[3.5] Rules for crafting artifacts/warforged

[Geopol4r]

I have a nearby dungeon that the players are going to be chewing through for a few sessions. I have decided that there will be many books, and among them will be instructions for building warforged or artifacts. How should I rule this? How should it work?

[StSword]

Well I'd make it an application of the Craft Construct feat, rather than reinventing the wheel, but maybe that's just me.

[Powerdork]

If I were to give that to my players, I'd suggest that building a creation forge be a narrative justification for the Leadership feat, or any other method of acquiring a character as a companion. Probably with a timeskip of about six to eight months.

But if it were in Eberron, I'd be firm about how big a deal this is before mentioning any application at all. All manner of civil rights issues still exist, not to mention the illegality of House Cannith creating more warforged, and the life of a warforged is not one we traditionally think of as good.

In another setting, I'd need to know if you've established lore for how warforged have been used to be able to tell you anything else.


As for artifacts: There's got to be a selection of artifacts inspiring you to include them in your game. Which are those? Being specific rather than open-ended matters somewhat when you're dealing with something as impactful as artifacts.
What level are the PCs?

[Geopol4r]

Level, about 12
setting: homebrew
backstory: nation to the north preparing army, fouled by meteor strike, random warforged wandering around now looking for purpose
edition:3.5

[rel]

I've always liked the idea that artifacts can be created via an epic quest across the planes to find the enlightenment necessary to realise the design, the unique raw materials required and the special locations to refine them into a final form.

How you complete each quest in the chain influences the artifacts flavor; How it fulfills the designed function, what quirks it has and the fatal flaw that will eventually undo it.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

For artifacts, there's really no way to have a single construction method for "artifacts" as a category because the whole point of them is that every single one is unique in terms of construction, destruction, and capabilities. However, you could have the instructions describe what kind of "special sauce" they can use to artifact-ify the normal item construction process, by reverse-engineering the costs of the desired artifact as if it were a normal magic item and then adding in the special sauce.

If someone wants to make a hammer of thunderbolts, they need the normal feats, spells, gold, and XP they'd need to make a Gargantuan +3 giant-bane stunning returning warhammer plus an item of item alteration (for the gauntlet/belt stacking) plus an item that grants Devastating Critical (for the kill-giants-on-crit effect); if someone wants to make a staff of the magi, they need the normal requirements they'd need to make a staff of power according to the normal staff-construction rules plus the retributive strike portion of a staff of power's cost; and so on, then they add on whatever process or materials you decide makes that particular artifact special--a soul, certain monster parts, a solar eclipse, whatever.

For warforged, the cost for turning a 1-HD humanoid into a warforged via the Ritual of Unlearning in Savage Species is 7,000 gp, so that plus the base cost of constructing the body (whatever you feel is reasonable, from "free" if they have wall of X+fabricate to "the cost of hiring a master craftsman" or somewhere in between) would be a good starting point.

[Telonius]

The first thing to realize is that if you put this tool in your players' hands, they are going to want to use it. If tell the players that they find a book titled, "How to summon Asmodeus and bind him to your will," there will always be that one player who reads the thing and tries it, no matter how terrible of an idea it sounds. Creating an Artifact is way too tempting of a plot hook for most parties to ignore.

How it should work: what you've done is just introduced a MacGuffin into the campaign. Multi-session epic quest to find and put together the thing. This gives some serious rails to the campaign; the players will go wherever the instructions tell them to go, because having the Artifact of Doom is now a main campaign goal, if not *the* campaign goal.