Great Magic Items Inspire Amazing Stories for Players and Characters Alike

We love magic items! The source of power for adventurers may have slowly migrated from external to internal over the years but this hasn’t taken away from the joy of discovery when characters glean such treasures from the hoards of conquered monsters or unearth them in long-lost vaults. In our own fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons games magic items play pivotal roles whether this means providing the power to best terrible adversaries, grant capabilities otherwise impossible for a character or complement existing features.

A random magic sword helps a lost knight reclaim their legacy

In my 5E D&D experiences magic items accomplish something far greater than any of those situations. Great magic items hold the potential to define your adventures and the characters who embark on those amazing journeys. This aspect of magic items sits and the forefront of my enthusiasm for sharing our curated collection through the Mage Forge.

The collection we’re sharing contains magic items from among other things our own personal games and I thought it would be fun to share the background of one such item. Hopefully this’ll inspire some ideas for you to bring to your own games. The whole Mage Forge project itself is our love letter to magic items and how impactful they’ve been for players in these campaigns. I’ll use the Petal Blade to illustrate what I mean. This particular item is something we’ve shared in the past through a newsletter and you can also add it to your own collection of magic items from D&D Beyond here.

Petal Blade

Weapon (longsword), uncommon

This longsword is oxidized and budding vines wrap around it from pommel to the tip of the blade. As an action you can strike the ground and create a 10 foot radius of flowers. The flowers are poisonous and all nongood creatures must make on a DC 12 Consitution saving throw or take 11 (2d10) poison damage and become poisoned until the end of your next turn, of half as much damage and they are not poisoned on a successful save. The sword can’t be used this way again until the next dawn.

Proficiency with a longsword allows you to add your proficiency bonus to the attack roll for any attack you make with it.

This magic sword came about after the Adventurers of Adventure followed their adventuresome instincts in the Dreaming World, which is my version of the Feywild in my setting. This turn of events emerged wholly through the players’ actions after their characters began exploring the sandbox. Soon after making the crossing a roll on the Feywild Time Warp table in the 5E D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide along with a Memory Loss check set the stage for a wonderful scenario. Not only would every day spent in the Dreaming World equate to a month passing in the Waking World but also the entire party completely forgot why they were in this fairy tale realm in the first place!

The somewhat tabula rasa adventuring party came into an audience with Princess Dandelion. The petulant archfey tasked them with a quest to gather important items she needed for an imminent party, which set them on a path to interact with Dandelion’s two sisters, Carnation and Pale Peony. It was during one of these encounters the group came into possession of the Petal Blade. And then something amazing happened.

One of the characters was a knight and when I described the flower motif on the sword the knight player’s whole demeanor shifted. What I didn’t know at the time was this player’s concept for the character’s heraldry was a raven clutching a poisonous flower. I learned after the session he assumed I included this item specifically to interact with his character somehow — so that’s exactly how it played out in later sessions. Protip: players can do a ton of heavy lifting for GMs!

During their time in the Dreaming World this character became known as the Petal Knight as his reputation grew. The character felt an unusual connection to the Petal Blade and spent quality time meditating on the sword. I couldn’t believe my good fortune! The player sunk their teeth into what they believed was a plot hook. What really happened is simply that when I described this magic sword with details connected to the trio of floral themed fey entities the player ran with their own imagination.

As a reward for this incredible investment into his character, the setting and overall theme of the campaign I wove together elements of the knight’s backstory and he learned of an ancient connection his family shared with folk from the Dreaming World. The Petal Blade became something of a fetter to the Waking World, which would eventually help lead them back home.

Unfortunately this particular campaign fizzled out a few sessions later. Ever since then in my setting the townsfolk remember the fresh adventurers who arrived on their shore and began to make their home in Fristad but were never seen again. The results of their abbreviated campaign ripple throughout later campaigns too. In fact the group that’s now our Tuesday night game group on Nerdarchy Live emerged from a game in which their characters picked up the trail of those vanished adventurers.

My hope in sharing this story is to help illustrate the kind of passion we put behind the Mage Forge project. While the Petal Blade can absolutely be found in the collection of 250 magic items, like many others we’ve omitted many of the specific details surrounding the items from our own games. Our thinking on this is we don’t want to create barriers around these items we felt might constrain your own awesome ideas. Instead we hope you’ll be inspired to make these items your own and incorporate them into your games so the same sorts of amazing scenarios emerge with the players in your group.

If you’d love to bring excitement back to your games with magic items you’ll be as thrilled to present to characters as they’ll be to discover check out the Mage Forge here.

*Featured image — We’ve got a lot of illustrations already completed for the Mage Forge project but the Petal Blade isn’t one of them! Instead check out these super cool Feral Pelts. Each distinct cloak bestows powers of their representative beast upon the adventurer who dons them.

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