out of arm’s reach the fighter wakes up, and attempts to strangle the rogue. The fight spills out of the room of the inn, down the stairs, and down into the busy foyer. At a scant few hit points remaining, the rogue separated from the fighter and hid, leading the fighter to go berserk and begin attacking other patrons, thinking that the rogue had disguised himself magically. One of the other patrons – a member of of another adventuring group – put him down with a Finger of Death.
As soon as the Fighter’s body hit the ground lifeless, his sword ripped itself from its scabbard, beheaded our injured rogue, and then swooped across the room to do the same to the spellcaster that killed its wielder. Cue the entire inn erupting into a fight with an intelligent dancing sword, and our party getting kicked out with two corpses and a broken sword in tow.