Need Interesting Ideas for Magic Items [3.5]

[Adam...?]

In a nutshell, my PCs will probably end up pissing off people with character levels soon. And for plot related reasons, those people should have a few insane magic items. Not just your regular +x swords, but the sort of things that can and should be unique, overpowered, and generally game breaking. Ideally the sorts of things that can turn a regular encounter against a handful of people into an interesting sort of combat/puzzle hybrid.

For instance, I'm liking the idea of a fighter-type with an amulet that effectively provides total cover against incoming attacks from the front. See how long it takes people to figure out that they have to flank him to get through his defenses. Also, maybe a guy with some sort of offensive teleportation ability could be interesting?

I know the classic issues with PCs vs. humanoid NPC encounters are that they tend to be too squishy and they require decent magic items to be effective, which means too much loot for the players. I figure these items provide an opportunity to give the enemies stronger defensive options, and it'll tie up a good chunk of their WBL. Win-win. And hey, the PCs are pretty behind on WBL, so they could probably use a good windfall anyways.

If it helps, this should be a difficult challenge for a group of five rather unoptimized level 11 PCs. Check the spoilers for a more in-depth background, if you think it'll help.

Heavy inspiration for this campaign has come from the lovely SCP Foundation (http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/). The whole plot hook revolves around the fact that, in addition to the usual Arcane and Divine magic, there's also "Wild" magic (affectionately referred to by the players as "weird ****") that doesn't really follow any known rules. It's really just a chaotic, inconsistent mess that most people aren't even aware of. However, every now and again, objects (or people, or locations, or whatever) get spontaneously enchanted/created by Wild Magic. Effects can range from the mundane, like the classic "stick that always stands on end," or the gambling dice that reward victories with small amounts of currency and punishes losses with dangerous jolts of electricity, to incredibly deadly, such as items that allow for at-will mental domination, or create permanent and fully functional clones.

After a handful of people with a couple cool toys were able to (nearly successfully) wage war on entire nations, some people figured that maybe Wild magic artifacts should be kept under control, and formed an organization tasked to locate, confiscate, and contain such things. The general idea behind this being that Wild magic represents a power too great for any mortal to control. The PCs have gotten themselves involved in this, and have been having a great time tracking down and obtaining a variety of weird things, all of which they are expressly forbidden from ever using. Strangely enough, they're okay with this.

Recently, the players have become aware of an organization that is trying to undermine and replace the ruling powers. To make matters more interesting, their tactics mainly involve collecting Wild magic stuff for the sole purpose of furthering their goals. So when the agents of this organization meet the PCs, it'll likely end in a showdown. And the agents won't have any qualms about using their fun toys to win. Hence, I need some ideas.

If it helps, here's the party composition
-Human fighter 11, uses greatswords and a lot of weapon focus/specialization type feats. Hilariously, most of the player consider him to be the "most powerful" character, and they may not be that far off.
-Human cleric 11, also uses greatswords, but mostly confined to healbot/party buffer status.
-Human sorcerer 6/rogue 3/arcane trickster 2, uses invisibility and flight. Enjoys blasting things.
-Human monk 10/swordsage 1. Just convinced him to take his first level of swordsage, since he was obviously falling behind the rest of the party.
-Elven wizard 11, blaster style. Has a few good non-blasting spells, but rarely makes good use of them.

[Fhaolan]

The best way I've found of making unique magic items, is to come up with what the item was *specifically* made to do, and then futz with it to come up with side effects.

For example, there's this sword was was specificially made to combat Mirror Fetches. Basically a kind of ghost thing where your reflection comes to life and steals your soul or some such nonsense. So the sword was made to pass through mirrors without damaging them, but could actually damage the Fetch. Unfortunately there was a side effect that if the reflection was *not* a Fetch, the 'real' person would take the damage to match their reflection.

You can now load other abilities onto this sword, if necessary. For example, it is itself reflective, and always seems to reflect a torch somewhere in the area even if there isn't one around. If you know exactly how to use it, you can stab a mirror and have the blade come out some *other* mirror within range, etc.

[Cyrion]

How about an amulet that provides the wearer with protection from magic- it turns the energy of any spell targeting the wearer or producing an energy area of effect that would include the wearer into a cloud of butterflies, granting partial concealment if the spell is 4th level or less, and total concealment if the spell is 5th level or higher. The concealment works both ways- the BBEG and any attacker's vision is hampered, so the clever party can turn it against him. The concealment lasts until the end of the BBEG's next turn. You'll probably want to assign a caster level check to punch a spell through the protection and affect the target instead of turning into butterflies; pick a DC that gives the level of difficulty you want.

[HalfDragonCube]

Or something that works vice versa?

Any insects nearby get consumed and random spell effects begin appearing.

Just make sure that if you get a new player they don't decide to be a thri-keen.:smalleek:

[Funkyodor]

Start with a rod of absorption, make it a necklace. Tie it to a weapon. Use both and the wielder can use absorbed spell level charges to add +XD6 force damage to an attack. So, he's pretty much immune to targetable spells and can pile the hurt on if the PC's try. Since it's a charged(decharged) item, if the PC's get it then it's less useful. And that's what I would suggest if you use overpowered stuff. Charges and/or Cursed.

Our group fought a Vampire who used a sword that when it dealt damage, it added HP to the Vamp. Curse was the wielder suffered all the negative effects of the Vampire and had to consume the flesh of enemies wounded by the sword. Whoop de flippn' do for the Vamp. But most of our PC's had big problems with the Curse. Oh, and when the curse was removed there was a chance of death.

Combine Bead's of Force & Pearls of Fireballs and have a badguy sling'n em around like mad.

That total cover from the front idea could be accomplished by a special cube of force with no movement restrictions, restricted to face 1 only. Plus you could combine it with a Force Shield ring and make a special Force Weapon ring as his weapon.

[panaikhan]

Items with insanely specific 'prerequisites' also fit here.
Like a +5 Vorpal sword that only works if your Truename is "Kevin"