Thread:Talk:Main Page/Where do we go from here?/reply (12)

Count me in for breathing life into a +1 longsword! While I think that just creating an interesting backstory and history of an item can be fun, what about quirks that either don't have game benefits or drawbacks, or that only have extremely situation small bonuses/penalties?

For example, we find a magical longsword. It's bearer and creator, Garji of the Battered Blade, was a Varisian blacksmith-arcanist and a member of a well known adventuring group "The Knight'ed Owls" based out of Korvosa. While he was brilliant, and a champion in battle, he was completely socially inept and absolutely in love with the group's priestess - Bethandra Hollowtine, halfling loremaster of Desna. His passion, besides the priestess, was in creating highly functional yet unassuming swords for his companions and those with the coin to hire him and the patience to wait for his slow pace. His trademark, the "Battered Blade", is a chipped and blackened steel sword with a darkwood hilt wrapped in an immaculately preserved Varisian scarf that was of his family's caravan. What made it worthy of story was twofold - one, that he would make weapons of much greater power and potency, yet never trade them out for his initial creation; and two, that it was discovered posthumously that it enabled the bearer to have a finely tuned sense of smell only when it came to halflings. For he could never bring himself to tell the object of his desire his longing for her, yet he enchanted his trusty blade to enable him to be able to not only find her by her scent, but also to breathe in her aroma from across the campfire.

So, mechanically, it's a +1 longsword that grants the scent ability, but only in regards to halflings - and it's not something that can be turned off so long as one possesses the blade. Another variant could have been that it would have halflings within 30 feet appear to be surrounded by faerie fire - but only the wielder would see them as such. Or for a non mechanical benefit, it would make the volume of words spoken by halflings especially loud to the wielder's ears.

Would something like that be fun, or should we stick to creating backstories that don't modify the weapon at all?