The Great Magic Item Analysis: How to Describe an Item

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June 19, 2020

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

Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip

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.

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45 thoughts on “The Great Magic Item Analysis: How to Describe an Item

  1. Great article Angry, I’ve been looking forward to seeing how you would manage to pare everything down to a manageable list of qualities without it feeling forced and you delivered.

    I feel like I need to defend you from your own criticisms on the resistance items, though. Honestly it makes sense and feels perfectly natural to me to make fire-resistance armor from fire materials. After all, imagine you’re in an arbitrary fantasy game and you encounter a creature made of fire, or using exclusively fire-based attacks. If you cast fireball on this creature do you expect it to do (A) more damage than usual, or (B) less damage than usual? I expect most people would say B — things made of fire are resistant to fire! The fact that it also simplifies the crafting system is just icing.

    As for the names, I feel a bit like Mercurial doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the list. What do you think about Flowing, or Volatile?

      • I’d considered fluid, but I don’t think its a good keyword. If you tell someone they need 3 units of fluid material, do you mean magical materials associated with wind and whatnot or liquids? It causes an unnecessary bit of ambiguity (a minor one, I concede, but unnecessary nonetheless).

    • The fire makes fire resistant also fits in with an existing magical item, dragon scale armour

      The colour of dragon the armour is made from gives resistance to the damage type assosiated with the dragon

      It would be kinda weird if you harvested cold materials from a red dragon

    • I personally think “chimeric” could work. You run into the fact that a Chimera is an actual creature in game, but otherwise it describes the properties of water fairly well. You just miss out on the “dextrous” portion. May also be a good substitute for “Chaos” as well depending on how you look at it.

  2. Hi Angry, congratulations for the detailed, extensive article, and for how clever you were to put everything together in your final descriptors list. Including schools of magic. Especially schools of magic 😉

      • It is a sincere tribute from an admirer.

        In comments to previous articles of this series, somebody (me too) advocated in favor of using schools of magic as descriptors, while your original proposal was based on damage types.

        Here I have seen with a certain satisfaction that schools of magic came back, in the end. But I cannot sincerely think something like “I was right”, because you incorporated them into an overall system which encompasses a lot of other things and aspects. It is apparent that you invested a lot of time and work on this.

        Your system is much more complex and comprehensive, and at the same time ends up being much more clean and streamlined, than anything I could have thought at that time.

        So, in the end admiration is my prevalent feeling. No irony involved.

  3. This is an amazing piece of synthesis.

    I guess that Lawful/Axiomatic weapons would fit into ‘Theurgic’ – no, I’m wrong. Into ‘Inert’, as this seems like the logical foil to Wild Magic.

    It’s cool that – like Kirk’s son – you were forced to use Wild Magic (aka ‘Protomatter’) to make the matrix work.

    • Changing ‘Inert’ to ‘Stasis’ might work well – Stasis somehow sounds like a more positive quality?

      • I feel that Stasis doesn’t address the Earth components as well. I like “Adamant” except for the existence of Adamantine armor. I think Inert is certainly fairly intuitive, even if it doesn’t sound that exciting.

  4. *Somebody* wants to make cursed items. They’re in the game, still, because they are so central to the fantastic stories and myths of just about every culture I can think of, Western and non-. Mostly, of course, they’re about universal human motives such as revenge.

    Typically curses are pronounced by doing the opposite of the “normal” thing. You summon the Devil by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. If you want to make a poison, you stir the potion widdershins (counterclockwise), ideally with your left not your right hand. You turn flesh to stone by reciting Stone to Flesh backwards, or you did in a lot of early RPGs (many, many 1e spells were marked “reversible”). You create a sword of weakness by putting in a few drops of a coward’s blood instead of a hair from a hero’s beard. Etc. In other words, the power to reverse by negation…to yell “…NOT!” is a huge part of many, many fantasy and mythical traditions. And that’s what Abjuration is really all about.

    Perhaps “Abjuration” is a class of “…NOT!” materials. Adding them to an item is like adding a minus sign to a number. If they are powerful or rare or high-quality enough, they might ruin or destroy an item they were added to, probably by some kind of mixed process/ritual, or you could add them to an item as it was being made to make it WEAK, not strong, against fire despite the item’s appearance. That would be actually cursing the cursed item. And it might not be “Add ice metal to curse this fire sword.” Maybe it’s “the blood of a frostbite victim.”

    Why do this? Not to add a layer of complexity; this isn’t something a player manufacturer would deal with much. You wouldn’t make a list of them…maybe there are three or four that will work for any item at any time, but more than that is overkill. It’s to explain game world mechanics…but also to serve as a major plot trigger. “That evil altar will continue its reign of, um, evil unless a saint’s breath touches it.” And so forth and so on. Perhaps that cursed sword would actually become something nifty if you could unbind the coward’s blood from it with a true hero’s rallying cry. Or something.

    • Oh interesting.

      I guess that “Cursed” (with its sense of personal hatred, rather than simple reversal or negation) could be captured under the ‘Malevolent/Evil’ trait – which would be a more general rebrand of the ‘Fiendish’ trait.

  5. Angry is the DnD version of Dmitri Mendeleev – piecing together the underlying structure of reality by moving bits of paper around on a table :0)

    • It is a method that has a lot of flexibility and doesn’t require striking things out when you change your mind. Also gets your away from your screen for a while..

  6. When you started this series, I thought, “Eh, it’ll be interesting to read about the process, but I’m not interested in crafting. It’s just too complex and always ends up either over-powered or only useful as flavor,” but with each passing article, I become more convinced that I need this system in my games. You’re doing a great job with this! I want to play in a game with this system just so I can craft things!

    Also, if you’re interested in feedback, I find Mercurial, Theurgic, and Zephyrous to be the least obvious in terms of what they include, although I think they all work. I’m a little fuzzy on the boundaries between Fiendish, Void, and Necrotic. (Where it’s not obvious) If you want to further trim the list, I think some re-combination of those three or of Vital, Radiant, and Zephyrous would make the most sense.

  7. What does the “Special” quality stands for? Many Items in your spreadsheet, e.g. all Spell Scrolls, have it listed as one of their qualities and I can’t find any mention to it in the article.

    • Looks like it means “context-dependent”, is unique for each such item, and must be noted in formula. For example, Arrow of Slaying must have some blood of creature it must Slay.

  8. The idea of a chaotic material that can be used as a wildcard could really bring some interesting or thematic material into the world. Maybe the chaotic material in the world can be used as a wildcard because the chaos itself can be conformed to the material around it. So it’s not just chaos in a bottle, but rather it’s a malleable material that can be altered by the will of a skilled crafter. Left to it’s own devices, it might be very chaotic, but in crafting, the crafter can mold the chaos to mimic the other materials used in the crafting process. One chaos material can become cold when it is crafted together with other cold materials as the item is being created. But maybe using too much chaotic material as a substitute for other material can lead to cursed items, or maybe that’s why the sentient sword has such a snarky attitude. Because there was too much chaos substituted in the formula.

    Curses could happen when an unskilled or low level crafter tries to manipulate chaos into an item that is beyond their skill level. It becomes more difficult to create an item using chaos as a wildcard. And/or, if too much chaos is added to an item. If you need 4 cold, but you only have 1 cold and 3 chaos, that has a higher chance of being cursed, or requires a higher skill level (AKA a more expensive NPC) to craft than if you had 4 cold materials.

    This idea of molding the materials to fit the item could also serve as the in-world explanation as to why cold material creates weapons that do cold damage AND armor that creates cold resistance. Because it adds the will of the crafter into the process of crafting the item. The cold materials do not have to physically be below freezing at all times, they simply contain a nature of coldness. A crafter, when making an item, can manipulate that nature into a weapon that freezes it’s opponent, but could just as easily manipulate that nature into a mug that always keeps your beer cold. And they could manipulate chaos into whatever they want. Or they can let it stay chaotic, and then you never know what that sword might say.

    • I honestly really like the idea of using Chaos ingredients in the place of specific ingredients (obviously still of the same rarity) and would probably personally do it something like

      Curse chance = chaos ingredients [excluding ones required in the formula] / (total ingredients * 2)

      It feels like a good way to make a decent risk of curses when taking the “easy” way out of ingredient collecting, but the problem lies with the actual curse itself. Either there needs to be a table of random curses, preferably one for each item type, or the DM needs to get involved, which is explicitly against what Angry is going for (not to mention the fact that many DMs would like that kind of a table anyway). Plus there’s the temptation to cheat when rolling away from the table, which requires the DM to individually assess whether or not they players are trustworthy. I think it’d make a great optional rule, but the random curse tables would be a lot of effort.

  9. One of my favorite articles so far (and I am following your blog from the beginning)! I like how you described the process of making various design decisions you encountered on your journey and your reasoning behind them. I especially like explanations regarding decisions between realism (which adds complexity) and abstractness (which simplifies things and is more user-friendly) because I often hit those roadblocks when trying to design stuff and I struggle with finding a good balance between them. I feel like there’s an art in finding that sweet spot which makes systems ‘elegant’.

    It’s much more valuable and difficult to teach people to design stuff than just designing stuff for them and handing them over the finished designs. I made my own crafting system (which is different from yours because my goals were different) by using the same logic and principles that you shared in these few articles. This was possible because those principles are very general and applicable to whatever system one is trying to design.

    Thanks for sharing great stuff with us!

  10. You’ve possibly already mulled over this, but why haven’t you made more use of the “traditional” associations with the four elements?
    Water often being used for ice spells and healing, Air being used for lightning and thunder, Earth for protection, Fire for empowering, and many more tropes associated with the elements.

    I personally wouldn’t want it that way because it would feel creatively boring. It could cause some slight confusion. Depending on the game some of those aspects get switched from element to element, but it would reduce the list quite a bit.

    Also some other emergent logic you could see is in some of its “meta” materials. You could almost make the alignments with them. Chaos obviously being chaos, Inert being neutral, Theurgic being lawful, and of course fiendish and radiant for evil and good respectively. Although the logic on inert and theurgic is kind of iffy and mostly there to fit the idea of the alignments. Some of the other qualities could fit in those slots but these seemed to fit the most in my opinion.
    Could be used for the law/chaos side of items. E.G. needing a theurgic and radiant material for a lawful good sentient sword.

    • Because D&D doesn’t do it that way. Except for the existence of elementals and elemental planes, elements don’t exist in D&D. There’s no distinction between elements. It’d be another version of assigning oppositions that wouldn’t get reinforced by anything else in the game.

  11. Awesome work! It all seems pretty cohesive considering how much stuff you had to mush together.

    I know it’s just a rough outline but the “forceful” one is the only one that stands out as strange to me.

    For example if an item “Requires a rare forceful mineral” what would that mean from a world logic standpoint?

    Does it just contain some sort of energy? And how does that differ from Theurgic or Thunder? Is it gravitational? The ghost of an angry ram? Or just Jedi magic? I kinda get the difference but it seems less clear than the others somehow. Less intuitive I guess.

    I’d suggest rolling it into another group if your weren’t trying to fit this to dnd, but it’s probably not possible/ worth it in order to achieve what you’re trying to do.

    I’m sorry if this is completely unhelpful, I’m just excited to see how this turns out 🙂

    • Personally, I envision forceful being similar to repelling magnets, pushing other things away from it. While thunder could also do that, I would think of that as more sound based. Something forceful might hit you like a sudden change in acceleration while something thunderous might hit you like a concussive blast. You’re right that they are similar, but the designers of D&D bothered to distinguish them so I suppose they’re different enough for their standards.

  12. Thank you for doing this! Following from the start, and it’s awesome!

    One idea I want to suggest for the final formulas is limit on material quantity – like, that cold damage great sword from Purely Theoretical Example could have “Can Use Only 1: Wood, Bone”, meaning you can use either 1 any Wood, or 1 any Bone. I love idea of carving the handle from a white dragon fang, but using 10 different kinds of wood obviously turns it into a halberd. This can be useful for other things – 10 different metal ingredients is too much for a dagger, but 10 different jewels can be just fine, as real world relics show.

    Other thing to consider is alternative formulas – maybe only a couple, for the few items where it’s expected – because a lot of people will expect being able to make fire resistance out of cold ingredients. So, potion in question could require either 2 Fire, or 2 Cold.

    Additionally, thank you for all the thought analysis, it really helps that creativity to flow – I, personally, will totally make a d20 list of minor curses, and slap one on every item where Chaos was used as substitute – partially for balance, partially because I absolutely adore the concept of magic with side effects:”Yes, you made this frost sword with Fires of Limbo, but now it’s in pain and drowns all sounds in a high-pitched scream if isn’t sheathed”

    Lastly, as a chemistry student, I visibly cringed when you called lead “inert”, but, at the very same time, I have clear understanding of exactly what you tried to say, and I love it

    • Not a chemist, but after hearing gold being called “volatile” a few years back in an economics item on the radio I can read anything without cringing.

  13. I just love the way we can have your thought process. That’s what really put you apart from most adivce GM out there. I can’t understand something easily if I don’t have the “why” behind it and the way you write really seems like you’re thinking out loud.
    I have catch up to do on this crafting series and looks like everything I need. Thanks !

  14. Interesting read so far on the process of your crafting system. I am looking foreward to seeing where it goes from here and how that list you made will get further refined along the way.

    It really looks like you are effectively creating a somewhat more generalized version of the classical Monster Hunter crafting system, what with the formulas so far boiling down to “at least x materials of type n and rarity z with constrictions y”. Truly interested in how that will evolve.

    On an unrelated note, your cat is gorgeous and makes me want to pet her. Hope she ends up truly helping on a later step. Inspiration can, after all, come from anywhere.

  15. Excellent work. Sounds like a lot of iterative design. I wouldn’t even know how to make a video of that, a bit like watching someone so a jigsaw puzzle I guess?

    The total prices in the final spreadsheet, are they on top of what an item would normally cost? Ie adamant plate armor says 500 (gp I presume), normal plate costs 1500 gp so the adamant version is 2k?

  16. The concept behind the sentence “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.” is the kind of trope I’m following Angry for.

    Beyond of course the s$&%load of useful wisdom I always found here.

  17. This is thorough, detailed and intuitive work and I’m absconding with what you’ve already done whether you finish it or not. “This is the way crafting should have been implemented” may be hyperbolic and trite but I just don’t know a better phrase to use here.

    My only suggestion: replace “Acidic” with “Corrosive” to fold rusting effects into it. Corrosion is the broader category – nobody debates that acid corrodes, nobody debates that rust corrodes, but pedants will spring from the woodwork (like I just did) to complain that acids reverse oxidation and thus rusting cannot be an acid effect.

    (Plus it opens up for more crossplay and item addition once the system is done – in the right contexts, all of the damaging elements have a corrosive effect. We even describe time and aging as “wearing away” at the body. Perhaps corrosive can be used as a catch-all or sub-in for magic items that cause degradation over time, like damage every round, or preternatural aging, or mummy rot.)

  18. I like the tangential mention of the inconsistency in the eight schools of magic, because it’s something I’ve toyed with over the years. 2e Spells and Magic paid *some* service to this idea by introducing the idea of different classifications of schools (schools of philosophy, schools of effect, and schools of *method* or something [cant remember at the moment]).

    I think it would be really cool to classify spells in a similar way to the way you’ve classified spells, so that a given spell has a method, a philosophy, and an effect. This would provide a framework for more logical spell lists and potentially even limitations on generalists.

    Thanks for this work. A task like this is particularly difficult for someone like me who tends to get 10-20 formulae into it, lose focus, second guess the work I’ve already done, and then scrap it all.

  19. My own intuitive takes on the paper list: Mercurial initially seemed like a rephrasing of Chaotic, and Theurgic implied divine origin (Thaumaturgy, Mystic Theurge). Weird to see Fiendish alongside Dimensional, though it makes sense to designate the corrupting force of evil separately. Dimensional has a vaguely psionic/sci-fi connotation, possibly due to the mathematical meaning, though we do have Dimension Door.

    With the extra context, I really liked Mercurial once tied specifically to shapechanging, and I don’t see another good option which keeps the link to water. Linking Forceful to Strength is another case I didn’t see intuitively (when primed on damage types) but felt very clever. Extraplanar is a powerful D&D-specific term. Not sure how I feel about Wild Magic, it links very cleanly at the meaning level but having a single two-word descriptor is ugly and ‘Wild’ on its own has druid connotations. I don’t get this reaction to Life-Giving as that feels like one word. The Living descriptor is awkward as it implies Animated (having Uncommon Living Hide around is uncomfortable), as much as I enjoyed the Innistrad lore that vampires were only vulnerable to stakes carved from still-living wood. Quickened has Dexterity and Haste connotations. I prefer Glamered to Fey/Phantasmal, and Windy to Zephyrous (Rare Windy Essence). Glamered and Psychic being associated with Wisdom and Charisma feels a little weird, but that’s the fault of poorly defined scores.

    Considering other evocative words for Theurgic… Mystical, infused, supernatural, spellbound. The more I think about it, the more I like Mystical – I already mentioned Mystic Theurge as a reason why I tied Theurgic to divine magic.

    I notice ‘Special’ listed for scrolls, I’m looking forward to that.

    • “Prismatic” might be an interesting alternative for “Chaotic,” given prismatic spray, etc. It’s not as immediately intuitive as some of the others, but since it implies a spectrum of possibilities, I think it fits pretty well. And I agree with you on the two-word approach feeling clunky when everything else is a singular adjective (as well as the commenter above who suggested “Corrosive” in place of “Acidic”).

      But that’s polishing the chrome on what is otherwise a very nice car! Makes me wish I played 5e so my games could more seamlessly try to adopt the system. 😛

  20. I’m thinking “special” means it can’t just be crafted with the materials alone.

    For scrolls, “special” probably indicates that the relevant spell must be cast as part of the process.

  21. “Warlocks and fighters don’t belong in the same game together.”

    Woah, I am dying to hear why you think so! I’m forcing my hemispheres really hard and I cannot fathom the reason. Can you please elaborate a bit?

    Either way, awesome work!

    • It has to do with how specific/general the classes are, I think. A Fighter is *anyone* whose focus is fighting without any emphasis on magic of stealth. A Warlock is a very particular kind of spellcaster, with a specific specialization, that is tied into the game world’s fiction in a particular way (i.e. dark pacts).

      It would make more sense for a game to *either* have just a few general classes (e.g. Fighter, Spellcaster…) *or* lots of specific ones (e.g. split Spellcaster into Warlock, Sorcerer, Wizard, Artificer etc, split Fighter into Commander, Champion, Gladiator…)

  22. I’m running an Eberron campaign with some Quori dreams$&% going on and the PCs occasionally find remnants of dream er, stuff. I’m thinking it could be used as either Dimensional or Psychic materials. Or perhaps some could be Chaotic, Theurgic or even Phantasmal. I know I can just make up whatever I like (and I will be) but wondered if anyone else is playing with dream magic and thinking about how to make use of this awesome crafting system.

  23. Been waiting for this article since the last one.
    Great groups you made. Their use may go beyond the use for D&D and its crafting.
    (called the use of cards. kinda)

  24. I think one problem that it built into the Player’s Handbook but not really addressed in your crafting system is that we do have another cost for magic items – but it only applies to armour?

    In 5e armour is the one thing that you can buy a +1 version of straight off the bat with out GM’s really being involved?

    So Studded Leather is functionally +1 Leather Armour that you can buy for an extra 15GP? No one in their right mind buys leather armour (still less Padded) and if you give some one +1 Leather armour as a reward nobody is going to give two hoots.

    Similarly a Breastplate is a +1 Chain shirt but now the +1 costs an additional 350GP.

    You could argue it some vague approach to verisimilitude but if it is, it comes from a place of deepest ignorance about arms and armour. Indeed both a Chain shirt and Breastplate don’t penalise stealth whilst Padded armour does, but in reality you need to wear a gambeson or padded frikkin armour to wear them with any degree of comfort or indeed to be effective as armour? So what is about adding a jingly mail shirt on top of padded armour that makes it stealthy? The stupidity of this actually makes my head ache.

    We don’t do this with weapons a spear is a spear is a spear – unless it is a Trident when it is an expensive spear that you need extra training to use and cannot use with the Polearm mastery feat?

    Look I come from the UK and do reenactment so arms and armour are real things to me. I would be really rubbish at making a system about guns because I have never really seen one apart from on holiday and never actually held one.

  25. The problem then is you can buy +1 Leather for 5000GP or functionally +1 Leather armour for 15GP so a death or cake choice? Which is no real choice at all?

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