Floating Magic Item?

[Cowardly Griffo]

Hello, Playgrounders!

This may be an embarrassingly simple question, but for the life of me I'm not having any luck finding an answer. I'm cooking up an Item of Legacy (and possibly Item Familiar), a snarky tome of truename magic which totally is not just Grimoire Weiss from Nier with the serial numbers filed off, I don't know why you would even think that.

Ahem.

Anyway, I would like to have this intelligent tome follow me around via basic levitation instead of me having to carry it, but I'm having the darnedest time figuring out how to do that. Neither Legacy powers nor Intelligent Item powers grant the item any independent movement capabilities. I know that Pathfinder intelligent items can get a fly speed as a lesser power, but the game I'm cooking it up for is 3.5 only, so let's try and stick to that.

I know that homebrewing such a thing would be pretty easy–pricing it as a continuous Floating Disc effect would be the simplest thing, even if it's not exactly what I'm looking for–but I'm wondering if there are any preexisting examples of this kind of effect. I'm aware of psicrystals and ioun stones, but those don't seem quite right.

I would think that a floating spellbook (or lantern, or other such utility item) would be a cool and iconic enough thing to exist somewhere, no? Anyway, thanks in advance. :smallcool:

Edit: And a permanent animate object effect might work. I'm not sure whether it would then qualify as a creature and consequently be ineligible to be a magic item, or going the other direction I'm not sure a magic item, particularly an intelligent one, could be animated by that spell. Either way, at that point the floatiness becomes simply dispellable and I'm not really a fan of that.

[With a box]

floating ioun stone?
let's tie a bag of holding at dull gray ioun stone

[Segev]

Price it as a dull grey ioun stone at its base, then refluff it to be book-shaped. Pay 15 gp to make it a spellbook, too, if you must. Add intelligence and the other specialty item mechanics to taste.

[Bronk]

There is a magic item called a 'floating book' from Dragon 341. For 500g, the book knows its place in a library or on a book shelf, comes when called, and puts itself back after. You could say that an intelligent book could know that its place is with the character and float around that way.

[Larkas]

Eh, animated (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/magicArmor.htm#animated) is a magic item property. Don't know if that's any use for you, though.

[Gildedragon]

In complete mage (or arcane, AFB) in the section of pricing special spellbooks there is talk of floating books: 50 or 500 gp I think. Use that and add as the omen that it follows whoever manages to lay claim to it. Alternatively: there is the +1 weapon special property: flying which lets it move at will.


Use an aureon Spellshard as the base item and expand its capacity... Or something like the scrolls of UP'

[Cowardly Griffo]

The floating book is pretty awesome, actually! That's pretty much exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about, and is very wizardy.

That said, animated might be just about perfect, weirdly enough. I could see pricing the base item as a magic shield and justifying it as the book having an extraordinarily hard cover. Makes the book itself a little tougher too, which doesn't hurt. :smallsmile:

Might toss in the cost of the floating book just to make it come when called, and/or the cost of a blessed book. I'm playing a truenamer, so I don't actually need it to be a spellbook, but I interpret "free scribing" as "it brings its own ink" and/or "it can take dictation." Which is pretty cool.

Thanks for the help, all! Good stuff, all around.