Blog

RPG Ideas — Mage Forge

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is Mage Forge, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy Live to talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of Mage Forge we kicked off 2022 with our second Kickstarter project, which is fully funded and moving forward for full production! You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

Nerdy News

Face the cryptid terror from the week that was! Stare down a monster from our own back yard, wield snazzy academic magic and get tangled up in the Beard Dimension plus new live chats with industry pros and creative folks and live games including a brand new superhero series round out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

Enter the Mage Forge! It was inevitable this became one of our weekly topics especially with the current Kickstarter going on by the same name, which has a little history with the Nerdarchy crew.

Back February of 2015 we did our first Mage Forge video — Veraloth the Divine Drought | The MageForge | Creating Magic Items for D&D. That is the first video of a playlist of 33 videos. The video series concept was a simple one — one of us would show up with a basic concept for an item and then during the video we’d create it through our discussion. It’s no surprise a handful of those items even made it into the current project on Kickstarter.

From our discussion on this past Monday Nerditor Doug and myself came up with some ideas with a little help from the chat. Chat frequenter Parks asked if there was a Mage Forge within the Mage Forge. Currently there isn’t but this did get us thinking. What would such thing be?

We immediately settled on it as an artifact rooted to place and not easily moved. I know many of you are familiar with our Out of the Box book of 55 drop in encounters for 5th Edition. What if we married the two products together and made an Out of the Box style encounter around the Mage Forge? I’m not sure where this might show up but I believe Nerditor Doug has some ideas he wants to explore. At the same time we mentioned the idea to Nerdarchist Ted who said he was already cooking up a magic item named the Mage Forge.

Thinking about both the magic item and the encounter made me think of the Infinity War movie. Specifically when Thor has to ignite Nidavellir, the forge upon which Stormbreaker is crafted. Part of a Mage Forge encounter definitely involves having to fire up the forge. Perhaps some form of sacrifice from the characters like hit dice, spell slots or even feeding magic items to be consumed by the igniting flames.

Is the Mage Forge itself sentient? Does it require bargaining and negotiation from the characters? Will the Mage Forge be insulted if asked to craft something it considers beneath it’s capabilities? Could this be a chance for characters with different tool proficiencies to shine?

This a great opportunity to add an exploration and social encounter into an environment that otherwise wouldn’t have them. It could even be kicked off with the need to overcome the forge’s guardian before you can explore and interact with the artifact. You could start off with the guardian having access to a limited amount of the forge’s power while it still lies dormant or asleep. I love idea of random constructs pouring out of a huge dwarven mouth formed from the forge’s hood. The anvil or forge itself is like a tongue sticking out of a screaming dwarf’s mouth.

I can’t wait to see what Nerditor Doug and Nerdarchist Ted come up with for this concept.

From Ted’s Head

I am so excited for our Mage Forge project. If you are active in the community I am sure you have heard people talk about our Mage Forge Kickstarter. In earlier editions of D&D there were core rules for characters to make magic items. There are loose rules in fifth edition D&D but it is ultimately up to the Dungeon Master.

What if we had an artifact location that was literally the Mage Forge? Was it lost to the ages or does one faction secretly guard its location? Feel free to use your own set of rules but this is what I would do for such a special location. The costs would still be the same and I would say half the value of the item in rare reagents are required to make the magic item or heck — maybe the location literally consumes the gold to take the magic from the gold.

• A common magic item can be made in 2 hours of work
• An uncommon magic item can be made with 8 hours of work
• A rare magic item can be made with 32 hours of work
• A very rare magic item can be made with 64 hours of work

It could go on even further or it could be limited as you see fit. Work can be halted and paused to allow for adventuring or time could have to continue or suffer a loss of progress. The Mage Forge could use skill checks or skill challenges as you want. Use the DCs by level or tier in the Dungeon Master’s Guide that make sense for you and your group.

Perhaps the quest starts off trying to find an artifact to destroy a bad guy intent on world destruction. Maybe the villain finds and drains the item first, leaving it a normal item. If the MAage Forge could be located its power could restore the item to its previous state thus allowing completion of the quest. The ideas are endless of how you could use such a place.

Check out the Kickstarter and bring items from the Nerdarchyverse to your gaming table.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

During the live chat where Nerdarchist Dave and I discussed the Mage Forge concept from a variety of angles the most intriguing of all to me came about through a viewer question, which Dave mentions in his editorial this week. At the end of the day 5E D&D is all about questing and I love brainstorming new ideas for facilitating adventure.

The key component for my take on the Mage Forge as the foundation for an encounter is a static location — it cannot be physically moved and exists in a discrete place. There’s some wiggle room for DMs because this location can be anywhere and perhaps even appear in different places but it’s always fixed in space wherever this happens to be.

Thinking more about this post-chat I’m imagining this as the basis for an entire campaign or even as a foundational part of a setting. Learning more about this amazing artifact, discovering its current location and then traveling there could facilitate many adventures. Once a party finally reaches this place, let’s say somewhere around the middle of tier two, it becomes a hub for future endeavors.

Such an incredible device certainly means there’s defenses, which of course the party must overcome before any Mage Forging takes place. Then there’s the matter of puzzling out how to reignite the thing — another source of adventure opportunities. When all of this is finally accomplished, let’s say somewhere around the middle of tier three, then characters can at last take advantage of what the Mage Forge offers. Here’s some possibilities:

• Characters can manipulate the magic of existing magic items. I’m thinking of things like the runic magic items from Storm King’s Thunder, which can be transferred from the item to a place. The Mage Forge could enable them to transfer properties into other items both magical and mundane too, or even onto creatures!
• Imagining the Mage Forge as a sentient artifact can open the door to extraplanar adventures with the forge acting as a quest giver of sorts. It’s not hard to imagine powerful entities from across the multiverse seeking to control the forge and these intrepid mortals become agents of the artifact to protect it from falling into the wrong hands.
• Investing their own power into the Mage Forge to make it work creates an opportunity for true sacrifice from the characters. This thing is tremendously powerful so it gives characters a real tough decision. Getting the forge to work could require investing things like spell slots, hit dice or other vital resources and not just until they sleep it off either. These things may not refresh again for days, weeks, months or may never return.
• The Mage Forge can break down existing magic items into something akin to 4E D&D’s residuum or Skyrim’s Arcane Enchanter. The resultant material could be used as a powerful spell component or any number of cool uses. It could simply mean the character knows how to recreate the enchantment, which may also facilitate further adventure.

I love the way all three of us shared different takes on the Mage Forge concept this week. Like we mentioned in the live chat we’re developing a special encounter building on these ideas, which we’ll share more about in the coming weeks. With our current big project a deluxe box set of 250 tarot sized magic item cards fully funded you can bet we’ll include lots of ways to get even more use out of the collection!

*Featured image — Along with 250 new Fifth Edition magic items on snazzy tarot cards Mage Forge includes a booklet with additional lore, details, plot hooks and more on many of the magic items, secrets for the Game Masters’ eyes and we’re working on a special encounter to add in too. Discover the Mage Forge here!

Subscribe to Nerdarchy Live and get notifications for live RPG game plays, chats with creators and industry professionals and new video series and content on our second YouTube channel here