How hard should it be to identify an Artifact?

[ksbsnowowl]

My PC's have, through "happenstance," obtained an artifact. They know that it is part of a collection, as they witnessed an evil cleric obtaining and absconding away with another that looks much like it, via a teleportation effect.

If you are a player in a D&D game centered in the City of Purity, stop reading further, please...

The artifacts have to do with an ancient and mostly forgotten god, who has been locked away since before the written histories of many interplanar beings, let alone man, dwarves, and elves.

What the PC's know:

The Artifact is a fist-sized stone, much like a chunk of obsidian.
They found it locked behind a cylindrical Wall of Force, inside a hidden vault underground.
The door to the vault had the symbols of every deity they know of, plus others they did not know of, etched on the door.

They found a second one locked in the top level of an abandoned wizard's tower (a wizard obsessed with Wall of Force and variations thereof), and another party of (evil) adventurers beat them to it. They saw one individual deactivate the cylindrical Wall of Force around the gem, and an evil cleric then snatched up the gem, and used Word of Recall to escape with it.
In studying the wizard's journals left behind in his library, they learned that he considered the Artifact dangerous, and he considered his new variation of the Wall of Force spell "useful for locking that dangerous artifact away from any that might desire it."
They recently discussed the item with someone who could detect evil, and said individual informed them it has an overwhelming aura of evil.

So far, the PC's have been cautious enough to not touch the Artifact (having only picked it up with a wooden box, and more recently keeping that box in a bag of holding), but the scenario writer didn't expect them to have teleportation effects at the level when they first encountered the vault, (a Shadow Hand maneuver got one of the PC's into the cylindrical Wall of Force, at a level when PC's typically don't have such abilities yet). Them obtaining it is perfectly fine; it has added some other interesting aspects to the campaign so far.

What the PC's don't know:

The locked-away deity in question is Tharizdun, and the artifact they have is one of the 333 Gems of Tharizdun, as per the Essence of Evil adventure from Dungeon Magazine back in December 2007, and the Elder Evils expansion, Elder Evils: Shothragot from Dragon #362.

As per page 7 of MM4, the Elemental Princes (Imix, Ogremoch, Olhydra, and Yan-C-Bin) are "too young to remember that ancient war" that locked Tharizdun away... thus my previous comment about him being a forgotten god that men would have very little knowledge of.




So, they have this rock, that they assume is an artifact (it is), based upon a journal entry from a long-dead wizard. They are trying to research it via a city library, and have decided to hire a scholarly sage to research it for them while they head off adventuring. How difficult should it be to figure out what this item is?

Going off of the Library of the Lady information in the Sigil section of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, trying to learn "Divine/demonic secret" level info is the hardest DC it has listed, and it is merely listed as a DC of "31+." So, it should be at least a DC of 31, likely a DC of 35 or more. They also aren't allowing anyone to "experiment" with it. No one has touched it, and thus no one is learning what its powers are. They just know it is evil, and the schools of magic that its magic auras produce. In my mind, that should make deciphering what it is more difficult, wouldn't you?

I'm thinking something along the lines of DC 40 Knowledge (Arcana), or a DC 35 Knowledge (Religion) check to identify what it is.

Thoughts?

[Gildedragon]

Depends. Lesser or Greater artifact?
Overall I feel artifacts ought be easy to recognize.
Like say... most people in the west have an idea of what The Ark of The Covenant, or The Holy Grail look/ought look... unless part of its schtick is that it is hard to identify.

If anything a Detect X Spell ought dazzle whoever examines it.

Re. the gems of tharzidun
DC 40+ for knowing their true identity. They've managed to get other myths associated with them. Like they might believe it is a Luckstone (there's some similar artifact in Ravenloft)
Or a gem of elemental control.

[ksbsnowowl]

If anything a Detect X Spell ought dazzle whoever examines it.A Detect Evil has already done this. (Due to mid-session brain fart, it wasn't overwhelming to a Detect Magic; to maintain in-campaign consistency it won't reach an Overwhelming magic aura until they have two or three of them together).


Depends. Lesser or Greater artifact?
Overall I feel artifacts ought be easy to recognize.
Like say... most people in the west have an idea of what The Ark of The Covenant, or The Holy Grail look/ought look... unless part of its schtick is that it is hard to identify. One added aspect that I didn't state in the first post is that this campaign is set in, for lack of a better term, a post-apocalypse of magic. Most of the gods are dead, Magic is tainted, casters go insane and their bodies rot. When they die, their accumulated taint in released, staining the spot where they died (5-foot radius per HD) into a Tainted Location, and they release a Taint Elemental (ala Heroes of Horror) with HD equal to the dead caster's HD. Thus Magic is taboo, and has been for a few centuries, though Psionics, Incarnum, etc have taken precedence in the interim.

Also, the PC's have not yet realized that they are in the World of Greyhawk, because they are not in the Flanaess. I've sprinkled a few clues (finding books in that wizard tower that are written in Ancient Suloise and Old Oeridian, things like that), but none of the players have picked up on it yet.

So, yeah, people today, in 2017, thanks to Indiana Jones, know what the Ark of the Covenant is supposed to look like. But this situation is somewhat like asking a scholar in England in 815 AD to look at an antiquity brought over from Persia, that's already 2,000 years old, and expecting him to tell you it's an artifact of Zoroastrianism, and what it was used for. Not impossible, but not likely, in my opinion. Even in "normal" Greyhawk (not just my post-apoc magic version), the entry for the Gems of Tharizdun says "Most believe these gems to be simple baubles or props used by mad clerics in their rituals, but in truth, these items have power."



Re. the gems of tharzidun
DC 40+ for knowing their true identity. They've managed to get other myths associated with them. Like they might believe it is a Luckstone (there's some similar artifact in Ravenloft)
Or a gem of elemental control.

Having some false answers is a great idea. I like that.

[Zanos]

By RAW, the dc to identify an aura when you use detect magic on it is 15+1/2 CL. As per the Magic Item Compendium, if you beat that check by 10, you can determine the items properties. Since most artifacts have a CL of 20, DC 35 Spellcraft on a detect magic is what you need to identify such an artifact's properties.

I would also allow a check in a similar range for Arcana for the item's magical properties, History for the events it was associated with, like the war, or Religion for its planar significance. I think your 35-40 DC is about right. You might throw a -2 circumstance check on the penalty for not touching the damn thing, but a library would probably also give a bonus for having access to reference material.

Your party is fairly smart for not touching or allowing anyone to touch that thing, by the way.

[ksbsnowowl]

By RAW, the dc to identify an aura when you use detect magic on it is 15+1/2 CL. As per the Magic Item Compendium, if you beat that check by 10, you can determine the items properties. Since most artifacts have a CL of 20, DC 35 Spellcraft on a detect magic is what you need to identify such an artifact's properties.Cool, thanks for pointing this out. I'll go read up on this in the MIC. DC 35 would generally be too hard for my PC's currently (level 9), but the scholar could probably pull it off (She has a +25 Kn Arcana mod, so as a Psion with a high Intelligence, she's probably got ranks in the range of 18 or so, making her around 15th level, and I treat Spellcraft and Psicraft as the same skill.)


I would also allow a check in a similar range for Arcana for the item's magical properties, History for the events it was associated with, like the war, or Religion for its planar significance. I think your 35-40 DC is about right. You might throw a -2 circumstance check on the penalty for not touching the damn thing, but a library would probably also give a bonus for having access to reference material.

Your party is fairly smart for not touching or allowing anyone to touch that thing, by the way.
Excellent suggestions. And you have no idea how true your last statement is... :smallamused:

Edit: One point I failed to bring up...


... unless part of its schtick is that it is hard to identify.
FYI - MAJOR spoilers ahead for Greyhawk and Temple of Elemental Evil stuff.

The thing is, with Tharizdun, most of the time (~95%?) his own worshippers don't even realize they are worshipping him. Aside from the die-hard upper tier of priests, everyone in Tharizdun's cults thinks they are actually in a cult dedicated to something/someone else. Tharizdun has tricked cults of Zuggtmoy and Iuz into building the temple that became the Temple of Elemental Evil, he has tricked Drow into worshipping him under the guise of something else, and he has tricked the Princes of Elemental Evil, and their cults, into thinking he is their progenitor, the Elder Elemental Eye, who was imprisoned long ago, and has them working furiously to free him, with them thinking they are freeing a being that stands for something other than what Tharizdun himself stands for.

So, getting to the truth about the Gems should be almost impossible at this point. Even true answers should be ... wrong.
"It is an artifact of the Elder Elemental Eye. Given it's obsidian-like nature, I would assume it is related specifically to Ogremoch."
"It is related to activating Earth Nodes, with the eventual goal of summoning Ogremoch and freeing the Elder Elemental Eye."