Ensorcelled Items

[Albert Sales]

The Will or energy los would be from whomever it was tied to (the maker, in most cases, but a "volunteer" could be bound to the item, suffering the drain, instead). I agree with the increased cost for stashing mana, it sounds good. 1:1 would work in your own purified sanctum, at best, but on the road or in hostile turf, it should cost more. A mana bleed would help tone them down a few notches (like 1 mana per EL+1 days fades away). That wouldn't happen to self-regenerating batteries. I really like these recharge suggestions, and they are less harsh than a Will expense. As I said, I made my players shudder at the idea of making an item (all the work to get stats back up was terrible). Another consideration: What if the mana battery limited Casting Speed? It can give, say, no more mana than EL (modified somehow) per phase and MEL per turn. Also, I like the "Money Pit". I think 1 SC in new materials for 10 Mana Recharged is a fair expense to load it up.

"Choinski, Burton" <Burton.Choinski at MATRIXONE.COM> wrote:Well, I'm sort of against a Will cost (and even the energy drain I mentioned before), since who gets the hit?  The maker?  The "owner" of the item?  Who ever happens to be carrying it?  However, if casting is truly limited by casting ability, then you could have 1000 mana stashed in piles of batteries, but you can still only trickle it out at your casting ability per day....

And then you have to recharge them.  The batteries do give a mage the flexibility to do maximum output casting over several days (instead of running out on the first day, and then being tapped for a while) at the expense of being tapped out for several days of down time to refill them.

To balance it I would make the recharge be "inefficient", sort of on the model of the Knowledge spell.  At EL0 it may take 10 mana to stash 1 mana in the battery, but at higher ELs the waste goes down since the battery is better made (perhaps by 1 per EL, to a minimum of x2). Or perhaps x10 may be too much and just have it start at x5.  Or maybe have it be x2 in a protected area (free of outside influences) and x3 otherwise.

Another "irritant" to balance the flexibility is time to recharge.  What if the maximum you could refill was MEL points per day?  Joe wizard with 100 points of battery would need a lot of days, even if he had the mana available.  Yea, he could have apprentices do it, but it will take longer.  And like "Healing", the item could only be charged once per day (so you could not pass it along to the next apprentice in the chain and thus tap it up in a day).  Taking a Runequest bent to it, it should probably be a sort of ritual, not a zap-bam casting (perhaps an hour for the process, maybe even a strategic turn if you want to be a hard ass).

The battery is very useful, but if put enough irritants on the recharge part, we won't need rules for how many you can have, or worry about drain or MEL limits.-- the logistics of reload will make the numbers low (if you have your wizard spending the day chanting over batteries, he isn't training skills or anything.  It's intensive work.).  If you make it a day process to recharge (and it should be at least a day process to make enchantments anyways, so it's not like the refilling is any harsher than the construction), then actually having apprentices becomes a desireable thing (much like for crafting, in order to add to the work points).  This reinforces the need for the player to hire people around them (rather than be lone wolves, doing eveything themselves).  Hirelings are money sinks, so of course they have to go off and adventure for coin. :}

The hireling money sink is a big game balance thing.  When my brother wanted to go running about with his 10 warrior hirelings and attack giants in the mountains, he better well bag them because it was getting expensive to have them on retainer. :}



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Burton Choinski
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email: burton.choinski at matrixone.com

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