What should magic items be like in the Forbidden Lands?

The roleplaying industry is economically and culturally dominated by Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s worth pointing out how unusual D&D is: how many weirdnesses have accreted in the 50 years since Gary Gygax needed a random monster for his players and invented the owlbear, how radically unlike most fantasy literature it’s become.

This is important because Forbidden Lands doesn’t just riff on the standard D&D species of humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, halflings and goblins (which D&D of course nicked from Tolkien): it also departs from D&D in a number of significant ways.

For instance: the D&D world is crowded and full of well-understood magic, but the exact opposite is true of the Ravenlands. And that has consequences on what magic items there should be, how they should behave, and what your players’ experience of them should be.

What does it mean to live in a world where magic is plentiful and well-understood?

I’m mostly going to be talking about D&D here, but a number of these points can also apply easily to e.g. Earthsea, or the non-Muggle parts of the Harry Potterverse.

Low-level magic is widespread

Obviously not everyone is going to be chucking around fireballs, but plenty of people have minor charms or cantrips for mending fishing nets or conjuring up a small glowing light to light their way in the darkness. Your granny might have used this particular pot so often that it’s taken on a slight magic aura, and anyone who uses the +1 pot of cooking from now on will end up with food that’s 5% tastier. If you play Baldur’s Gate 3 and balk at an NPC who says he’ll help you if you feed him a magic item every so often, don’t worry: small, rubbish magic items are two a penny in this world.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and in a world where you can buy an entry-level magic sword for not much money, even slightly-experienced adventurers are soon going to lose their sense of wonder when they find a sword that talks. Expect casually-racist attitudes like “all magic swords are the same, ‘blah blah blah’; shut up already!”, and, in a particularly whimsical or advanced setting, for lesser magic items to try to form a union that can lobby on their collective behalf for better conditions.

Magic users are a recognised social class

If there are many magic users around (note that this doesn’t apply to Tolkien, where by the Third Age of the books there are at most a dozen in the entire world), then society has adapted to them. The path of least resistance is to say that, OK, there are wizards, but they keep to themselves because they don’t want to get involved in mundane affairs (any setting where magicians are academics, nerds or deliberate political noncombattants, e.g. Barbara Hambly’s fantasy works, or the Star Wars prequels), or they’re busy with stuff that only rarely intersects the mundane world (Harry Potter, Dr Strange, and frankly most superhero stuff once they discover gods and multiverses).

Another choice is to say: OK, there are magic users, but somehow they only use their magic against each other, and that cancels itself out, even though they wield the sort of powers that could radically alter society. This is either a decision to aggressively ignore the world-building consequences of your decisions, or fandom of the Spiderman villain who could cure cancer but instead wants to turn people into dinosaurs. TVTropes calls this “Reed Richards is Useless”, and only click that link if you weren’t planning on doing anything with the rest of your day anyway.

But once you decide that plenty of randos can cast magic missile, you’re going to posit a society where rich people have bodyguards who can cast counterspell. Police and the military are trained in magic and counter-magic procedures, ports and other mass-transit buildings have security staff looking around for suspicious people with spell components in their pockets, and magic-nullifying devices or people are omnipresent in the inner sancta of governments and other powerful bodies.

In our world, still many of the upper class of England are descended of the Normans who invaded the country almost 1,000 years ago. They don’t bother training their children in sword-fighting these days, but instead make sure they go to the best schools, because that’s where power comes from now. Similarly, the upper echelons of a society with widespread magic will make sure that their children with magical talents have the best training, or failing that have retinues of powerful mages. And those mages will be well kitted-out.

If you make there be things of power, the powerful will have those things

If magical power is arbitrary and random, and not even the most careful of breeding can guarantee a powerful wizard as a child, then sorcerer-kings might not rule the world. Dragoth the Slayer may have conquered the known world and have everybody still alive bow their heads to him and pay him homage, but if his children are Slothoth the Languid and Clothoth the Well-Tailored, his dynasty won’t survive long. It’ll probably be a few generations before someone of similar power emerges, by which point his empire will have been dismantled and his treasures scattered.

If there are enough things of power available to a ruler, though, we can safely ignore any commoner with a mysterious ancestry whispered of in prophecies, even if he meets up really early on, like a third of the way into the first book, with a brilliant but erratic exotic warrior with a troubled past and a point to prove, and a beautiful mysterious grey-eyed woman exiled from high society for having stumbled across forbidden and ancient secrets. They’ll get as far as trying to pluckily infiltrate the castle of the disc one boss by stealth, only to be spotted by guards with amulets of hero-detection, who will send up a magic signal to summon a squadron of elite troops with impregnable armour and impossibly-sharp swords. If for some reason any of them survive that encounter and make a run for it, they’ll get picked off by snipers armed with lightning-bolt crossbows and/or the dragons the snipers ride on.

The natural equilibrium of a world where there are powerful people and plenty of magic items is that, eventually, the most powerful people will have the most powerful magic items. Because if they didn’t at first, they’ll have been replaced by people who did, who will use their new-found power to monopolise the rest of the powerful magic items, and by now there’s no getting rid of them.

This includes magical books of knowledge

The Book of Beasts (p. 143) suggests having magical books where you read it for a few hours and you gain a talent or a skill. My initial reaction was that you could get the same advantage by just handing out more XP, so just do that, you cowards.

But as written, while one person can only study a particular book once, anyone in possession of a magical book could have an unlimited number of people study it, one by one. That means you can charge people (not via coins, because they don’t have them, but via some kind of favour or servitude) to read the book.

Even if your GM decides that this was a broken rule, and that once the book is read it should disappear in a cloud of magic dust, all the one-use thing does is make them more valuable. You haven’t solved the problem that the damn things can be manufactured.

The outcome is stark: if you didn’t have the riches or societal advantages needed to read a magic book, you’ll be worse off than the rich popinjays who literally had their talents handed to them.

The Bind Magic spell has been written for the wrong game

As written, for a measly 5 additional willpower, any rank 2 sorcerer or druid can create a magical item that can cast any non-ritual spell the creator knows, once per day.

The danger of magical mishap is significant, but that also means that you may as go “in for a penny, in for a pound” and cast both the rank 3 Bind Magic ritual spell and a rank 3 spell that you intend to imbue into the item, because you’re already rolling 5 dice that count for magical mishaps, on top of the dice you’re rolling for the spell. If you already know that you’re dying, then there’s especially little to lose, and potentially a lot to gain, if you can create a magical item that your heirs can sell or trade for a really big favour.

Even the willpower cost isn’t huge, if you consider that going on a journey and coming back can canonically give you a willpower from a Shrine (Player’s handbook, p. 171), on top of any willpower you might have gained during the trip, any willpower that you’ve deliberately hoarded rather than spent because you need to make this awesome magical item before you die, and potentially any willpower you gain via casting Blood Channeling (ibid., p. 139) just before you start the ritual.

As written, Bind Magic almost guarantees that there will be magical items that can cast spells once per day, that non-magic-users can use, pretty much everywhere. If you don’t think that should be the case, then the spell shouldn’t be able to do that.

If we don’t want to play D&D, which D&D-style tropes should we avoid?

If Forbidden Lands is definitely unlike D&D, then after saying “OK, so no Beholders”, another immediate thing we can do is identify features of magic items that are peculiar to D&D, and ban them.

Weapons that hurt a particular class of monster

By all means let’s have masterwork weapons with an extra gear die, or weapons which behave exactly the same way as normal weapons but look fancier. (That will add to your Reputation score, and/or give you bonuses when receiving visitors in your stronghold.)

But as soon as you start introducing monsters that can only be hurt by magical weapons, you now have a dilemma. Either there’s only a few special weapons in the world that can harm them, and the rest of the party with boring normal weapons are left doing less exciting things like healing, buffing, disarming or standing around looking like targets; or there are enough magical weapons that everybody gets a go, and before you know it people start to say “OK, these monsters can only be hurt by +2 swords or better”, and you’ve got the world’s most boring arms race.

Because magic weapons are always just better. They’re ordinary swords or what have you, and they can hurt special monsters. You’re a loser if you don’t have one of these.

“How about I make magic weapons only good against monsters that fear magic weapons?”, you might ask, and sure, that’s slightly interesting. Maybe a sword made of anti-ghost magic is rubbish against a very-much-alive troll. But that just means that high-end fighters will cart around a whole bunch of different weapons for different circumstances, and when the smart guy they have follow them around for moments like this makes their Lore roll and tells them what they’re up against, the fighter turns to their squire and say “hand me the anti-this-particular-monster sword”, and hooray, you’ve invented combat golf.

Magic items that make ordinary life easier for a rare few

When you start playing a Forbidden Lands campaign, you go through the travelling rules a few times, so your starting characters have to hike through wilderness, find a camp, hunt for their dinner, put up the tents, set a watch, and so on. The rules say “if you’ve been to this hex already, no need to go through this again”, and I suspect that most GMs quickly gloss over the details after a while. You can’t push an everyday roll for willpower, and after a while the PCs should be good enough to pretty much always make them, so eventually travelling becomes a way for the GM to tell a story about the changing world that the characters are moving through, rather than challenging the players. (Well, unless you’re playing the Bitter Reach, and even then I expect the PCs tool up with travelling gear and put up survival skills pretty sharpish.)

Drawing a veil over travelling – “you guys are good at it by now, you’re like Aragorn who’s been everywhere” – is different from saying “travelling used to be hard, but now you’re better off, so it’s a lot easier”. But that’s what D&D does.

D&D GMs worry about Leomond’s Tiny Hut for tactical combat reasons, but my concern is different: you’ve introduced class and privilege into travelling. A city rando with the right spell has a much better experience of being an adventurer than someone with less privilege. Even better-off characters cast a mansion spell, which comes with excellent foods and servants, just in case you were wondering whether or not to smash the State.

“But my players will have had to kill a lot of gnolls before they can level up and get a magic hut, and especially a magnificent mansion”, D&D GMs tell me, and maybe it’s reasonable to reward PCs with some comfort after months of killing gnolls, goblins and gelatinous cubes of various types. “Well-off people will have an entire baggage train of servants and gear so they can rest comfortably every day”, historians tell me, and if the rules say that you get followers at level 6, maybe it’s not unreasonable that at level 9 or whatever you should be able to do all of that stuff magically instead.

But this sort of thing feels at odds with the Ravenlands ethos that not only is this is a post-post-apocalyptic world, it’s one where there very much isn’t any kind of oppressive feudal society, where some people just have a better life because of how they were born, and the rest reckon that was right and deserved and tug their forelock. Or if there is one, they’re the bad guys (looking at you, Zytera, Kartorda and your Rust Brother protection racket; and, if you want to play it that way, the similarly population-dense and ripe-for-corruption dwarven cities, with their hereditary kings).

One of the interesting things about Zertorme is that if he joins the PCs on their travels, he’s not a spoilt royal brat, and he’s happy doing the ordinary hunting, camping and fetching water things. Don’t take that away from the game!

How do we make sure there are very few magic items in our world?

Having dismissed D&D-isms, we can look at the spirit of the rules and the setting, and try and work out what the rules for magic items should or could be, if we want our world to be one where magic items are as rare as the books mostly say they are.

Creating a grimoire should take a long time if they’re going to be as special as the rules say

The Player’s Handbook (p. 171) says you can build a Scriptorium, which gives you bonuses to writing a spell in a grimoire, a process which it says takes one or two Quarter Days, depending on whether the spell is a ritual or not. It also says “grimoires are highly sought-after artifacts among sorcerers” (ibid, p. 120), which is weird, because a druid or magician with a talent at second level can have their followers build a scriptorium in a week, and inscribe all the spells in the rulebook for that talent in 4-6 days, total. Even if you assume this is going to take intense concentration, you can do just one spell per week during the winter when there’s nothing much to do anyway, and be easily done by time the roads are suitable for travelling again. So unless there’s something special about creating a grimoire, this doesn’t follow: all druids and sorcerers should have created their own grimoire, like how all Jedi build their own lightsabre. The advantages of being able to safe-cast a spell are too great otherwise.

So maybe the answer is that it takes intense focus and dedication to create a grimoire and/or inscribe spells, and the rulebook is just wrong about how long things take? (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

My headcanon says that the magical mishap rules don’t kick in if you’re trying to cast a spell in controlled conditions, like being instructed by a teacher; or maybe you have a couple of chances before the full-fat magical mishap rules kick in, and after the first incident your teacher says “OK, that’s a sign that you need to rest; we’ll pick it up tomorrow”. So maybe inscribing a spell into a grimoire is an act of almost casting the spell, and then keeping it in your mind while you write magical symbols on the appropriate page of your grimoire. Once you’re done, you release the magical enemies into the page. And then you do it again. And again. (Breaking for the day if it looks like you’ve overdoing it.)

Over time, the page becomes infused by magical energy: tougher, maybe strangely iridescent, weirder. A proper grimoire probably has pages that can’t be ripped, nor be casually damaged by water, because its pages are now thicker and somehow more than just paper: stone-like? wood-like? fleshy? They probably don’t move under your fingers independently of how the wind is blowing, for instance. And spilling blood on a grimoire shouldn’t do anything either, right? Especially not if it’s the blood of the person who scribed the spells into it, yeah?

Most sorcerers don’t have the patience, diligence, flat-out determination to make themselves a grimoire. But the flipside is that the resulting grimoire is something to be very much respected.

Maybe that means creating any kind of magical item should also take a long time?

So maybe the same thing should be true of any magic item? It requires a serious investment of time and effort, and most people aren’t going to do that. Maybe they’ll occasionally cast Bind Magic to create one-off enchantments, especially if it means they can prepare a spell ahead of time and deal with any magical mishap in comparative comfort, or give a magic pebble to the warrior so they can use magic in battle. But the act of creating a permanent magic item should be beyond almost everyone.

Consider the ancient elves of the Heart of the Sky. In order of canonicity, Algared (the Nekhaka sceptre), Iridne (the Blood Star cloak clasp), Neyd (her staff of nature) and Gemelda (her spyglass of dispelling obstacles) each decided that they wanted to make a thing of power, and they were elves so had all the time in the world to focus on a task like that.

Note in contrast that the Maligarn sword is canonically just a good sword, albeit one that’s since been imbued with certain aspects of Viridia’s personality; and Kalman Rodenfell’s weapons aren’t anything special. Nebulos also explicitly had the help of dwarven artificers to make the circlet, which must have helped.

You can also argue that the only thing we know about the lives and times of the ancient elves was that they mostly happened before the Shift, so creating those artifacts could have taken decades, even centuries. Or you might want to say that artifacts also fell from the Red Wanderer, and the ancient elves merely had to find them in the new world they were exploring.

Against that, you can say that while the Shardmaiden had 700-odd years to persuade Algared to make Frailers of his own, Iridne had significantly less than a century to have the Blood Star cloak clasp made, if she only decided to help the orcs after the Second Alder War had them join the side of the dwarves as slaves. But maybe this was a signature item of hers that she’d had made earlier, and only later repurposed as a “I give you my blessing” artifact?

More importantly, arguably it only takes Kalman Rodenfell a year to reforge the circlet of elven peace into the war crown Stanengist and use it to enslave the orcs, between the arrival of Alvagard’s army in 825 AS and the second Alder War in 826 AS. But (a) he was starting from an existing magical item, and merely tweaking its purpose, and (b) it’s amazing what you can do if making a magical item is a war goal of the dwarves and elves combined.

Are magic items subject to the engineer’s dictum?

If you want something done, the saying goes, “good, fast, cheap: pick two”. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch: you’re not going to get the moon on a stick, so you’re going to have to decide where you’re going to cut corners. And if the ancient elves were happy sacrificing “fast” (it’ll take as long as it needs to), and the combined dwarves and elves sacrificed “cheap” to reforge the ancient circlet into Stanengist (war efforts, like the Manhatten Project, tend to blow through peace-time budgets), then it follows that sometimes people made magical artifacts and decided to sacrifice “good”.

Any magic item with a limited number of uses is potentially an example of this, as is any magic item with weird limitations, like a sonic screwdriver that doesn’t work on wood. Maybe the inventors hoped that, after the immediate rush was over and there was a working prototype, they could spend time to make a proper version without any of the limitations, but then priorities shifted and the true version of the item was never made?

Also, if you come across a magic item which has a particular drawback that annoys you, consider that maybe the creator(s) of said magic item didn’t consider that as much of a trade-off as you do? If you’re uncomfortable wielding a magic sword that demands that it should shed blood, or even kill something, every time it’s unsheathed, if might be because the people who made it decided that killing was a matter of last resort, and you shouldn’t just posture and say “look at my awesome sword of magic” unless you were serious about ending someone’s life.

But it also could be the product of a society who considered life to be cheap, where sorcerers casting Blood Channeling (Player’s Handbook, p. 139) always have with them at best a bag of rats that they can sacrifice for power at any moment, or more likely a posse of doomed slaves in shackles. If a magic item artificer said to them “I can make you an awesome sword, but it will tend to crave blood”, their response might well be “why do you say ‘but’?”

Are some magical items born, not created?

Demons are known to be shapeshifters, and otherwise made of Mog. Could a demon artificer force a demon into a magical item, or trick them into taking the form of a sword or a shield, or a ring or a jewel, and then freeze them in place? (Obviously the demon is likely to resent anybody who uses the item, unless a cunning wielder can persuade the demon inside their magic item that they now get to experience all sorts of novel sensations vicariously, and/or threaten them with being cast into a peat bog if they don’t behave.) A magic item that’s actually basically a demon is going to behave very differently from something that someone set out to make from scratch.

Or maybe circumstances are enough to create a magical item, if they’re truly exceptional? Some of the massive battles of the Alder War seem like they could have produced so much bloodshed, so much pain, so much death, that somehow a magical item was formed as a result? Or maybe emotions in sufficient number and intensity, from either the victorious army or more likely the defeated armies, are enough to conjure up a spirit of hope, glory, despair, revenge, which took the form of a magic item?

So maybe you could get a sword of massacring, which is just a normal sword to begin with, but as you Break people it gains more and more dice; if you ever stop Breaking people, though, the bonuses go away and it starts to be actively bad? Alternatively, exactly the same circumstances could have brought about a miraculous shield, which was maybe originally a dead tree that someone desperately hid behind, which provides more and more protection as people the wielder cares about are Broken nearby.

And likewise, maybe the combined emotions and beliefs of enough people could grant power to what started out as a perfectly-ordinary item. Maybe a perfectly ordinary sword or shield owned by a charismatic, constantly-victorious war-leader, could end up a little more magical over time, until eventually whoever wields it just will be better at killing or failing to be killed, regardless of their own personal level of skill.

(Yes, this is the cooking pot of +1 tastiness from earlier; the point is that in the Forbidden Lands it’s a lot harder for this to happen.)

Forbidden Lands is satisfyingly clear about how magic items should feel

For all my occasional criticisms about how Forbidden Lands writers don’t always understand the setting they’re writing for, there are a couple of very important themes in the setting that we can base ourselves on when creating or updating magic items. This goes a long way to making your game feel like the Forbidden Lands.

The most-important Forbidden Lands rule about magic artifacts: they do not make you inherently better

It’s not mentioned anywhere explicitly, but if you read through the Player’s Handbook and the GM’s Guide, and look at the various ways to spend XP or gain magical artifacts, one thing stands out very clearly: you can never improve your attributes. (Very occasionally a writer for a subsequent book forgets this rule, but not as often as you’d expect, given the inflationary nature of sourcebooks.)

You start out with 15 points to spend on Strength, Agility, Wits and Empathy, and eventually, if you’re not an elf, you’ll lose one as you lose the flush of youth, and another as you get old, and then you’ll die. There is no way of gaining more points in attributes. You can offset this by learning skills, but guile and cunning will never make you as inherently attractive as you were when you were 18.

And no matter how many skills and talents you might have, you still have an attribute between 2 and 6, and probably between 3 and 5, which you can take damage to, and if you take a mere handful you’re Broken. Combined with the lack of any level-based hit point mechanic, this means a starting character with a grudge and time to plan an ambush is a mortal threat to anyone.

Oh, sure, there are ways to improve your attributes beyond normal levels, like doing hideous experiments with demon magic, but the game is very clear that if you do that, you now get to play by the monster rules.

“But I looked at e.g. Virelda’s stats (Raven’s Purge, p. 41) and she’s off the charts”, you might say, and you’d be right, but (a) arguably Virelda has demon hair so she’s part-monster; and more importantly (b) the stat blocks pretty everywhere in Forbidden Lands books are rubbish and you should probably ignore them out of general principle. Does it make sense that Virelda should have 11 skills and 5 talents, but Zertorme should only have 4 and 3 respectively? No: what happened is that they went into detail for Virelda but didn’t bother for Zertorme. You should stat NPCs based on how powerful you think they are and/or based on what you need them to do for your story, and ignore the “will this do?” stat blocks in official publications.

Magical artifacts always have drawbacks

Forbidden Lands is very clear that to use a magic item is always to make a choice, and choices have genuine, narrative consequences; artifacts’ drawbacks should be real, and not something that can be gamed. This is hard to write, and if you look at some of the items in the books it’s clear that thas hasn’t always been achieved.

For instance, if you tell the players “this weapon will inflict 1 Wits damage when you Break someone”, most players will just accept that as the price of using the weapon, but organised players will go ahead and have someone ready to roll Performance to heal the Wits damage when it happens, and because this happens in combat they’ll argue that it’s a roll that can be pushed, so it now becomes a Willpower source. Even-better-organised players will have a second character who can roll Performance, so if the first healer takes damage from pushing they get to heal them. (They’ll swap order depending on who now has the highest Wits.) Proper munchkins will deliberately never put up their Performance skill too much because the odds of failing the roll before pushing are more valuable to them than the odds of eventually succeeding.

Similarly, “this artifact can only be used a small number of times” isn’t a drawback, it’s a nerf, and it makes it more likely that the players will never use it, or, paralyzed by indecision, will always reserve it for the next fight. “In rare cases, this artifact will curse food or drink, turning it into a potent poison” sounds like an additional power rather than a drawback to me. ”If the rightful owners of the artifact find out you have it, they’ll hunt you down and demand it back” isn’t anything to do with the artifact either, and if you as GM have decided that the rightful owners have given the artifact to the players, there’s now nothing bad about the artifact at all.

“Using this artifact will make you age at an unnatural rate” is a cruel and uninteresting punishment.

Conversely, “this Arrow of the Fire Wyrm is rubbish as a weapon but it will kill dead the person whose name was inscribed on the shaft” (GM’s Guide, p. 130) is a brilliant limitation. It fits with the fairy-tale vibe of Forbidden Lands that there’s an evil monster with just one weakness, and it seems impossible that you could find it, but you never know. “Asina has a mind of her own and might injure you when you take her out of the scabbard” (ibid., p. 131) is pretty good as well, as is “this weapon is so good at killing particular kinds of creature that they’re now drawn to it” (Bitter Reach, p. 113), because it implies that the weapon is somehow psychically shouting “come on if you think you’re hard enough” all the time.

“Using this artifact is addictive” or “using the Big Bad’s artifact can let him into your head” are older than The Lord of the Rings, but that’s fine: things can be tropes because they’re great ideas. “Overusing this artifact can backfire and seriously disrupt the environment” (Bloodmarch, p. 64) is also solid. “When this artifact saves you from harm from ranged weapons, someone else near you (maybe an enemy but maybe a friend) will be harmed instead” (Bloodmarch, p. 65) is amazing, because it leans into the “be careful what you wish for” themes that make the story of Tvedra’s Twin Rings (GM’s Guide, p. 142) such a brilliant tragedy.

There’s always at least one legend about each magic item

This follows on directly from magic items being rare, imperfect and weird: every magic item is unique. Because people are fallible and prone to exaggeration, there might be multiple legends about a particular magic item, each of which at best contains part of the truth. But magic items are rare enough, and distinct enough, that each of them has a story. There might be a scholar in Farhaven or Pelagia who prides himself on knowing about all the magic items that exist in the Ravenlands, and while he’s clearly wrong (because otherwise what are you doing as a GM?), he’s not wrong by much.

So regardless of how you came up with a magic item, it shouldn’t feel to your players that you’re saying “OK, you open the chest, and you find a (FX: dice roll) drum”, or that once they pick up the item and try it out you say “the drum tells you that it’s (rolls) Kondalf’s drum of (rolls) extreme (rolls) movement”. By all means use random tables as inspiration (e.g. Book of Beasts pp. 161..164), same as you might ask an AI for some ideas to get your creative juices flowing. But more than two or maybe three random elements in a magic item will lead to confusion and implausibility, same as they will for a random settlement or dungeon, and you need to be able to say “no, that’s silly” and rethink part or all of the idea.

Magic items should have personalities

The magic items in Raven’s Purge obviously have personalities, because they’ve got ancient elven rubies stuck in them. But I think the same thing should be true of any magic item: an empty Stanengist should still be suggesting “conquer them all, rule the land!”; Maligarn without Gall-Eye should still be quietly muttering thoughts of reckless violence; the Phantom Daggers should dream of epic acts of skulduggery they’ve been involved in and try to tempt anyone nearby into picking them up. This will be subtle and easy to ignore most of the time, but sometimes, late at night when everything is quiet, everyone else is asleep and you’re alone on watch, the whispers will become difficult to ignore. Or maybe you’ll realise that not only do you still remember a dream from last night, hours after you woke, but this isn’t the first time this has happened.

And this is just when they’re near; if you claim a magic item as your own, then every time you use it, you should expect a brief conversation with a particularly weird and borderline unintelligible NPC. The more you adventure together, the more likely that when you’re discussing the party’s next course of action, you’ll find yourself saying “I’m sorry, but the sword wants to say something. I’m going to try to translate.”

So maybe the drawback of a magic item could be that the more you use it, the more you become involved with it. One sword is eager for adventure and sulks if you haven’t used it recently, or is jealous if you’ve used any other cutting weapons recently (“for reasons that are too complicated and boring to go into right now, if you want me to cook tonight I’m going to have chop these carrots with a sword”). Another is lazy and baulks at being used too often, or decides that it should only be used for true challenges, and not just fighting common brigands. (If you can do a posh accent, the sword should speak like that.)

There’s no reason why magic items should only have one character trait either. If you find a sword that wants to be involved whenever anyone cuts anything, but refuses to be sullied by targets it considers beneath it, well, maybe that explains why nobody else wanted it too badly.

If your players are up for it, a drawback can be qualitative: maybe a metal shield could be amazing but, the more you use it, the more you start to see things like the shield? Food starts to lose flavour, colour drains out of the world, even in conversation you become determined to never expose a weakness (the behaviour previously known as “listening to someone and learning something new”). “In thrall to their magic item” would make a pretty good Dark Secret.

Or maybe the more you shoot a magic bow, the more it’s interested in you travelling through the air at speed? This can be a heartwarming way of bonding with your murder weapon, as you rig up a swing in a tree or dive off tall cliffs into the sea; but if you close yourself off to the bow’s wishes, eventually the urges become uncontrollable and you find yourself involuntarily throwing anything that happens to be in your grasp.

Why are you giving your players a magic item?

This is the ultimate question you need to ask yourself.

If you’re playing Raven’s Purge or the Bloodmarch, say, the plot demands that the PCs get some magic items, so the only thing you really need to do is to make said magic items interesting. This is basically the same skill as making your players want to talk to Zertorme whenever they meet him, wonder which version of Kalman Rodenfell they’re going to get this time, or enjoy hating Arvia whenever she shows up.

Your players might have slogged through a really tough dungeon, or had to be nice to a whole posse of unpleasant NPCs while solving multiple murder mysteries, and you want to say something other than “hooray, here’s an XP for completing the adventure site”. Getting cool loot is one of the reasons most of us got involved in this hobby, and playing the hits rarely gets old.

But one of the things that makes the Forbidden Lands interesting is that, if magic items always have drawbacks, that means that giving stuff to your players should always invoke a moral dilemma. So if you can find a way of working out what your players would enjoy, then give them something that makes them tougher but isn’t quite what they wanted, and now they’re unsure about how they feel about that, well, that’s the closest I ever get to GM heaven.