[PnP] And another thing...about perm magic item creation

[J Hooten]

The rules are sadly lacking on making items.
Very little is documented as to what effort it takes.

But one factor of PnP I love is that a minor mage can make a useful item!
#1 Require any item to have some sort of ritual that must be learned. 
That increases the effort required.
#2 Require a good amount of Mana to be used. 3X or 5X greatly limits or 
even makes the casting impossible without aids.
Mana is the blood of the mage, its a very limited resource that recovers 
slowly, increases slowly and is limited in daily use.
If an item costs close to what a Mage has for Mana and oops can destroy 
the working or greatly delay it.
Thus the Mage may need to acquire a staff or wand or mana storage before 
doing anything serious

Only if you want magic items to be extreemly rare should you do what you 
suggest.
Some think that each item should do permanent loss the the mage, but if 
you do that then what occurs?
1) Items become very costly
2) Lower level mages are used up making items for powerful people--Slave 
Mages
3) Certain monsters become nearly unkillable and terrorize areas
Definitely read through monsters carefully, I have been surprised many 
times in a random encounter that became much nastier than expected

But its all a balance act, you are determining the magic economy of the 
world.
Its a Hero's job to kill monsters and save people, so determine what a 
hero needs to do that.
If characters cannot kill some monsters without some magic equipment 
then that shifts the balance
So make sure there is a way to handle everything and how hard they have 
to work

PnP has a few fairly common monsters that most people cannot handle and 
some of those can be summoned!

For example: A low to medium level Chaos mage can summon Beasts! Many of 
which can only be hurt by Light Powers ie by Law mages
So the right one can easily wipe out a party, even with Law Mages as 
they can fall first.
Item Solution- Talisman of Light or similar, Scrolls, Tomes, Item to 
summon Ahura to fight, weapons with light powers maybe some dedications?
No Item solution-Law or Balance Mage for Light spells, others may summon 
Ahura but may have risks there too
Non Mage solution- Run very fast? Which may not be an option for some beasts

Then there is Specters, only CL1 so even easier to summon or just find 
wandering about. Another that needs special weapons.

*Edimmu, Spiritual (Specter)*

*Special* - Specters can be armed. In general they are not. They are 
immune to any form of Wizardry or Sidh-Magic. They cannot be killed and 
do not suffer from fatigue. They can only be damaged by a magical weapon 
dedicated to the destruction of Edimmu.


White Flint can make you immune to them if I remember correctly



Schnockel wrote:
>
> I start with a premise that it's way too easy to create magic items, 
> and then characters start to look like christmas trees with magic 
> ornaments hanging all over themselves.
>
> So...maybe the Magic User making Permanent Magic items need to pay 
> more for them somehow…something like the mana cost used to form the 
> Perm Magic spell is temporarily deducted from the Mage’s Casting 
> Ability. The mage could recover the lost CA using the same rules as 
> recovering Energy Level In other words, it takes something out of the 
> wizard (it takes a lot out of him) and keeps him from just becoming a 
> magic item creation machine, and is slower than just recovering mana.
>
> So...is this just plain heresy? Unworkable? tell me what you think.
>