MiuKujo
2015-04-10, 02:03 AM
Alright, so as a DM I like to practice by building characters, I find it entertaining and lets me look at a variety of different design ideas and such, some of which I pit against my party. Recently I found inspiration for a weapon in a show I was watching that gave me an amazing idea for a weapon for a intelligent swordsman build. Now, we all know the standard swordsman practice. Get a blade, enchant it, and beat on things until they stop breathing. What if instead of one powerful blade and maybe a backup or two, the swordsman carried one sword with a hundred interchangeable blades? The logic being, +1 Flaming Longsword (~8,000 GP), +1 Cold Longsword (~8,000 GP) Total: ~16,000 GP. +1 Flaming Cold Longsword ~18,000GP. Two specialized swords are better than one general sword. Figured I'd ask people who know things how this sounds/pricing for a PC to make.
The idea goes like this;
You make a EXTREMELY customized hilt. Put a wand chamber in the grip for ready spell access (fireball wand might be weak, but it outreaches/out powers any mid-class bow), and it has a mechanism at the front to grab a blank blade. The mechanism would have to be made by some Gnome tinkerer or other out of something pricy like mythril or adamintine, and various other expensive bits for durability/fluff reasons. I figure the Custom Masterwork hilt will be ~500GP(Maybe even 1000GP?), +100GP for Wand Chamber.
Then, you have the sheath. Now, the Quiver of Elona aka Efficient Quiver (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Efficient_Quiver) says it can hold up to 60 arrows in a pocket of nondimensional space. Unless you're carrying them point up this tells me you can make nondimensional space that doesn't have the risk of getting destroyed when cut or punctured. Create this space inside of a specially designed sheath. Tack on some minor intelligence and a permanent limited mage-hand enchantment for it to operate inside the void similar to the first-order-retrieval of a handy haversack and you now have a sheath that can understand what blade you want and swap out the blades itself (say, as or during a move action). Now, set the dimensions to be able to hold 100 blank blades. Then give it an enchantment for Blade Barrier 1/day because it goes with the theme of "ALL THE SWORDS". As a DM I would probably price this around 23-25,000GP (18,000 just for Blade Barrier (Lv 15) 1/day) because it is so specialized that it wouldn't really have any other purpose than to hold these custom blades.
Now, for the custom blades themselves. the meat of this item. Most of the blade is a standard masterwork blade, except the tang. It is a special hook/shape to fit into the mechanism of the hilt and lock securely into place until the release lever is pulled. The blades can be commissioned one-by-one or ordered all at once by some very enterprising adventurer. (Hell, take some ranks in Craft(Weapons) and make your own with some mad stat-boosting item.) Then the hard part is to get them enchanted at 8,000GP a pop for a total of about, 300GP Masterwork, ~50GP Materials, other costs, ~8,400GP each? Not hard to come by in the later campaign if you're good. Now you can create specialized weapons and don't need to worry about walking around with six swords on your back. +1 Alchemical Silver blade with Bane of Lycanthrope anyone? Never comes in handy, except for that one time you needed it and didn't have it. Now your arm is molar deep in this thing because your general purpose sword isn't good enough.
So, any thoughts on the idea of the weapon? Yes, it's supposed to be mostly for RP fluff, nobody really needs that many different swords. But, 'twould be nice. Think about it; track a young dragon down to it's lair. Bust out your specially designed dragon killer blade, go to town on it's ass. Take loot, buy more blades.
OR!
Have one basic sword. It does some pretty cool stuff. Maybe has a flaming burst mod. 'S cool. Explosions and such. But, you know, it basically ends up pretty similar to most other builds swords because of the price increase as you go up. So you find that new bane enchant hard to justify on your super expensive +4 Greatsword of killing-things. Because it's only useful against ONE thing. Same with ones to smite evil and such. So hard to justify them unless you know for sure everything you'll be swinging at is an evil-aligned lycanthrope.
The idea goes like this;
You make a EXTREMELY customized hilt. Put a wand chamber in the grip for ready spell access (fireball wand might be weak, but it outreaches/out powers any mid-class bow), and it has a mechanism at the front to grab a blank blade. The mechanism would have to be made by some Gnome tinkerer or other out of something pricy like mythril or adamintine, and various other expensive bits for durability/fluff reasons. I figure the Custom Masterwork hilt will be ~500GP(Maybe even 1000GP?), +100GP for Wand Chamber.
Then, you have the sheath. Now, the Quiver of Elona aka Efficient Quiver (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Efficient_Quiver) says it can hold up to 60 arrows in a pocket of nondimensional space. Unless you're carrying them point up this tells me you can make nondimensional space that doesn't have the risk of getting destroyed when cut or punctured. Create this space inside of a specially designed sheath. Tack on some minor intelligence and a permanent limited mage-hand enchantment for it to operate inside the void similar to the first-order-retrieval of a handy haversack and you now have a sheath that can understand what blade you want and swap out the blades itself (say, as or during a move action). Now, set the dimensions to be able to hold 100 blank blades. Then give it an enchantment for Blade Barrier 1/day because it goes with the theme of "ALL THE SWORDS". As a DM I would probably price this around 23-25,000GP (18,000 just for Blade Barrier (Lv 15) 1/day) because it is so specialized that it wouldn't really have any other purpose than to hold these custom blades.
Now, for the custom blades themselves. the meat of this item. Most of the blade is a standard masterwork blade, except the tang. It is a special hook/shape to fit into the mechanism of the hilt and lock securely into place until the release lever is pulled. The blades can be commissioned one-by-one or ordered all at once by some very enterprising adventurer. (Hell, take some ranks in Craft(Weapons) and make your own with some mad stat-boosting item.) Then the hard part is to get them enchanted at 8,000GP a pop for a total of about, 300GP Masterwork, ~50GP Materials, other costs, ~8,400GP each? Not hard to come by in the later campaign if you're good. Now you can create specialized weapons and don't need to worry about walking around with six swords on your back. +1 Alchemical Silver blade with Bane of Lycanthrope anyone? Never comes in handy, except for that one time you needed it and didn't have it. Now your arm is molar deep in this thing because your general purpose sword isn't good enough.
So, any thoughts on the idea of the weapon? Yes, it's supposed to be mostly for RP fluff, nobody really needs that many different swords. But, 'twould be nice. Think about it; track a young dragon down to it's lair. Bust out your specially designed dragon killer blade, go to town on it's ass. Take loot, buy more blades.
OR!
Have one basic sword. It does some pretty cool stuff. Maybe has a flaming burst mod. 'S cool. Explosions and such. But, you know, it basically ends up pretty similar to most other builds swords because of the price increase as you go up. So you find that new bane enchant hard to justify on your super expensive +4 Greatsword of killing-things. Because it's only useful against ONE thing. Same with ones to smite evil and such. So hard to justify them unless you know for sure everything you'll be swinging at is an evil-aligned lycanthrope.