Magic Items from Malevolent Stars

I was playing Minecraft Dungeons with my 5-year-old a couple of weeks ago, and saw some absolutely amazing unique item names, which I commented on in Twitter. Starless Night and void bow got me thinking about weapons of the cosmos, and it was a short hop from there to something based on the malevolent stars of 4e/5e cosmology: Acamar (historical footnote! Also, “Sixth Star of the Celestial Orchard,” from the Chinese name, is extremely good), Delban, Khirad, Hadar, et cetera. Let’s see what comes out, with that as my prompt.

Mace of Acamar Revealed

Weapon (mace), very rare (requires attunement)

The head of this mace is a series of metal bands enclosing one another, slowly rotating around a central chamber. That chamber is always empty, but sometimes it contains true nothingness.

Once per turn when you use the Attack action with this mace, you can replace one of your attacks with revealing the sliver of Acamar’s devouring void within the mace’s head. Choose one or two creatures within 30 feet of you. If they are at least 10 feet away from you, they roll DC 14 Strength saving throws. A creature that fails this saving throw takes 1d8 cold damage and is pulled 10 feet toward you; a creature that succeeds takes half damage and is not pulled.

If you choose a target within 5 feet of you, you and the target roll a contested Intelligence saving throw (reroll ties). The creature that loses this roll takes 4d6 cold damage and is frightened of the mace until the end of your next turn.

Dream-Harp of Caiphon

Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement by a bard)

This musical instrument can’t be properly tuned, and any performance it is used in becomes discordant and twisted.

If you strum a few notes on this instrument as part of a bonus action granting another creature Bardic Inspiration, you can also choose one creature that hear you. The next time that creature takes psychic damage, it takes additional psychic damage equal to two rolls of your Bardic Inspiration die. This effect can stack and isn’t perceptible to the target.

If you play this harp as part of using your Song of Rest, affected creatures can choose to expend two Hit Dice to gain resistance to psychic damage until they finish a long rest. If you play this harp as part of a long rest, sleeping creatures within 30 feet have vivid, unquiet dreams, and can expend two Hit Dice to gain advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the frightened condition for 8 hours after the end of this long rest.

You can play the instrument while casting a spell that causes any of its targets to be frightened on a failed saving throw, thereby imposing disadvantage on the save. This effect applies only if the spell has a somatic or a material component.

Cowl of Delban

Armor, very rare (requires attunement)

This full-length hooded robe is ice-white with blue trim. When the hood is up, your eyes burn with blue-white fire; you gain blindsight to a distance of 15 feet, and you can sense magical auras within that area. If you already have blindsight, the range of your blindsight increases by 15 feet. A creature that turns invisible while you can see them isn’t invisible to you while the hood is up.

While you wear this robe and no other suit of armor:

· Your Armor Class is 13 + the better of your Dexterity or Charisma modifiers.

· When you roll a saving throw against an effect that would cause psychic damage, you take half damage on a failure and no damage on a success.

· When you deal cold damage to a creature, you can deal an additional 1d6 psychic damage.

· When you deal psychic damage to a creature, you can deal an additional 1d6 cold damage.

Spear of the Endless Gibbeth

Weapon (spear or pike), very rare (requires attunement)

The head of this weapon is made of verdigris-covered bronze in the shape of a star, with one arm longer and sharper than the others. When you make an attack with this magical weapon or use it as a spellcasting implement, you gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls, and your spell save DC increases by 1 if you are proficient. When you critically hit with a spell or weapon attack using this weapon, you deal an additional 2d6 psychic damage in addition to the critical hit’s other effects.

When you make a ranged spell attack that would deal acid or psychic damage on a hit, you can use this weapon as a spellcasting implement to make a melee spell attack instead, against any creature in your reach. On a hit, you can immediately use your bonus action to teleport to a space within 5 feet of your target and make one attack with this weapon.

Hands of Hadar

Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)

These elbow-length gloves are made of oily, milk-white leather. When you put your hand into one of these gloves, the hand becomes a prehensile tentacle. Your reach with that arm increases by 10 feet and you have advantage on ability checks and saving throws to maintain grapples and to keep your grip on objects.

Your tentacle is a magical weapon that you can use to make an unarmed strike. If you hit with them, you deal cold damage equal to 1d10 + your Strength modifier. You can use Dexterity in place of Strength to modify your attack and damage rolls with the tentacle. If you’re wearing a glove on each hand, when you use the Attack action and attack with one tentacle or a weapon held in that tentacle, you can make an attack with the other tentacle as a bonus action.

Starsoul of Khirad

Weapon (any sword), legendary (requires attunement)

When you grasp this calcified soul, you can mentally command the star spawn within to create a blade of blue-white radiance, as if you are drawing a weapon. When you put the calcified soul away, the blade instantly ceases to exist. It has the following properties:

· You can choose for the weapon to be a dagger, greatsword, longsword, rapier, scimitar, or shortsword.

· When you make an attack with this magical weapon, you gain a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls.

· This weapon deals radiant damage rather than slashing or piercing damage.

· You can use Intelligence or Charisma rather than Strength to modify attack and damage rolls.

· While the blade is visible in your hand, you have advantage on ability checks made to extract information from another creature, whether friendly or hostile.

· You can cast suggestion without expending a spell slot, using Intelligence or Charisma as your spellcasting ability, only for the purpose of extracting information from another creature. You can cast the spell this way three times, and regain all expended uses each day at dawn.

· As a bonus action, you can teleport to a space within 5 feet of a willing creature you have a telepathic link with. You can use this bonus action once, and regain the use of it after 1 minute.

Conclusion

There are, of course, several more malevolent stars attested in 4e cosmology, a few of them even mentioned in 5e: Ihbar, Nihal, Ulban, and Zhudun. In addition to six magic items being a pretty solid offering for one article, the canonical source material gets a lot spottier for those four, and I can tell that I’m starting to repeat myself in ideas today. Taking them in reverse order:

The starsoul of Khirad is, obviously, a light saber. Plenty of people have written light sabers for 5e; my goal with this one is to add something unsettling to it without going full-on sentient weapon (just because that adds several paragraphs of rules). I like the idea of a weapon that also gives you strong social interaction features. I also like the idea of a getting a weapon in the mid-to-late game that might get less melee-inclined characters interested in some occasional melee combat.

Hands of Hadar seem like a logical extension (er, sorry) of the two Hadar spells of the PH. They’re also inspired by the tentacle weapon in Dead Cells.

Spear of the Endless Gibbeth is complicated by the conflicting lore I found on Gibbeth, which is to be expected with Great Old Ones to some extent. I emphasized an unsavory green-ness and making the weapon as appealing as possible for a Blade pact warlock. Paying you for spending your action on something other than eldritch blast is also part of the goal.

The cowl of Delban is intended to be strong armor for the cloth-wearing set, as well as super creepy (but trying not to look like the robes of American ultra-racist organizations), hence the glowing eyes. Some of the Delban spells I found from 4e were about revealing concealed creatures, so that’s what the blindsight stuff is about.

The dream-harp of Caiphon really just amounted to wanting to include something for bards in this article. I liked the idea of it doing good stuff for you and your allies, but with a meaningful cost – I’m not trying to take support gameplay away from bards, after all. The Bardic Inspiration damage kicker is about building up that sense of wrongness through the harp’s discordance.

The mace of Acamar revealed is about Acamar as a pseudo-black hole, and the mace intermittently containing a micro version of that. (That’s my interpretation of Acamar’s hunger, anyway.) It draws enemies in, but also carries severe risks in another of its uses.

As I’ve said almost every time I’ve written new magic items, power versus rarity is guesswork for me – there are enough magic items out there that benchmarking is very hard.