I was having a Johnny Depp movie night the last day there and after watching From Hell and The Ninth Gate it occurred to me that there might be some mileage to be gained from applying the Joycean monomyth as interpreted by John Campbell to the creation of magical items and other things.

Right now in most games magical item creation is composed of variations on

• Gather the ingredients
• Do unspecified things
• Spend your magic points
• Roll for success

I prefer my magic to be a little more visceral with its own internal if twisted logic, so I'd like to do better.

The monomyth or Heroes Journey is a pilgrimage of sorts whereby the hero gains magical powers through questing and so on. It looks a bit like this:

• The Call to Adventure
• The Road of Trials
• The Vision Quest
• The Meeting with the Goddess
• The Boon
• The Magic Flight
• The Return Threshold
• The Master of Two Worlds

What if instead of gaining a preordained boon the various ingredients are combined with one another to produce the desired magical item. So making a magical item would involve undertaking various deeds in order to build up a standing wave of power, which then crashes down into the arrangement of ingredients and if successful forges them into what you want.

Some games have a system (Earthdawn I think) wherein you can unlock powers from magical items by doing the deeds which originally granted them this magic, learning their stories. This would be somewhat similar but done deliberately instead of random powers being invested - if you wanted a sword +2 versus orcs, you'd have to heroically slay a famed orc champion with it or something similar.

Part of the process would be researching and discovering the steps needed to fully instill the magic, based on the magic user's preferred form of spellcasting.

Just the seed of an idea but it could be fleshed out and turned into a full system. Any thoughts?

I think that's a seriously fucking cool idea and you should fucking run with it hard and fast and thorough.

I've seen this kind of thing recommended before in many a GM advice column, forum thread, and RPG book, but never anyone putting any damn effort into describing how to do it.

and if attuning was like creating?  Interesting idea.

Quote from: The Traveller;689350What if instead of gaining a preordained boon the various ingredients are combined with one another to produce the desired magical item. So making a magical item would involve undertaking various deeds in order to build up a standing wave of power, which then crashes down into the arrangement of ingredients and if successful forges them into what you want.

I'm going to steal this idea and play around with it a bit. I like how it sounds quite a bit, but I want to see how it plays out in practise.

It's kind of difficult to do generic fantasy with this as a lot would depend upon the context and type of magic your game uses. Okay, let the rubber meet the road, a lot of people have experience with D&D hereabouts so from wizards:

QuotePrerequisites: To make any wand, you need the Craft Wand item creation feat. (The feat itself has a caster level of 5th as a prerequisite.) The creator also must have prepared the spell to be stored in the wand (or must know the spell, in the case of a sorcerer or bard). Also see the notes on caster level.

Caster Level: A character creating a wand can set the caster level for the wand at any level from the minimum level that character would have to be to cast the spell up to that character's caster level when casting that spell. For example, a 10th-level wizard creates a wand of fireball. Fireball is a 3rd-level spell for a wizard, and a wizard must be at least 5th level to cast it, so the wizard in this example must create the wand with a caster level of at least 5th. Since the example wizard is 10th level, the wand can't have a caster level higher than 10th.

Equipment and Materials: Making a wand requires a wand and assorted oddities that serve to focus magic into to the wand and hold it there. Such items might include prisms, expensive inlays for the wand itself, powders to treat the wand, and other sundries that are either consumed in the wand-making process or incorporated into the wand.

Base Price: You can look up base prices for most wands in Chapter 7 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, but I find it easier to use the formula for spell trigger items with 50 charges from Table 7-33 in the Dungeon Master's Guide: spell level x caster level x 750 gp.

Creation Cost: The monetary cost to create a wand is half the base price, plus 50 times the cost for any expensive material component the spell requires (just as with a scroll, except that you must pay the cost 50 times for the wand's 50 charges).

The experience cost to create a wand is 1/25th the base price, plus 50 times any experience component the spell stored in the wand has.

Shiny stuff plus gold plus time. Let's say a wand of fireballs, here's where the tone of the campaign becomes important. High fantasy will have the wizard catching cinders from a volcano in a lantern while riding a flying carpet, dark fantasy will have an elaborate ritual for capturing a hellhound and a price to be paid for it. Some settings will need patron spirits as guides, some won't.

The more you do the more power you get, the further along the journey you travel the more powers or charges or times per day or sheer power your magical item can call upon. The power comes less from the magic user than the journey. But the more you do the greater the price and chance of failure, standard tradeoff. Does it have to be a physical journey or just sitting in a sealed room for a month writing concentric magical circles?

It's relatively easy to work out a broad generic method based on the above. Spell level is a multiplier in difficulty and cost, other factors like charges etc add to it.

The Call to Adventure: the magic user needs a good reason to want to create this item, beyond making a few bucks at the marketplace. Their heart really has to be in it.

The Road of Trials: these occur in threes, so three actions or deeds per spell level, starting at the lower levels in the item. These may be the same actions or deeds at increasing difficulty levels, succeeding at one or two may produce lesser effects (smaller radius fireball) or failure might cause complete collapse or perhaps adverse side effects like a curse. The magic user might know how to avoid it but others not so much. This can be boiled down to a roll with the successful completion of tasks in a timely manner adding bonuses.

I'd lean towards increasing the difficulty rather than the number of deeds in order to get more charges or whatever, and that needn't be in terms of target numbers on a dice roll. Tasks themselves can be more difficult or complex to do, and components can be physically more difficult or dangerous to find.

Tasks are time limited, you can't just suspend it halfway or your magical potential all dribbles away.

The vision quest and meeting with the goddess: Again these depend on the tone of the setting - I'd put the vision quest in first, or perhaps leave the details of some of the tasks out and you need to do a vision quest in order to learn the next steps. The goddess thing is a bit meh in this context unless you're doing swords and sorcery.

The boon: You have your stuff. Now let's see if you can keep it.

The magic flight: There's a chance that your large standing wave of power has attracted the attention of supernatural collectors of some sort. No reason why this couldn't be part of the trials, in fact interference from the outside might have an affect on the nature of your new item. Action combined with power creates effect*. This happening after the boon is granted is optional even in the monomyth concept.

The Return Threshold, The Master of Two Worlds: The item may come with conditions, like don't feed it after midnight, so the magic user needs to make people aware of that.

*This really is the core idea here, maybe more to harp upon that subject. Spontaneous magical item creation might come to pass when random eddies of magic coincide with particularly notable feats.

I'm not sure upon reflection that every step of the monomyth is directly applicable to magical item creation, but it forms a good basis to start from.

Other random thoughts, arbitrary geases or rules may be placed upon a magic user for the duration of the journey - a common one is that the magic user can't haggle for the price of anything, and must pay the first price asked. Being unable to eat or buy food unless it's freely offered is a bit stiffer but still usable. Isolation for the duration is standard enough as well, but anything can be imposed really... is it worth putting some guidelines out there to enable that or should it be GM discretion?

Action combined with power creates effect.

Limitations enhance art.

An interesting idea - I've used something similar (except less codified and not so lengthy, so to speak) for creating of Fetishes and Rituals when I was making my "Black Company/Malazan" style magic for BRP.

Quote from: Rincewind1;689547An interesting idea - I've used something similar (except less codified and not so lengthy, so to speak) for creating of Fetishes and Rituals when I was making my "Black Company/Malazan" style magic for BRP.

Yeah I think it's best to trim off some of the steps, even most "heroes journey" type books don't use the full routine.

In the Disgaea video game you can enter items in order to defeat it's guardians and increase the items powers. You can do this as many times as you dare and the item gains levels each time you do it and it's stats improve.