Defense of the Magic Shop III: Stupid Magic Items II

Let's just do it. Yeah, let's just get right into it, no god damn intro. Stupid magic items part two, here we fucking go.


Stone Horse. I talked about D20 having a history of overvaluing things and this is, weirdly, another thing it hates. Transportation. While flying certainly has implications of its own, the system seems to think magical mounts should be inordinately expensive, even though transportation's importance is wholly dependent on the individual GM. I mean, you could play a whole campaign in one city, one dungeon, or one place. You group could just walk everywhere if your game has no time-focused urgency.

But the Stone Horse still costs ten thousand gold. What do you get for that? Well, it has hardness 10. That's good, because it's hilariously expensive to heal. I mean, if it even ever gets attacked in the first place. Otherwise it...doesn't get tired? Whoopy. The fucking rider still does, so that's pointless. The Stone Horse isn't going to get used more often than a regular fucking horse unless your whole fucking group never needs to rest. Say, Mount is a first level spell, a continuous use item of that would just be two thousand gold. Is this another situation like an item of continuous Expeditious Retreat where the system is going to imply via its examples that you just shouldn't allow it to exist? A light warhorse is 110 gold, meaning for the Stone Horse to be worthwhile, it has to save you from having to buy ninety horses. Upon Dead Horse Event #91, this thing starts saving you money. Until then, you could simply ride horses until they die of exhaustion then eat the corpse and save money compared to the Stone Horse.

No, this thing and many others are a tax on people for roleplaying. It's not very much more useful than a horse, the things it's "good at" won't hardly ever come up, and the only people who buy it are people whose characters don't like animals or something similar. Things like the Clockwork Steed are basically the same, where it's not even much more powerful in a fight than a horse, doesn't go faster, but still costs twenty-nine thousand gold. In fact, as a bonus, I want you to reread this whole section, but replace "stone horse" with "mechanical steed", "ten thousand" with "Twenty-nine thousand" and my regular tone of voice with angry screaming.


Sovereign Glue. This is a classic item and, for once, I won't fault it being included. It's definitely feeling the ravages of time, though. Back in 1e and 2e, the game was less fantastical. Less big, bold and...movie-like. You can tell by the classic items in the game: Decanter of Endless Water, Heward's Handy Haversack, and yes...sovereign glue. The game's more punchy and more flashy now, and gluing stuff together...just doesn't sound as useful as it did when I was a kid. For 2400 gold, it should...I dunno, repair magic items or something.


Figurine of Wondrous Power.  I guess we're talking about classic magic items today and how they're bad. Unlike Sovereign glue, I can't imagine these things, ANY OF THEM, were ever useful. Every version in every edition have ridiculous time limits on their use, when having these to use most of the time would be the entire point of the item. Okay, the obsidian steed is like a BADASS horse with an incredible amount of spells it can use, but who the fuck only needs a horse once a week for 24 hours? It's ONE fucking horse and this is a game where you explicitly are in a party of adventurers. I can go on and dispute literally every one of these piece of shit figurines, but most of those arguments would end in the figurine doing something that would be useful if it were once a day instead of once per fucking week. And yes, if they were more usable they WOULD be more expensive. I think a lot of people would be totally fine with that, though. You could even cut down costs by not giving them a bunch of pointless spell effects we're not likely to use.

The one that's new to Pathfinder, Slate Spider, is pretty awesome, though. Once a day you can get a fight with no misfire from your gun. For 5k gold, that's alright. Now if only guns were worth using...


Folding Boat. This isn't exactly a bad item or anything, it's just that 7,200 GP isn't much more expensive than an actual nonmagical ship of the same size. By the time your group is looking at transportation, you're likely to just spring for this instead of a regular ship.


Migrus Locker. I secretly love this item. Even though 10k probably isn't worth it for what's essentially just a familiar, I like tools like this. It's neat and it's one of the reasons it was so fun in 2e to have your thief read a scroll of Summon Familiar. Even these days I'm always looking for reasons to plunk a familiar onto my rogue characters like taking the advanced talent for it.

But.

This is OBVIOUSLY someone's custom magic item, and it's gross on the level of parody. Did it have to be like this? A chained box that has a weird skinned cat with your face in it? Couldn't this be...I dunno, a cute little mechanical bunny or something? As a horror fan, this is really often the internal conversation I have with myself when watching gore movies. Sometimes it's fun and effective. Sure. I fucking love The Toxic Avenger and that's one gross fucking movie. A lot of the time, people have problems with gore not because it's gross, but because it's presented without context or reason. Something that's gross or shocking can really drive a point home, like in Evil Dead 2 or the remake. This is a pen and paper game, though, so I'm not sure what point they're trying to make here. Migrus Locker reminds me of Saw 2, when Jigsaw is getting brain surgery in his filthy trap warehouse. Instantly upon the scene beginning, you think "Okay, you're showing this for no fucking reason. You just want to gross me out.".


Elixirs. Any of them. Back in 3.0 and before, Druids had religious restrictions on weapons. This is fine, except they got club but not greatclub. It led to me imagining Archdruids walking around with measuring tape, making sure clubs weren't too long. Elixirs kind of do the same thing for me. I get that it's because these are various effects instead of potions explicitly being spells. It's a categorization thing. I get it. But, does this not imply that Brew Potion shouldn't be in the game? I can make a single use item of a spell effect with Craft Wondrous Item. I can make a liquid that causes an effect when I drink it, apparently, with Craft Wondrous Item. And actually, if I make a magic item with fifty charges of a command-word spell, it's hilariously cheaper than potions. An item of fifty charges of a first level spell at command word activation is 900gp, or 18 gold a charge. Compare to 50 gold for a single potion. You just have to put up 900 gold at once instead of 50 at a time. You might even need someone in the party to take Craft Wondrous Item. Honestly, though, neither of these two situations would dissuade most common adventuring parties.

 I mean, I guess at least wands are cheaper, at 15 gold a charge for a 1st level spell. They should be, being spell trigger items. They're more restrictive to use. Nice that something makes sense, for once.


Horn of Valhalla. Let's call a 5th level Barbarian a CR5 monster. Summoning 1d4+1 CR 5 monsters is something Summon Monster VII can do. Summon Monster VII cast once a day at Command Word activation is 32,720GP. The Horn of Valhalla functions once a week, has restrictions on who can properly use it, and costs 50k gold.

I think I've made my point.


@}-,-'--


So today ended up being a lot of bashing on classic magic items. That's going to be a trend in magic items: Sometimes things are brought forward due to nostalgia and their gold value doesn't really mesh with the new system. Maybe it never did, since I'm sure 1e and 2e D&D's developers weren't using a unified system with which to justify gold piece prices. I mean, in those games, you really weren't supposed to be buying and selling them. Games were less fantastical and magic items weren't integral to character builds, so simpler things stood out more. You'd probably think the Horn of Valhalla was really cool if you were playing 2e. We're not playing 2e, though.

But as a closer, I wanted to say something about the magic item creation rules. If you want to say that they're broken or require restrictions, I don't agree but I'm willing to have that conversation. If you're going to tell me that I'm misusing the rules to create these "more economical" magic items, I'm sorry to say that nothing in the book supports your point of view. The magic item creation rules are presented explicitly for the creation of custom magic items. They wouldn't be in the book if they weren't intended for use. Even if you weren't supposed to use them like this, they're some of the most fun in the game and help people feel like they have options, or even just neat stuff.

We even give our weapons names. Aikiyo the Mockery doesn't wield a +1 flaming katana. No, that's Blossom Thief tucked into her obi.  Letting us create our own magic items is the same feeling, only greater. It's grown integral to making characters and even whole games really memorable. We won't remember most of the crap on our character's sheets, but we'll remember those cool magic items that define them.

The problem isn't the magic item creation rules. The problem is these thoughtlessly designed items, and I'll keep proving it, over and over. I'm never going to run out.