One of my favorite aspects of D&D was making our gear.  To keep it from being crippling on our party and the caster I didn't require an XP sacrifice or constitution sacrifice in the actual manufacture, but they could gain no experience in the gathering of the materials.  This made a nice balance where I didn't have to focus on the minutia and could focus on the story.

One of my players wanted to fashion a good ole' Hammer of Thunderbolts.  This borderline artifact made me leery for what could be the tattered remnants of my campaign.  But I acquiesced.

"Impossible Elements"
-Blood, sweat, & tears; Freely given; from the king of each type of giant:  Frost, Fire, Hill, Stone & Storm.
-100 pound block of Mithral Adamantine alloy fired by a gold dragons breath & forged & shaped (to player specifications) in the City of Brass by an efreeti using a glass hammer; tempered in the blood, sweat & tears; without recompense of payment.
-Branch of ironwood from the ironwood treant Father; freely given.
-10 foot cord of astral behemoth hide tanned in Tarrasque blood; freely given.

Steps
-7 successful, successive weapon crafting rolls with at least 1 being a 20.  Any roll of 1 indicated utter failure and having to restart from scratch.

'Improbable Ingredients'
-Once assembled, still non-magical, must be thrown into the air by the owner & struck by lightning 3 times.
-Bind an air elemental to the hammer, of their own free will.
-prayed over by 100 dwarven priests of Moradin for 100 days to discern name for hammer.
-Strapped to the owners arm and cast into a natural tornado.

"Wizard Enchantments"
-5 castings of magical weapon
-Casting truename in reverse to give the Hammer it's name.
-Permanency.

"Cleric Enchantments"
-Slay Living
-Harm

Freely given meant that they could trade services to acquire the items.  The efreeti however had to agree to do the forging without payment.  Essentially from the kindness of the efreetis heart.  The air elemental served as the sentience for the hammer and the returning function.

You may want to give this a try.  I much preferred this over the Chemcheaux style world, or the broker style world of DDO.

I sent some players to a quite epic quest in Rune Quest, going to some other planes and so. But I think I am not so good at giving the proper ambiance.

Starkjade wrote on Dec 26^th, 2014 at 12:15am:


It is interesting how people totally forget. I surely could base some games on DDO quests and my players wouldn´t notice (all have played DDO, but very casual and do not play since 2012

Aeolwind wrote on Jan 12^th, 2015 at 12:03pm:


They seem to have all the old The Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Thx.

Paizo?

There's a toon with that name running around in Orien.
Or *was* running around in Orien.

NOTSunnyshadow wrote on Jan 14^th, 2015 at 12:13pm:

They own Pathfinder; http://paizo.com/