Black Blade with a Twist

[Gorfnod]

I have a player who will soon be starting a Bladebound, Kensai Magus and for his "Black Blade" will be using a whip.

Unbeknowst to the player his whip is in fact a Rod of Wonder that was transformed into an intelligent whip.
(One of the player's previous characters was an avid Rod Wonder user and the new character will be inheriting the "whip". This will be discussed with the player before anything is put in place but I'm positive he will love it.)


I have tables created from my previous game of level appropriate effects for a Rod of Wonder all the way from level 3 - level 20 so I'm not worried about him having standard Rod of Wonder abilities at level 3 but my question to the Playground is this.


What would you use for the Whip's Rod Power activiation?

I have contemplated allowing it to simply act as a normal Rod with a whip coming out but that seems a little "normal". If I went with this I was thinking of adding a Magus Arcana that allows for Rod Activation as part of spell combat.
I also thought that maybe instead of doubling damage on a crit, it instead activated a random power.
I guess it could also replace an existing ability of the Bladebound archetype or the Black Blade itself.

Any additional thoughts or is this just too crazy?

[Fouredged Sword]

You go for it. Triggering on a crit sounds fun. Nice and random in the middle of combat.

You should also give him a bag of holding that has a 4/20 chance of acting like a grey bag of tricks and a 1/20 chance of acting like a rust colored bag of tricks but will only activate up to 10 times a week.

You reach for your trusty rope and pull out... A black bear.

Best applied to a character with no ranks in handle animal. The animal is friendly, but fairly useless.

[Kurald Galain]

Whips don't crit very often, though. I'd go for something like any natural 20 triggers the RoW on the enemy you're attacking, and any natural 1 triggers it on yourself. Or maybe that's too much :smallbiggrin:

[Warchon]

Firing off on a crit or fail sounds like a lot of fun.
If you want it to go off a little more often, you might give it a command word operation too, potentially having it go off when the wielder isn't even in combat.
The command word could change, behind the scenes, if it is used more than X times in a day, however, minimizing the chance of your player being able to make actual, reliable use out of it by figuring out the trigger(s).
I realize this relies pretty heavily on Rule 0, setting off a command word without an action, but...

[Gorfnod]

Thanks for the replies guys. I didn't even think about using it for "Rolling 1s" but this is a critical failure system that I think might work out ok.

I definitely will be going for target effected on crit, player effected on critical fail. I'm going to tweek the RoW tables a little to account for this but otherwise think that this answers the mail.