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Give your magic item a quick history. Then use the history to tie a whole bunch of things together that will make you look like a genius.

We’ll get into genius part in a sec, but let’s first create a simple background that you can do in just 60 seconds.

To flesh out your item’s lore fast, give four questions a one line answer each:

Lore Question #1: Origin Story

Who made the item and why? (And when?)

We’re dealing with how the item came into existence. The item’s origin story. And this is always interesting stuff!

I’ve assumed the item was crafted on purpose by someone or some thing, but that need not be the case. A magical event might have imbued a mundane item with powers. Or, if you’re using the Legacy Item system from Assassin’s Amulet, the item might have spawned from energies absorbed by great events or NPC deeds.

Origin Ideas

Some ideas for why the item came into existence:

• An NPC commissioned the item to be created
• The creator was forced into it by an NPC or terrible circumstances
• It was an accident
• A magical event, such as a supernatural storm
• Manifested when the gods created the world or universe
• The gods built it for mortals as part of their plotting
• Natural disaster + magical world, such as a landslide imbuing its earthly power into a shovel buried during the catastrophe
• A community pours its attention, devotion or spirit into a mundane item that absorbs this energy over time

Date Stamp

Next, give the item a date stamp. While not required, this fact offers you additional context and inspiration.

For example, is the item ancient or new? If so, that’s notable and worthy of further exploration to help detail the item and your campaign.

If you have a campaign management information system, like I do for my campaigns using My Info, then a date stamp also helps you log the item into it.

Example origins:

• Created by Servis, a humble village priest, to help protect his northern community from orcs 53 years ago. (Servis was half-orc , which caused interesting problems, but that’s another story.)
• The goddess Cyrene bequeathed the item to her loyal guildmaster in CY245 to help him handle recruitment.
• Lightning struck the item not once, but three times. Each strike imbued the item with one power. This happened yesterday, to a PC (stinking behirs!) but he doesn’t know that the item he’s been carrying since level one is now magical.

Lore Question #2: Who Used It Last?

In most cases, owners dictate an item’s impact on the world. A magic sword offers no lore if it’s been sheathed since creation. To make history – and interesting campaign material – the blade requires an NPC to brandish it.

On a finer scale, recent ownership can inspire plot. For example, if the item was stolen, the previous owner might want it back.

Loot or Possession?

Items are either loot or possession.

Loot means the item sits somewhere waiting to be discovered. Dungeon crawls, museums and private collections are full of loot, for example.

But that’s boring. We want to know who used the item last, which means it was a possession.

So go back to that point the item was used last and jot a note about who used the item last and how the NPC became the owner.

Answer these questions as succinctly as possible to keep your creation process moving fast:

• Who was the last owner?
• How did they become the owner?
• What did they use the item for, in general?
• How did they lose the item? (If applicable.)
• How did the item get to be at the location where the PCs can find it? (If applicable.)

Examples:

• Servis gave the item to the village’s strongest warrior, Urbat, who used it in many raids against the orcs. A foe finally defeated Urbat after many seasons and stole the item away.
• Guildmaster Avram used the item in his presentations to prospective guild members for years. He kept the item’s function a secret, but was never seen without his golden torque. He handed the torque to his successor, and ever since it has become a symbol of guild leadership.
• The PC carries the item in his backpack, ripe for a friend or foe’s detect magic.

The main reason these quick facts help you is they offer a breadcrumb trail in your campaign. Armed with NPC identities, locations and past usage rumours, you can guide the PCs to the item, add the item to a PC’s background, incorporate the item into an adventure back story and so on.

Simple details become great hooks and leads with just seconds of preparation.

Lore Question #3: Weal

Next question offers you more grist for your campaign wheel.

Name a time when the item brought good to someone or some place, and briefly describe what happened.

Again, a one-liner suffices. More details are welcome, but if you do have extra time, keep creating past events when the item did some good instead of fleshing out details for just one event. You can always add details when working on other parts of your campaign or on-the-fly during the game. That’s where the genius part I mentioned at the beginning of this article comes in.

Examples:

• Urbat slew many orcs with the item, but a legendary moment came when he singlehandedly saved a farm family from a dozen orc raiders. (The village created a holiday in Urbat’s name on the date of this event after the warrior’s death.)
• Another time, Urbat used the item to kill an orc champion in a challenge with the orc leader. Urbat’s victory gave the village a one-season reprieve until the orcs reneged.
• Bratheon, the third guildmaster after Avram, used the torque to convince city counsellors to stay an execution. The criminal became a guild member, and the family never forgot this kindness.

Lore Question #4: Woe

Now we dive into the dark corners of the item’s past.

Name a time when the item brought harm to someone or some place, and briefly describe what happened.

If you have more cycles, add more bleak spots to the item’s past.

For example:

• Urbat stumbled in combat and accidentally slew a friend. This sent Urbat into a funk that was not lifted until he met his future wife.
• Avram recruited Nial Crackhammer with the torque. Nial’s clan suspected foul play, and discovered evidence of the item’s magical influence. The Crackhammer clan remains a guild enemy to this day – plus they bear knowledge of the torque’s secrets.

You Are A Genius: Weave A Complex Tapestry Through Simplification

Questions three and four give you campaign depth with little work. This brief effort makes you a genius because the item becomes a catalyst and a unifying element.

Catalyze Gameplay

By having an item do good and evil, you create an intriguing past. The contradiction will make PCs even more curious. The good and evil events generate conflicting views, stories and legends. The PCs might even think they’re hearing about two different items, thereby creating a great future group  Aha! moment.

Instead of a ho-hum cardboard magic item, you have one that offers mystery, dilemmas and gameplay potential as players try to sort things out.

Further, these stories of weal and woe give players hints about the item’s powers. Bonus points if you offer clues about the existence and nature of hidden powers or surprise elements.

For your adventures and encounters, the conflicted history brings good and evil factions to the table. The bad guys hear of the item’s evil deeds and want it for their cause. The good guys hear of the item’s good deeds and want it for themselves.

Optionally, each side wants the item to prevent their foes from using it against them!

Unify Campaign Details

During design, we create a lot of details. Each bit of information tends to be its own island within your notes. This NPC over here, that place over there, this event in your adventure background, that event in your campaign history.

Tie some of these details together using the history you just created for your magic item. Each time you link game elements together, you reduce prep work and add depth to your world.

You can even use this to generate some plot. Who did what when to whom? Your item history can take disparate facts from your notes and noggin, and start building such statements in your campaign background using NPCs, places and things drawn from item history tid bits.

You connect stuff. This increases detail for what gets connected, which is great. But it also reduces the number of game elements you now need to track. It’s like a video game where smaller blobs combine into big blobs, and the big blobs get new features and properties from the merge.

For example, you need a village for your adventure. Normally, you’d put a dot on your map and declare that the village. Then you start developing the village a bit.

This time, you make the village the same one Urbat protected for all those years. Boom. A small parcel of details borrowed from an item’s history instantly gives the village great details and campaign context.

Instead of a new village and one more thing to track and design, you’ve got one place with a bunch of interesting details you can include or not, roleplay or not, as you run your adventure.

Go through your item’s history and highlight all people, places and things mentioned.

Each of these nouns becomes a new entity in your campaign. Try to link to these entities as you develop your game.

Use It For the Contest

If you like the four question deep lore method, consider giving it a whirl by crafting an entry or three for the Magic Items contest. Read the Brief Word section at the top of this newsletter for more information about how you can enter and what prizes you can win.

Related articles

• Why I Fell In Love with Staves Again After 10 Years (PFRPG) (campaignmastery.com)
• Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: The Value Of Magic (campaignmastery.com)
• magic items Gygax forgot to steal from Zelazny from Blog of Holding (blogofholding.com)
• October Blog Carnival Wrap-up: A cavalcade of posts about goodies (campaignmastery.com)
• How To Create Great Magic Items In Just Three Minutes from Roleplaying Tips (roleplayingtips.com)

You can create cool treasure for your campaign and enter a contest at the same time!

Gator Games is sponsoring the contest and you can win some great books from them.

How To Enter

Follow the 3 Minute Magic Item template described below to create a magic item.

Email me your magic item creation or post it as a comment below.

Multiple entries are welcome!

Prizes Up For Grabs

Care of Gator Games (available to North Americans only due to shipping restrictions):

• Wraith Recon Core Rulebook for use with D&D 4th Edition
• Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 for D&D 4th Edition
• Monster Manual 2 for D&D 4th Edition
• The Adamantine Arrow for Mage the Awakening
• Player’s Guide for Aces and Eights
• Fantasy Craft Core Rulebook from Crafty Games

And these prizes are available to anyone in the world:

• PDFs from Open Design and Kobold Quarterly
• Copies of AstroSynthesis 3.0 from NBOS

How to Win

There will be three sets of prize draws: Nov 7, Nov 21 and Dec 5

All entries submitted before each date will be eligible for each draw. So enter early and often.

Winners will be drawn at random.

Don’t worry about the quality of your writing – I’ll help edit.

As always, entries will be given back to the community after the contest, so you’ll be helping your fellow GMs too.

If you have any questions, drop me a note.

Here’s the stat block template to use for your entries:

• Awesome Name
• Appearance
• Benefit
• Drawback
• Lore
• Twist

Check out the full articles about 3 Minute Magic Items to learn more about what each stat block item is about.

Thanks to Gator Games for their sponsorship!

Busy GMs need help prepping for games faster. And you can create fantastic magic items in just three minutes using my stat block.

Magic treasure is critical in most fantasy games because it does so much:

• Creates campaign balance, especially if combats are often difficult
• Adds to campaign mood, atmosphere and wonderment
• Beefs up weak characters in parties where more knowledgeable gamers build more effective PCs
• Gives players creative options during gameplay
• Gives game masters fun design opportunities
• Fun! Who doesn’t love a magical reward?

It’s easy to create a +1 dagger, but that’s boring, as we’ve chatted about in Roleplaying Tips before. You want your treasure to entertain, feel like a reward and add depth to your campaign.

With my fast design system, you turn magical rewards into plot hooks, world development tools and campaign enhancements all at the same time. Oh yeah, and your players will love them, too.

My stat block has just six elements, all focused on making gameplay more interesting. I think that’s the key to anything you design – make gameplay more fun, then worry about world building and plotting.

There are other things you can add to this stat block, such as cost to construct, creation process, market value, and so on. You can also take a deep dive into any element of the stat block, such as lore, and write up pages worth of information.

But I wanted a tool that let me generate a great reward, whether it’s in a pile of treasure or being worn by an NPC, in just three minutes. In a half hour you can have an adventure’s worth of key magic items designed!

Let’s dive in.

The Stat Block

Use this stat block to create three minute magic items. The numbers represent the time you should give to each part of the block to meet our three minute goal.

• Awesome Name – 30 seconds
• Appearance – 30 seconds
• Benefit – 30 seconds
• Drawback – 30 seconds
• Lore – 60 seconds
• Twist  – 0 seconds (yup 0 – not a typo!)

Awesome Name

The item’s name is its hook. The test of a great name is players’ ears perk up when they hear it. If you get your group’s attention just with the name of something, you’ve done a fantastic job.

You want to then drop the item name into conversation, histories, clues and everywhere else you can think of in your campaign. Tease your players first. Then supply the way to acquire the now must-have object of character lust.

I give 30 seconds to this because you should try out several different names. Then pick the best. Usually our first name idea is not the best, and a little brainstorming helps generate a better result.

Appearance

What does the item look like? A one-liner here should be enough to work from when introducing the item during a session.

Turn this into a 5 second task by using an image and just showing it to your players.

Tip: create one interesting visual feature or quirk. Bonus points if it ties into a PC’s personality or theme. This helps firmly hook the item in your players’ minds. An item with distinct appearance gives the owning player fodder for roleplaying, identification and value.

For example, a +1 dagger that looks like a finely crafted dagger is pretty boring. When in use, the player is not likely to play it up or celebrate the item in any way. However, make the dagger look like an exotic creature’s fang, and you’ll get a little more excitement for it.

Benefit

What does the item do for a character? A great benefit offers choice. If an item enters player conversation (and better yet, NPC and PC conversation) a few times each session, you’ve done a great job.

I split benefits into three types:

1. Passive
2. Active
3. Surprise

Passive benefits tend to be always on. A +1 attack, for example.

I do not like these much, though I currently do hand out a lot of this kind. Passive items add little to gameplay. They are not interactive. They offer no choices or tactical considerations. They offer no roleplaying opportunities.

Active benefits offer specific effects for a limited time. With these you can create any kind of cool and interactive operation, effect or event. Pick just about any spell effect, for example, and make that the reusable benefit of a magic item.

Aim for active benefits with your item designs. Feel free to add in passive benefits as well, because the PCs will need parity with challenges they face. But focus on creating active benefits PCs will swoon over.

Surprise benefits come in two flavours.

Emergent benefits come from clever players figuring out great uses and synergies between the item and other game elements.

Hidden benefits foil typical detection and identification means so you can surprise and delight players at some future point.

I like adding hidden benefits, especially to the most beloved items. Because the benefits are secret, you can add these after the fact, once you know an item isn’t going to be sold or stuffed in a sack.

Picking just the best or most interesting items for this treatment is like putting chocolate sauce and sprinkles on ice cream. Your players will be ecstatic.

Drawback

This is perhaps the trickiest element of the stat block because it requires the most thoughtful design.

A drawback creates gameplay at its finest where players must pay a small price to receive the benefits of the item.

This is not meant to be a penalty. Nor is it meant to negate the benefit. It’s meant to add more fun by weaving more texture into your games.

The design skill comes in where you want a drawback that actually creates fun, or at least more interest or depth, so the PC opts not to toss the item and actually wants to use it despite the drawback.

A great example is the artefacts system in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. (If you own the book, crack open those tables for drawback inspiration. By the way, did you know the book placed #1 recently on Wired’s 9 Essential Geek Books You Must Read Right Now?)

Examples of the types of drawbacks to consider:

• Minor curses
• Trade-offs (one thing improves, one thing worsens)
• Costs
• Random effects
• Chance of occasional interesting failure

I suggest creating a swipe file, as they call it, of drawback ideas you find while reading RPG stuff in books and online.

Lore

You can mine a rich background throughout an entire campaign. The trap we fall into is lengthy histories. If you’re like me, by the time we’re done one history for one thing it’s game day already.

So get into the habit of point form histories that cover just the highlights. Do this for enough game elements and you build an awesome scaffold for your game.

A great history focuses on just one thing: notable events relevant to your campaign.

Break that down further, and we see an event only needs a time, place, location and NPCs.

For our magic item design, then, we just need three or so one-liners, one event per line, that follows a Mad Libs style formula like this:

On [DATE] an [NPC] [TOOK THIS ACTION WITH THE ITEM] that caused [THESE CONSEQUENCES].

There are other approaches, and I’ll cover at least one in an upcoming newsletter. But, the gist is to keep it short and simple, and to proliferate your histories with people, places and things, because that’s what your adventures are all about.

Put another way, when you create adventure backgrounds, NPC backgrounds, plot hooks and encounters, you want to tie things together to make your campaign feel integrated and immersive. To do this easily, you want your notes to be clear and simple. Pages of history result in tons of great information getting buried. One-liners present the most important information front and centre, available for instant use.

For your item’s history, create three one line entries that involve at least one NPC, a place and a situation.

Twist

You want to break the pattern of “just another +1 dagger” that saps wonderment out of your sessions. A twist offers one of the best ways to do this. The unexpected always creates interest and excitement, and sometimes a little drama.

Best case scenario, which only comes with practice at creating magic items in this fashion, is you create a neat twist in one of the other stat block elements. Then this step takes no extra time!

For example, an interesting drawback creates a natural twist. So does a secret in the form of a juicy Lore entry. A surprise benefit makes a neat twist sometimes, too.

On occasion, you can make a twist out of the item’s appearance, such as when form does not follow function. For example, a magic dagger that does d4 damage and d12 healing when it hits. Attacking to heal is a fun twist, and on the rare occasion when damage exceeds healing but only by a minor amount, you’ll get laughs and groans at the table.

Practice Required

You will not likely make your first item using this system in the time it takes to boil an egg. It requires a bit of practice. You might need to create 10 items or 25 or more before you get fast at it. The great news is practicing is fun.

What could be better than whipping out an index card when you’ve got three minutes to spare and creating a magic item for your campaign? Repeat as often as possible until you get fast.

It’s not like designing a game world. Those take a long time to work through the entire process. Weeks, months or even years.

But with our magic item stat block, you can cycle through the entire creation process from start to finish in minutes. That means you can repeat often, and therefore become great at it fast.

Cheat Like I Do

Use all the tools and resources at your disposal to help you out. Following my template ensures you will generate something interesting. That gets taken care of all by itself. You just need to put in the time and effort.

First thing you might do if stuck is grab a magic item book off your shelf. Or an adventure. Steal parts liberally. Mix and match.

Websites are another great source of ideas.

Second, use generators. Suck at names? Google some name gens and hit F5 to get that design part taken care of for you.

Here are a few generators you might find useful:

• 40 Name Generators
• Artifact Generator
• Magical Weapon Generator
• Historical Event Generator
• Stock Fantasy Situations
• Cliché Plots
• Equipment Generators category

Write In Point Form

Your campaign is not a writing contest. As a rule for all your game notes, be as brief as possible with your notes without losing the fidelity of your thoughts.

Point form stat blocks are perfectly acceptable. Add in the extra words during gameplay.

Now You Try It

Here is the stat block again. Got three minutes to spare? Give it a shot:

• Awesome Name – 30 seconds
• Appearance – 30 seconds
• Benefit – 30 seconds
• Drawback – 30 seconds
• Lore – 60 seconds
• Twist  – 0 seconds (yup 0 – not a typo!)

Treasure hunts are the crown of RPG

By Jesse C. Cohoon

There is the type of game where you go to dangerous site, talk to the appropriate people, wander around, fight the monsters and come home with the treasure that’s just laying there. However, such games can be so much more than that. What I’m talking about is making the game more exciting, more thrilling. A treasure hunt can be an investigation – a hunt for information – for actual treasure or something intangible.

What key points should a good treasure hunt have?

1. A good treasure hunt should have multiple parties wanting what you’re after

These parties could be different political or religious points of view, different people wanting whatever the treasure is for whatever reason, or people who do not want the information to come out.

Each party should have their own viewpoints and reasons for wanting to find the treasure or keep it hidden.

For example, what would happen if, as in Dan Brown’s Novel The Da Vinci Code, it was proven there actually was a divine blood line of Jesus? What if aliens visited the earth and the gods are aliens that gave us technology and knowledge? What if the various conspiracy theories found in the Zeitgeist movie are true?

2. A good treasure hunt should be geographically diverse

Look at the National Treasure movies, and Dan Brown’s multiple works, and look at the History Channel Cities of the Underworld. Each offers different geographical ideas and how to connect diverse things hat might not at first glance have any apparent connection.

You can hide treasure hints in statues, remote geographic locations, cities, books or even art for those who know what to look for and how to find it.

Such places might be guarded by physical, magical, technological or psychic means.

It is then up to the players to find a way around the obstacles faced to get what they need to get.

3. The treasure should not be easy to find, understand or decipher

Clues should be available, but not readily known or noticed. If they’re widely known and others have all the pieces, why hasn’t the treasure (whatever it may be) have been retrieved by now?

It should take special knowledge or skills to decipher clues because they are so scattered. Players may go to a specialist or sage, only to be told incomplete or wrong information, or that someone else may have the knowledge they need.

Going to specialists might alert those that who also seek the treasure of its whereabouts and increase the danger. Furthermore, the specialists themselves or their families might be in danger.

4. A good treasure hunt should have wide-reaching consequences

Can you imagine how history would be different if Nixon was able to silence or prevent the Watergate scandal? Could you imagine the ripples of consequences if aliens were proven to have interfered with human history? What happens if the evil overlord gets the crown of divinity? What happens if the scepter of undead control ends up wrong hands?

5. A good treasure hunt should be dangerous, but there always should be a way out if the participants think about it long and hard enough

This danger can be:

Social – failure to find treasure makes you to look like a fool, or defame you or your family’s name

Emotional – failure makes you feel very bad, lowers your confidence or even causes psychosis

Physical – guards and traps.

There should be time to think and adjust to get everyone out alive if a plan is enacted fast. The forces that wish to get it before you, or wish to prevent its discovery, can also be dangerous. They might do anything to prevent the PCs from completing their quest.

6. A good treasure hunt should be rewarding

Even if the treasure isn’t quite what you expected, it should be valuable and worth the adventure, if not materially, then in terms of character growth and development.

7. A good treasure hunt should be fun

Anything you should do for a game should increase the player’s enjoyment.

by Silveressa

“In my new campaign, arcane magic has been outlawed. It’s still there, people are just too scared to use it. This has been the status quo for 1,000 years. How would you recommend handling the pacing of magic items, non magical rewards, and character wealth in general?”

Hi James, thanks for writing in; this is a common issue with experienced and beginner groups alike. Here  are my thoughts on how to keep things balanced and interesting:

Non-Magical Rewards

With magic outlawed you may want to consider how far technology advanced during the thousand year ban, and how many steampunk style devices and inventions might be in use or lay lost among ruins.

Rewarding players with treasures of partially functioning attempts at replicating magic-using technology. You can easily keep them mystified and busy trying to decipher, repair, and sell the inventions they do discover without dealing with anything even remotely magical.

With magic outlawed, knowledge of magical cultures and the history of magic itself also likely has been lost to the mists of time. Letting the adventures discover lost arcane texts or simple historic scrolls regarding magic item creation techniques, and how magic influenced the history at the time, can make compelling rewards valuable to scholars on the black market.

Other useful treasure rewards are ancient paintings, statues and other works of art long since lost among ruins. Finding these treasures is only part of the fun since players will need to devise a way of safely transporting them (without magic) and then  finding a suitable collector to appraise the pieces, and lastly, someone interested in purchasing them.

The effort and cost involved in this process will slow the monetary income considerably, and make the money the group does receive at the end feel more valuable. (They might also make contacts and enemies along the way.)

Pacing Magic Rewards

Some characters  might be able to use the historical tomes to piece together the real reasons magic was outlawed, and perhaps use them to learn the basics behind the crafting of simple magical artifacts or rediscovering rudimentary cantrips.

For example, handing the characters a magical ring that gives a small bonus to armor offers much less excitement as allowing them to rediscover the secrets behind creating such a ring themselves, and letting them experiment. The process of experimentation will also help consume some of their treasure money and time, making control of magical power progression easier.

In regards to actual magic items and weapons, detecting them as magical in the first place without some type of preexisting magical detection artifact or steampunk invention could prove impossible. This would make the inclusion of magical items a difficult treasure reward unless the the magical gear mystically glows or exhibits clear magical properties.

Assuming they have a way to properly identify some of the treasure rewards as magical, without an alchemist or other scholar to identify the specific properties of each item the group will be left with experimentation and the rare magical lore text to discern the use of each artifact found. This lets you once again control how fast the group grows in magical power

Regarding the speed of rewarding magical treasure goes, I would start slow and small. Let the characters reinvent magical equipment rather than discover existing magical artifacts. At higher levels, offer small caches of magical artifacts hidden away from the magical purge a thousand years ago. This lets the players feel responsible for their growth in magical ability, and the later rewards will seem more valuable if they have to fight through  higher level traps and enemies to acquire them.