It’s been a long time since I talked about this whole “making magic items” thing I’m calling AngryCraft, huh? F$&%, it’s been a long time since I promised this very article would come out. But here it is. At long last. Part whatever out of part however the f$&% many parts I need to get this done. And that’s all I’ve got to say as a lead-in. No Long, Rambling Introduction™ today. I’m just going to do a recap – more for my benefit than yours – and then get to work.

The AngryCraft Story So Far

Last time, I put all of the magic items in the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide into a big-a$& spreadsheet. Remember that? I don’t think I actually shared the spreadsheet itself, though. Here it is. Do what you will with it.

DMG Magic Item List (Original)

I did that so I could figure out how to properly price the materials that AngryCraft craftspeople would gather and use to make magic items. Which I then did. First, I figured out how many units of material it would take to make a given item based on its usage and power level. Then I decided on an average cost of individual units of material of each rarity. And then I did some mathe-magic to determine the cost of the materials that would go into each item. After that, I used the magic item prices in the core rules as the basis for some more mathe-magic to assign a ‘labor cost’ to each item which would determine how much PCs would have to pay NPCs to get them to turn available materials into magic items. And then I added those numbers up to figure out the actual cost of each magic item.

And this is what I came up with.

DMG Magic Item List (With Prices)

I can’t stress enough that those prices are tentative averages. And I say that I can’t stress that enough because it seems like I always end up with people asking me about the same stupid s$&% no matter how many times I stress it. In the final version of the system, wood materials might be worth less than the average cost and mineral materials might be worth more. I don’t know how it will look when it’s done. I’m not there yet. These are just baselines. Consider that stressed. Again. And stop stressing me out with this s$&%.

Consider us now fully recapped. If you need more information about how I figured this s$&% out, go back and read the tens of thousands of words I’ve already written explaining it all. Please. Because I’m getting sick of explaining the same things over and over and answering the same questions. I swear to f$%&ing Zeus that if have to explain one more time why I can’t use the Sane Magic Item Prices list or why schools of magic are not useful, intuitive descriptors for materials, I’m going to break out my bespoke Tesla coil and start shooting bolts of lightning randomly into the crowd until the voices go quiet.

What’s in a Recipe

Recall that the reason I did all the work I described above is that I want to develop a useful, intuitive, and – most importantly – systematic list of materials for GMs to hand out in their games. Materials that players can use to craft any item – magical or mundane – that exists in the core game. And also recall that materials come in different types – wood, mineral, herb, fluid, essence, etc. – and they come in different rarities – common, uncommon, rare, very rare, and legendary – and some of them have special magical qualities. They’re attuned to certain types of magic like fire or ice or healing or teleportation or whatever.

To make a magic item, a PC merely has to expend the right quantity of the right types of the right materials with the right qualities. I’m calling the requirements a formula. And I don’t think I’ve actually been clear about what a formula might look like. So let me provide a TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE of what a formula MIGHT LOOK LIKE when I’m done with all of this. An example I’m TOTALLY PULLING OUT OF MY A$&. And I have to emphasize all of that s$&% because whenever I say, “so, for example, this is what the finished product might look like,” I get a bunch of dumba$&es nitpicking the details of the example.

Let me be clear: the following is a total a$&pull meant to provide an example of what an AngryCraft magic item formula might look like when the system is done. It is not an actual piece of design.

Frost Brand Greatsword

• 8 Very Rare Materials (6 Very Rare Metals)
• 4 Cold Materials
• Cannot Use: Common, Uncommon, Wood, Plant, Bone, Hide, Fire

The PC can use any number of any kind of materials as long as the combined pile of materials satisfies all the conditions established in the formula. To make the frostbrand greatsword, the craftsman must have a minimum of 8 units of very rare materials and at least 6 of those materials must be very rare metals. Can they use 8 metals? Sure. Can they use 10 total materials? Sure. As long as there’s at least 8 very rare materials and at least 6 of those very rare materials are metals, they’re good.

The craftsman also needs to supply 4 materials with the cold quality. Can those cold quality materials be part of the pile of 8 very rare materials? Sure. Can they come from the 6 very rare metals? Sure. Can you add 4 very rare cold minerals to the 6 very rare metals? Sure.

Of course, there’s also restrictions. Powerful magic items might be spoiled by common ingredients. And organic material is unlikely to survive the process of forging a sword. You can infuse a sword with powdered minerals and quench it in fluid, but if you add some leaves to the mix, they are just going to burn up. And the leather or wooden grips are too small a detail to affect the item’s magic one way or the other. And adding fire magic to an ice sword would probably f$&% things up.

So, that’s a formula.

Now, thanks to the work I’ve done, I’ve already figured out the total number of materials required to craft any item in the DMG. And I know the required rarities. The next step is to figure out the magical traits. The qualities.

Cast a Wide Net, Then Draw It Tight

I keep saying that I want this whole AngryCraft thing to make some kind of sense. I want players and GMs to feel like that there’s some kind of underlying logic to it all and to feel like that logic is somehow connected to how magic actually works in the world. The formula I shared above is an example of what I mean. It makes logical sense. Why is that important? Because it means the players don’t have to memorize everything or reference everything. They can have a conceptual understanding that helps guide their decisions.

Imagine that a high-level party clears out an adamantium mine in the heart of a glacier. It was overrun by ice devils who were forging weapons to arm the infernal legions fighting the Blood War. At the end of the adventure, the party has a bunch of very rare metal and a bunch of cold-infused devil blood and maybe some ice diamonds or frost sapphires or whatever. And now the party has to look over that pile of materials and decide what to do with it.

Because the system makes sense, the PCs don’t have to look over the entire magic item list and examine every formula. The logic of the system helps them come up with a shortlist of things they can probably make. They have a lot of metal, so they can probably make weapons and armor. And they have a lot of cold-infused materials, so they can probably make things that deal cold damage. Just by the name alone, a frost brand weapon is a pretty likely candidate.

I’ve already said I don’t want too many different magical qualities in the game. The players and the GM should be able to remember most of the list without having to look it up. And when they come across something with a particular quality, it should be easy to remember what that quality is and what it does, even if they had forgotten that quality existed until they found a material with it. If there are 50 different possible magical qualities and they include effervescent and scintillating and discombobulating, no one will ever know what they can make from anything.

Ultimately, I refuse to have more than 20 qualities. I personally think even that’s too many, but I don’t have a choice. I need 10 qualities just to cover the damage types in the game and one to cover healing. That means I have to add just nine more qualities that are sufficient to intuitively describe every magic item that exists in the game.

There’s two basic ways to tackle this problem. First, there’s what I call the Dumba$& Stupid Method. That method involves just coming up with a list of 20 magical-sounding words based on whatever magical effects and keywords I can remember from the game and then slapping those descriptors haphazardly onto all of the different magical items and using whatever arbitrary moon logic I need to make everything fit.

You can probably guess based on my name for that method and the general tone of my description that it’s not the method I plan to use.

The second way, The Totally Right Way, is to run through the entire magic item list and assign each item a few intuitive descriptors inspired by what the item does, how it does it, what it looks like, and how it’s named. Obviously, if there’s an existing game term that works, I’ll use that. Once I’ve assigned intuitive descriptors to every item, I’ll make a list of all the descriptors I assigned and see how many there are and then try to pare it down to just 20.

To put this in pretentious design speak, because I’m working from a list of existing items and magical effects, I have to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. That’s the best way to end up with something remotely intuitive.

That said – and it kills me that I have to explain s$&% like this – that said, I know everyone’s intuition is different. I don’t need to be reminded of that, thank you. My intuitive descriptions may not match yours. Or anyone else’s. You might disagree with my descriptors and there’s nothing I can do about that.

What I can do, though, is to make sure there’s a consistent, logical pattern that underlies my intuition. That might seem like a crazy thing to expect given most people think intuition is the opposite of reason. But intuition actually arises from an unconscious recognition of patterns. And patterns are what consistency is all about. I have to be careful, therefore, not to overthink things. I have to go with my gut. Which is something a lot of gamers absolutely f$&%ing hate doing. Because most gamers overvalue logic and reason and undervalue all the rest of the tricks their brain can do.

I can also do my best to draw on established game concepts whenever possible. Like using those damage types. They’re pretty strong descriptors. They come up a lot in the rules and they make good, logical sense. In fact, because so much of D&D magic involves dealing damage, you can probably describe 50% of the magical effects in the game with just those ten words. Plus healing.

Doing those things will help make up for the fact that intuitive understanding isn’t universal. So, while there’s the chance that any given player will initially think my understanding of extraplanar magic is weird or unintuitive, if my understanding is applied consistently and if it is consistent with everything that already exists in the game, the player will be able to reframe their understanding quickly enough. Intuition won’t always help you learn something new, but it does facilitate quick learning and lots of ‘a-ha moments’ where patterns and connections suddenly become clear.

With all of that very clearly said, it’s time to describe some magic items.

Describe All the Items!

And done.

Seriously.

Have a look.

DMG Magic Item List (With Initial Descriptors)

Here’s the thing: it’s really hard to explain how I did this. Initially, I was going to record myself going through every item on the list and assigning descriptors. But you know what? It was boring as f$&%. Because I just sort of did it. I looked at each item, read its description, and assigned a few fantasy descriptors that felt right. That’s all.

Well, that’s not QUITE all.

All right. Let me try to explain without having to run through every one of the 800 items. First, let me grab a screenshot so we have some context and so you don’t have to hunt through that entire crappy spreadsheet. This one will work:

Notice that I added three columns to the list. The second new column, Energy, is where I put any damage type associated with the item. I know they’re going to end up in the final list of qualities, so I kept them separate. The first new column is where I put the school of magic that I felt best suited the item. I know I said I wasn’t going to use the schools of magic as descriptors, but the truth is some of those schools actually do provide useful descriptions of magical effects. The problem is they’re not all created equal.

Transmutation, for example, is a good, useful school. It’s all the magic that transforms. And the conjuration school almost always involves stuff teleporting or moving between different planes of existence. Those are good schools. But then you have abjuration. It seems like it’s got a good, useful definition. It’s magic that wards or protects, right? But when you actually think about how the magic works in the world – what the magic actually does – it quickly becomes a mess. You’ve got protective spells like mage armor and shield that project magical fields of force. But you’ve also got spells like sanctuary that create some sort of mental aversion to attacking the target as evidenced by the Wisdom save and the fact that it doesn’t hedge out area effects or environmental hazards. And then you’ve got spells like pass without trace that alter sensory information like an illusion while also somehow transforming the world to wipe away signs of passage after the subject has moved on. You can argue that the force fields could be evocation, the aversions could be enchantment, and the concealment spells could be illusion or transmutation based on what they actually do.

I once complained that there’s two different kinds of classes in the game and they look weird being in the same game if you think too hard. Warlocks and fighters don’t belong in the same game together. Well, it’s the same with the schools of magic. Some of them are based on the fluffy, flavorful way the magic works in the world. Others are based on the mechanical effects of that magic. Only spells that actually transform something in the game world count as transmutation, but any spell that provides protection mechanically counts as abjuration regardless of how it works.

That said, some of the schools ARE useful descriptors. And I do need to acknowledge the existence of schools in my list of qualities. However weakly, they ARE a part of the D&D world. And there are magic items that are basically just spell batteries. Items like scrolls and wands. And the system needs a quick way to pair up spell effects with materials. So, I assigned every magic item to a specific school of magic based on my understanding of the schools and my reading of how the item worked. It was pretty hamfisted in some cases – this isn’t like the old days where magical effects, magical items, and schools of magic all align coherently – but that’s okay because I knew it would only be useful when it was useful and I’d ignore the school in all other cases.

The third new column was the fun one. That’s the one where I put in all sorts of made-up descriptors based on my reading of the item and my subjective feeling about how the magic worked. You’ll notice that a lot of terms from the D&D lexicon are in there. There’s references to ability scores, creature types, different planes of existence, the non-fire hermetic elements, and so on. And there’s also a few other odd little bits of lore from fantasy literature or that incorporate common fantasy tropes.

Fun as it was to come up with this s$&%, there’s not really a lot to say about the process itself. That’s why I nixed the video idea. But a few interesting patterns did emerge and those are worth mentioning. After all, this whole process was about allowing an underlying, emergent logic to, you know, emerge.

The word ‘inert’ pops up a lot. And I like it. Initially, it was just my word for anything unyielding or immobile. But it gradually expanded. You’ll see how and why that happened later. The word itself is a very obscure reference to a single throwaway line of text in the first chapter of one of my favorite humorous fantasy book series, the Myth-Adventures of Aahz and Skeeve, by Robert Lynn Asprin. I highly recommend checking it out and I highly recommend stopping after Asprin passed away and other authors took over.

Anyway, inert eventually became a synonym for antimagic. In the D&D universe, it makes sense. Lead – one of the most inert metals I can imagine – blocks detection spells. And in European mythology, iron repels evil spirits and can be used to bind or harm magical creatures like fairies.

I also have to draw attention to the fact that, even though my main goal is to build an intuitive system, I also want to build a system informed by the game’s fiction. Something I wish D&D cared more about. Given the choice between a descriptor that fits the game mechanics and a descriptor that fits the world’s fiction, I almost always went for the latter. For example, it would have been easy to classify weapons like the sword of sharpness and the vorpal sword as necrotic effects because, mechanically, they dismember and kill and instant death is pretty much the exclusive domain of necromancy. But the fact is that both of those weapons work because they are supernaturally sharp. Sharper than any mundane sharp thing. They have been magically transformed from normal sharp swords to the sharpest of sharp swords ever. See what I mean?

What else should I make note of? Oh, the ‘magic’ descriptor. Some magic items got that one. It doesn’t mean they are magical. All of the magic items are, ipso facto, magical. But magic items with the magic descriptor are items that magically affect magic itself. They change the rules of magic. The pearl of power is a great example. It allows a spellcaster to recover spell slots. Yes, I could have called it metamagic and I probably will in the end, but I hate that word.

Finally, I guess I should mention the ‘chaos’ descriptor. That became the descriptor for magic items that can generate lots of different effects that are determined by random die roll or by pulling cards from a deck or beans from a bag or whatever. But, like both the inert and the magic descriptors, the chaos descriptor evolved a lot. You’ll see that in a minute.

So, anyway, I went through the whole list of magic items and assigned descriptors based on snap judgments and gut feelings. That’s the point.

I Can Craft That Item in Twenty Words

It might surprise you to learn that when I got done assigning arbitrary, flavorful descriptors to every one of the 800 magic items in the DMG, I had a lot more than 20 words. Especially when I included the creature types, damage types, schools of magic, and hermetic elements.

The reason I included creature types, by the way, is not because I plan to have materials with the ‘ooze’ quality, but because I’m going to need an easy way to pair up magical item qualities with all of the beasts in the Monster Manual so I can tell GMs what crap can be harvested from what corpses. That’s a lot easier if there’s a simple set of rules like “golems and constructs always have some theurgic material that serves as their magical heart.”

Anyway, I ended up with a list of descriptors that looked a lot like this list. And that’s because this is a picture of the exact list I ended up with.

Now, how the hell could I possibly prune that list of descriptors down to just 20 qualities without losing the ability to describe every magic item in the game? Well, it’s easy if you know anything about astrology or alchemy. Both of those – and they are highly interconnected, complementary systems, mind you – both of those ancient sciences are based on the idea of mystical correspondences. The idea is that there’s certain patterns of mystical forces that persist across all the different levels of reality. Saturn is associated with lead is associated with fire is associated with the spleen is associated with the choleric humor is associated with mustard and so on.

I just needed to take all the descriptors on my list and combine them into 20 different groupings. And then, I’d just have to figure out a good name for each grouping that captured the essence of all the descriptors in that group.

It sounds easier than it is. But I did find a way to streamline the process. I wrote every descriptor onto a separate index card, laid them all out on a table, and then I physically rearranged them into different groups until I liked what I saw. Biscuit helped. Until I made her get the hell off the table and get out of my way so I could actually get some work done.

Here’s some pictures of the process.

As above, so right here: I don’t have anything to say about this process. Not anything interesting anyway. I just kept shuffling things around until they looked good. And none of those pictures show the end result. I don’t know what happened to that picture. But it really doesn’t matter. Because it resulted in this final list.

Except that wasn’t the final list either.

The End…?

That should be it, right? All that’s left now is just to open the spreadsheet and use the search and replace function to replace each of the dozens of descriptors with their corresponding qualities.

If only it were that simple.

See, as you go through a process like this, your understanding of the underlying logic you’re applying keeps changing. And as you juggle concepts around and associate different things and start to imagine the reasons why certain things might be associated, you start to see new patterns and connections. As you work, the system is evolving organically. And that really helps it feel like a consistent, logical set of rules instead of an arbitrary pile of game terms.

To take advantage of that, I didn’t just search-and-replace based on the correspondences between the different descriptors and the 20 qualities I’d come up with. Instead, I started with a new copy of the magic item list and went through and assigned one or more of the 20 qualities on the final list to each magic item with fresh eyes. And, as I did so, I ended up renaming a few qualities and moving a few correspondences around so they’d work better when applied to the actual item list. It’s like a feedback loop.

Once again, I was going to record the whole thing. And, once again, it turned out to be really dull busywork. But, that’s design. 1% inspiration, 99% running through the same f$&%ing spreadsheet seventeen times gradually iterating. There were a few interesting moments though. And it’s easy enough for me to sum those up in a couple thousand words. So, let me give you the Cliff’s Notes version.

First, let me note that this final pass isn’t really the final pass. It’s the initial final pass. I’m going to end up sweeping over all of this again at least once to turn all of these little details into actual, final formulae. And I’ll likely go back over the list at least once before that just to see if everything still makes sense once my brain has worked on other s$&% for a week or two. And I’ll probably make changes. And things will get further refined when I do that.

Second, let me address the f$&%ing ‘resistance problem.’ There’s a bunch of magical items that grant resistance or immunity to specific kinds of damage. And there’s a few different ways – when it comes to a system of magical correspondences – to handle those items. The basic thing I had to decide was whether a chain shirt of fire resistance would require fire materials because it involves the manipulation of fire or whether it would require cold materials because cold magic opposes fire magic. Of course, I could cop out and just say that all items that grant resistance involve the same kind of material. One associated with general protection in all its forms. But no.

Now, most gamers – especially those raised on video games – would say that you should use cold materials to make flame retardant pants. And I would totally agree. IF I were working with a system that already had an in-built system of magical oppositions. Games like Final Fantasy and Pokemon, for example, have rock-paper-scissors-type elemental oppositions built right into them. And understanding those oppositions is either a major part of the game – as in Pokemon – or it at least grants a substantial advantage to players who learn to capitalize on it – as in Final Fantasy.

But D&D is haphazard and scattershot and has no such underlying logic already baked in. What, pray tell, is the opposite of poison damage? What is the proper magical spell to use on an acidic ooze to deal extra damage? What type of damage would you use to destroy a magical crystal that sends out waves of psychic damage?

With some work, you could come up with a list of elemental oppositions. But there’d definitely be a few weird, arbitrary choices on that list. You’d hit a point where you’d have to invoke some twisted-a$& logic to explain just how the motherloving f$&% poison is a logical antonym for force. And whatever your moon logic, the real reason would be, “those were the last two elements you had left to match up.”

And even if you did come up with a good, logical system, there’s nothing in the game that would reinforce that system. It’d only work for magic item crafting. Just because you decided that poison materials are just the thing to create a potion of force resistance, that wouldn’t mean you could suddenly dissolve a wall of force with Melvin’s non-copyright-infringing acid projectile. And it wouldn’t make oozes any more susceptible to magic missile.

As I said before, if you can’t take the most intuitive approach, you can at least take the most consistent approach. So, fire resistance comes from fire materials. Cold resistance from cold materials. And so on.

Initially, I had this idea to designate one quality of material as a sort of ‘inverter’ quality. Basically, if you combine that material with some fire material, you get anti-fire. That is, you get fire resistance. It sounded nice in theory, but it meant that the formulae for all the items that provided some kind of damage resistance became more complicated. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it because elemental resistance is a pretty minor, pretty specialized thing to begin with. It didn’t need to be extra hard to slap together some potions of fire resistance just to raid the red dragon’s tropical volcano resort dungeon one week. And I didn’t like it because some magic items that grant elemental resistances also grant a bunch of other magic effects and those formulae would become prohibitively complex. I wanted to err on the side of “one quality, one effect” as much as I could.

Which brings me around to the three-quality limit and what happened to chaos materials. And, by the way, those will probably get renamed to wild magic materials. Let me explain that saga.

Because I wanted to keep the complexity of the individual item formulae under control, I didn’t want any formula to require too many different kinds of materials. So I decide that no item’s formula could involve more than three distinct qualities of materials. There will be some in-universe explanation about magic fields interfering or some s$&% like that, but that’s just the lore excuse for the mechanical rule. I hate doing it, but sometimes you have to invoke the Conservation of Time Hypothesis. And at least I’m TRYING to explain magical laws in-world.

But sometimes, when you make a rule and explain it in-world, you discover something really cool. That arbitrary limit – no more than three magical qualities in a single formula – created a problem. Some items would absolutely need four or five or even more different qualities of material just because they did so many different things. Like the f$&%ing instruments of the bards. To keep those formulae below the three-quality limit, I’d have to decide which of the seventeen different f$&%ing spells the doss lute could puke out represented its primary usage and which spells were just ancillary. And that would be completely arbitrary.

So I had to think like a wizard in the world. What would I do if I wanted to create a magical item that required four kinds of magic?

Well, I already sort of had my answer. Because those stupid magic items that have big, random tables of effects required chaos materials. Maybe chaos materials were useful precisely because chaos materials contained an ever-shifting miasma of all the different kinds of magic. They provided a loophole. They were everymagic so they could circumvent the three-kinds-of-magic-per-item limit. Using them, an artificer could create an item that required more than three kinds of magic without introducing instabilities in the thaumaturgic field that would lead to a cascade resonance magical bulls$&% technobabble wand core breach.

And that led to the idea that maybe chaos materials could also act as a sort of wildcard material. Maybe a craftsman could substitute one unit of chaos materials for one unit of material with any other quality. If the craftsman didn’t have enough ice metal for his frostbrand, he could use some chaos metal. Chaos materials thus ended up with this special, extra use that would also make them more expensive and valuable than other materials.

Now, I had another, related idea that I absolutely can’t use because it would take too much extra f$&%ing work. And I’m sad about that, but that’s how it goes. Maybe chaos materials are how cursed items happen. That is, the risk of using wildcard materials is that sometimes you get an item that seems like the one you tried to make, but it isn’t. It’s something else. The problem is, to implement that, I’d need cursed analogs for all the items in the game. Or at least a list of curse effects that could be applied to cursed weapons, cursed armor, cursed potions, cursed scrolls, and so on.

The vestiges of this idea do show up in my lists, though. The few cursed items in the game all require chaos materials to craft. Not that you’d want to make them. But cursed items have gotten really weird anyway thanks to the overall pussification of D&D. I wish the designers had the balls to just excise the s$&% they don’t want from the game. But I digress.

There’s a few other things that evolved in similar ways. For example, theurgic – metamagic – materials became magical batteries. They’re required for any item that has charges and can recharge itself periodically. They also power constructs, animates, and golems. But my thought process is less interesting than the definition it led to.

I should also probably mention that I decided that +1, +2, and +3 magical weapons, armor, and ammunition don’t require any special magical qualities at all. You just need materials of the proper rarity. If you want to make a +2 longsword, you just need some orichalcum or something.

With all of that said and with the understanding that everything is in a state of flux, here’s my final pass spreadsheet. All of the magic items in the DMG, each with up to three qualities, and each with costs assigned. That’s what I’ll be working off to create the formulae for all the magic items.

DMG Magic Item List (With Final Qualities)

And finally, here’s a quick list of the 20 material qualities and a very brief, working definition of each. In parentheses, I’ve included alternate names I’m considering.

• Acidic. Associated with acid damage, evocation spells that deal acid damage, conjuring acid, acid resistance, rusting, and corrosion.
• Chaotic (Wild Magic). Associated with wild magic, randomness, unpredictability, and be used as a substitute for other qualities.
• Cold. Associated with cold damage, evocation spells that deal cold damage, conjuring ice, and cold resistance.
• Dimensional (Planar, Extraplanar). Associated with teleportation, portals, conjuration magic, summoning, bigger-on-the-inside spaces, and pocket dimensions.
• Fiendish. Associated with fiends, the lower planes, evil effects, and the warlock fiend pact.
• Fiery. Associated with fire damage, evocation spells that deal fire damage, conjuring fire, fire resistance, the element of fire, and fire elemental creatures.
• Forceful. Associated with force damage, evocation spells that deal force damage, force resistance, force fields, many abjuration spells that ward or hedge, pushing or shoving, and the Strength ability.
• Inert (Antimagic). Associated with magic resistance, antimagic, magic deflection, the element of earth, earth elemental creatures, and giants. Also associated with resilience and immovability.
• Lightning. Associated with lightning damage, evocation spells that deal lightning damage, and lightning resistance.
• Mercurial. Associated with transmutation magic, shapeshifting, fluidity, the element of water, and the Dexterity ability.
• Necrotic. Associated with necromancy magic, necrotic damage, necrotic resistance, and animating or summoning undead creatures.
• Phantasmal (Fey, Glamered). Associated with illusion magic, senses, awareness, perception, music, the fey, the Feywild, the Wisdom ability, and the warlock archfey pact.
• Poisonous. Associated with poison damage, evocation spells that deal poison damage, poison resistance, conjuring poison, inflicting the poison condition, or protecting from and neutralizing poison.
• Pyschic. Associated with psychic damage, enchantment magic, spells that deal psychic damage, mind reading, mind shielding, and the Charisma ability.
• Radiant. Associated with radiant damage, evocation spells that deal radiant damage, light, celestials and upper-planar creatures, the gods, divine blessings, and good.
• Theurgic (Metamagic). Associated with the rules of magic, spell slots, magical storage, divination, knowledge, and the Intelligence ability. Associated with construct creatures and permanent animated objects. Required for any item that has charges and can recharge itself.
• Thundering. Associated with thunder damage, evocation spells that deal thunder damage, thunder resistance, and loud noises or explosive sound.
• Vital (Quickened, Living, Life-Giving). Associated with healing, regeneration, purification, treatment of disease, longevity, and the Constitution ability.
• Void. Darkness, destruction, madness, nonexistence, aberrant creatures, and the warlock Great Old One pact.
• Zephyrous (Windy, Airy). Associated with wind, elemental air, air elemental creatures, flight, breathing, and objects that can float or hover under their own power.