Customizing weapons without magic

[Yora]

What ways are there to make weapons that are better than the standard stuff except for masterwork weapons and using adamantine, cold iron, mithril, and silver?

Homebrew solutions are also welcome.

[Fearan]

DMG 2 has XXX-crafted line. Feycrafted, githcrafted and such. Also, look into dungeonscape - there are upgrades like wand chamber or oil dispenser

[Greenish]

There are the foocraft templates in (I want to say) PHBII. Elvencraft to turn bows into melee weapons, dwarvencraft for more hp/hardness, feycraft for finesse or finessability und so wieder.

[Edit]: Blast it, I have been swordsage'd!

[Amnestic]

Don't know if you count them as "magic" but Weapon (and armour/shield) Crystals (MIC) aren't 'standard' and they're not enchantments.

[arguskos]

In Dragon Magazine #358, page 38, there is the Master's Forge, which has item templates for armor and weapons that you can have applied for a light cost. Lots of good stuff there.

[MarkusWolfe]

If you're looking for 'enhancements that don't count as pluses', there's some enhancements in the DMGII and the MIC that cost a flat amount of cash. If you're looking for 'enhancements that work inside an antimagic field', go with the templates that people already mentioned. Also consider the option of fancy materials; there's more out there than just silver, cold iron and adamantine.

[Yora]

No, I'm actually looking for plusses that don't count as enchantments. :smallbiggrin:

[Abemad]

Black Company Campaign setting has a great mastercrafted system (it's a low-magic setting).

Every item can be made in 7 different "grades" (average, fine, excellent, exceptional, superior, masterwork and masterpiece). Every grade above average, gives the weapon 1 benefit, and if the weapon is of high enough grade, you may choose the same benefit twice, or even three times.
The benefits range from damage bonuses, attack bonuses, skill bonuses and a ton of other things.

Imo the book is worth the price just for the masterwork item rules, and the spell rules :smallwink:

[MarkusWolfe]

No, I'm actually looking for plusses that don't count as enchantments. :smallbiggrin:

No lady, you got it all wrong. Most enhancements are treated like pluses in respect to their cost. Bane, for example, is equivalent to a +1 bonus. However, as I said, there are some ways to improve a weapon magically without changing the number of effective pluses on it.

[Yora]

But what I want is to have better weapons without any magic involved.

[MarkusWolfe]

Well, that limits you to materials naturally found on the material without any magic, and non-magical construction processes done by non-magical natives of the material plane....which leaves you the metals listed in the first post, elvencraft and dwarvencraft.

[Hiro Protagonest]

But what I want is to have better weapons without any magic involved.

I thought up something for this sometime back, just treat it as magic in respect to the cost and stuff, but flavor wise, it's masterwork.

This solution would allow you to use properties like keen, aptitude, and vorpal, but not obviously magical ones like flaming or bane.

[MarkusWolfe]

I thought up something for this sometime back, just treat it as magic in respect to the cost and stuff, but flavor wise, it's masterwork.

This solution would allow you to use properties like keen, aptitude, and vorpal, but not obviously magical ones like flaming or bane.

I don't know, worked properly the bane property could be masterwork flavor wise. A weapon forged by a blacksmith who had no magic available to him but a deep, burning hatred of gnolls after they razed his village and took his family away would be an excellent candidate for a +1 gnoll bane weapon, especially if he had forged it for the purpose of exacting revenge on the gnolls.

[Hiro Protagonest]

I don't know, worked properly the bane property could be masterwork flavor wise. A weapon forged by a blacksmith who had no magic available to him but a deep, burning hatred of gnolls after they razed his village and took his family away would be an excellent candidate for a +1 gnoll bane weapon, especially if he had forged it for the purpose of exacting revenge on the gnolls.

Well, the weapon design could make it bane, but nonmagical ways of bane typically include a fighting style, which is more like the ranger's favored enemy.

[MarkusWolfe]

Well, the weapon design could make it bane, but nonmagical ways of bane typically include a fighting style, which is more like the ranger's favored enemy.

Nonsense, weapons are specially modified to fight specific creatures all throughout history. For example, the boar spear and the bear spear. And the other half of it, of course, is that the weapon was forged in hatred or desire for revenge upon that specific creature type. It's just like how curses from Heroes of Horror work: if you get someone really, and I do mean REALLY, upset or angry and they shout some harmful wish of theirs upon you ("Jane Smith, you little strumpet! This is the last time you will cheat behind my back! May every man you chase after leave you as I do now!") and BAM! The curse comes alive (No men like Jane Smith anymore, and she dies alone and unmarried.)

[Gemini Lupus]

To the OP, these threads may help you out:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10517

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64755

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133119

[JonestheSpy]

But what I want is to have better weapons without any magic involved.

Well, you're definitely in the realm of houserules then, not that there's anything wrong with that.

When I run campaigns, there's no magic weapons with less than a +3 bonus, because I think magic should be impressive. But I do have weapons with interesting materials that have already been mentioned, as well as 'extra-masterwork' stuff like in te links above. 'Cause really, when you really look at things like the metalforging techniques o the master Japanese swordmakers, and then extrapolate that kind of skill to dwarves and such, a simple +1 to hit seems really really insufficient.

So the best mundane weapons have pluses, but they're not magic - won't go through DR and such.

[Feytalist]

There are some nice alternative weapon materials out there. Most, I think, is in Magic of Faerun. Stuff like glasssteel, darksteel, fever iron, etc. Some (like darksteel for instance) give an extra point of elemental damage, or protects against that element, if crafted into armour.

You could also rule "enhancements" like everbright or bluesteel as nonmagic.

[Leon]

Iron Kingdoms has a small selection

Cleft - Increase Threat range by one
Barbed - extra pt of damage that doesn't stack with Enhancement bonus damage
Hooked - Makes the weapon capable of trip attacks
Spring Loaded Blades and Injector mechanisms

[Thurbane]

Here's a list of some (all?) special materials: http://www.devinlc.com/specialmaterials.htm

[Zaq]

There's always Weapons of Legacy. I'm on record as being very much not fond of the system, but it definitely exists, and it's quite a different paradigm from the old-fashioned "+n [adjective] [adjective] handaxe." Explicitly magical, but a very different form of magic.

[Greenish]

Here's a list of some (all?) special materials: http://www.devinlc.com/specialmaterials.htmLacks Eberron's materials: bronzewood, byeshk, densewood, flametouched iron, livewood, Riedran crysteel, targath and sentira.

Out of those, actually useful for weapons are only flametouched iron (the weapon counts as good-aligned) and crysteel (if the wielder has power points, +1 enhancement bonus to damage). Byeshk and targath pierce the DR of some Eberron-based critters.

[manyslayer]

Here's a list of some (all?) special materials: http://www.devinlc.com/specialmaterials.htm

Cool list, though I don't see Deep Crystal on there (from XPH), for one.

[Doc Roc]

Whugh, just use the phb system and call them (Ex) effects, if you are accepting homebrew. Halve all the costs involved and you might get something that will pretend to be playable. Alternatively, as suggested, Black Company has a great system for it, though this once I can not vouch for balancE

[Curious]

You could have a series of upgrades that you could work into weapons, such as;
Basket Hilt- This weapon has a broad guard that protects the hand from glancing blows. +2 bonus to protect against diarm maneuvers.

Mithral weapons might give another bonus to hit due to their lightness, while adamantine could give a bonus to damage. Just an idea.

[Alanrex]

In my homebrew low - magic campaign I have found that this idea works fairly well. it makes a chart of "materwork levels." these levels depend on the amount of ranks the creator/smith has in the appropriate craft skill. for instance, instead of making masterwork weapons a straight DC 20 craft skill, it also goes by the actual number of ranks.

Masterwork Level 1 - DC 20 and 5 ranks in craft - yields +1 enhance to attack like normal

level 2 - DC 25 / 8 ranks would then give an additional +1 to damage.

you can alter this however you would like. the abilities that i find mundane enough to be added to this list are: wounding (serrated), keen (sharpened), speed (light), and then you can also add hardness and hitpoints to your gear by "folding" the metal several times over (think to the Highlander movie)

You can do the same thing for armor: the abilities that i add to armor are different percentages of fortification (at an added check penalty) by adding plates/studs/reinforcing to the armor. you can also add, hp/hardness, alter the max dex (not too much), lessen the check penalties, and even add DR. for example. chainmail would be vulnerable to piercing damage so add some DR/piercing.

I hope this helps your creative juices going.

edit: you may even want to make a special feat necessarry to take to make better than normal masterwork weapons/armor

[Cicciograna]

Some time ago I wrote this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132703): maybe it can help you.

[McSmack]

Back in the day when I was still doing the homebrew thing I had a fairly extensive crafting system developed where various reagents could be used to get magic-esque properties out of weapons during crafting.

Things like adding the blood a certain creature to the quenching mixture would give a lesser bane property to the weapon (+1 hit and 1d4 damage).

Heating the metal with a fire elemental instead of a normal forge fire allowed the weapon to absorb heat later on, so a player could heat the blade in a campfire for a few hours and then have +1d4 fire damage for the next 24 hrs.

Using a phenoix feather to carve the runes in a healing wand increased the healing done by 2 for spells cast from it.

Also had a nice tiered masterwork system with different prices/qualities (players could get just +hit or +damage, keen, improved critical multipliers, etc).