Annals of the Drunken Wizard: +0 Weapon Modifiers (PFRPG) PDF

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Drunk one night in his study, master wizard Archibald, much like Cher in the way he has only one name thanks to his notoriety, mused about his compatriots, those who slice and stab with their sharp bits of metal and wallow in tier envy whenever they gaze upon himself being totally awesome and stuff. The next morning, he woke up with a terrible hangover, Constitution having never been a strong point. To his surprise, his body was covered in sheaves of paper musing about how he could help his allies stay alive by harnessing one of the few things they actually do do correctly: hit things with sharp bits of metal. In typical Archibald form, his musings were backed up by highly technical documents detailing exactly how to make those musings a reality. With a shrug, Archibald collected his drunken ravings. This bears some investigation, he thought, right after I prepare and cast that hangover spell...

Let's consider the way the wealth by level curve works. Players pick up masterwork weapons early on and have fun with them. Some invest in the +1 weapon, whilst others begin to pick up all sorts of fun toys. Much later, those who got toys finally get a +2 weapon, while the fellow who focuses on weapons may have a +3 weapon and nothing else. Frankly, weapons simply don't do interesting things in the early game, and the more interesting something is, the more fun the player has. The person focusing on the weapon is essentially playing for the future the entire time. Let's bring that individual to the NOW, shall we?

The simple solution to this is to have the ability to add a weak free ability to any weapon that has a +1 enhancement bonus or greater. It allows players to have more options, while also allowing the GM to slap fun and interesting powers onto randomly generated +1 weapons (and we know every campaign has far too many of those). That being said, beware, for each ability also carries a hefty penalty with it. Perhaps you don't get critical damage. Perhaps your enhancement bonus to damage is a bonus to something else instead. Maybe you need to spend multiple full round actions charging some moderately powerful effect. ...Maybe the weapon just slowly tears itself apart.

This product contains 20 +0 weapon modifiers and special abilities as well as rules on how to integrate them into your game.

  • Acidic: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, this weapon launches gouts of alchemical acid.
  • Dazing: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, this weapon dazes foes of 4 HD and under.
  • Debilitating: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, this weapon imposes a saving throw penalty to wielder and victim.
  • Dense: +1 sunder, -2 CMD
  • Flaring: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, this weapon dazzles the victim.
  • Hooked: +1 disarm, -2 CMD
  • Jittery: The weapon's enhancement bonus to damage is now to initiative
  • Least Spell Storing: As spell storing, but only 1st level spells and under. Further, use of the spell storing ability causes the weapon to gain the broken condition.
  • Lesser Bladethirst: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, the wielder restores hit points equal to the weapon's enhancement bonus.
  • Lesser Erupting: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, the victim takes one point each of acid, cold, electric, and fire damage.
  • Lighthurling: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, the wielder can slowly focus on creating a number of lights that can be thrown at range.
  • Plated: +1 shield bonus to AC, -2 to hit
  • Raging: +1 morale bonus to damage, -1 to AC and Reflex
  • Resisting: Rather than dealing additional damage on a critical hit, the wielder gets a resistance bonus to saves on a critical hit.
  • Smoking: The wielder and everything he threatens takes a penalty to hit.
  • Sparking: This weapon slowly destroys itself, but deals additional fire damage to unarmored targets and can start fires.
  • Terrifying: This weapon deals additional negative energy damage, but punishes the wielder on a critical hit.
  • Vengeful: Immediately after being critically hit, you may declare a smite. If this smite hits, both you and the target take 2d6 points of damage.
  • Weighted: +1 to trip, -2 to CMD

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Double 5 star rating

5/5

This supplement clocks in at five pages, including three pages of content. After the cover and a brief introduction, we dive right into the crunch (no table of contents).
Presented are 20 magic weapon properties which provide both an advantage and disadvantage, and so have no net effect on the weapon’s cost. The product description already does a good job summarizing their effects, so I don’t have to. There is nothing else in this supplement: it is just 20 weapon properties.
There is almost no visual artwork in this product.
Short Term Use: At low levels, you can throw one or two of these abilities onto weapons the PCs find before they could normally afford magic weapons. At high levels, you can use these abilities to further diversify magic weapons in your campaign. Each weapon property is explained clearly enough that you can add them to other weapons with little or no prep-time.
The one minor complaint I have for short term use is that there is no chart for adding these to randomly generated weapons. However, as the supplement just consists of 20 weapon properties with the same price, you could just roll a d20 to pick one of them, no chart required. 5/5.

Long Term Use: This supplement is very useable for running a game straight from level one. Since you can combine several +0 properties, there is an enormous variety of affordable weapons for low level heroes.
After low levels, go back through your old d20 books and find your favorite magic weapon. Apply any of these properties. Bam, your favorite magic weapon now comes in 20 different varieties. But that’s not all! You can combine several +0 properties. Now, you can’t combine any +0 properties, since several of them (ten, to be precise) all trade away the ability to do extra damage on a critical, so you can take at most one of those ten. Still, you can otherwise stack +0 weapon properties freely, so your favorite magic weapon now comes in 11,264 different varieties. With this one supplement, all the weapons in your old magic item books are several orders of magnitude more valuable. 5/5.


Hit me baby, one more time

5/5

Annals of the Drunken Wizard - +0 Weapon Modifiers by Interjection Games is a short PDF of 5 pages, with 1 page being the front cover and one page for the OGL, leaving three pages of content.

First off I have to say, that I love the series name, Annals of the Drunken Wizard. It just provides a whole host of imagery that just tickles my funny bone, in much the same way that the Krazy Kragnar from Rogue Genius Games line does and is nicely contained on the product description page, I might add. Maybe the drunken wizard and Kragnar should get together… So what do we get within the three pages of content? Well we get 20 different abilities that can be added to weapons that are low cost options and add some new wrinkle to the weapon.

The author starts off with a nice little introduction about how these options could fit within an existing game and an easy way to make low level weapons outside of masterwork but less than the investment in more high powered magic weaponry, more accessible in the first few levels of a character. Since this all assumes that these are nice additions that can be added in at low level, it generally assumes that the spells cast to make these minor additions are also of a correspondingly low level. Most spells are either Cantrips or 1st level, but not all of them. One I even had to go look up because I wasn’t familiar with it as it was outside my normal spell list, Channel the Gift. The author suggests a price of 500 gp to add these options to a given weapon. Additionally, while the all provide some benefit to the user, some of the also come with a cost, so even though a higher level spell may be used, the benefit is reduced or offset by a cost.

For example, the hooked option, provides a +1 enhancement bonus to disarm a combat maneuvers, but because the weapon has hooks shooting from, it, it reduces the wielder’s CMD by 2 when using this weapon. Others have similar cost/benefit structures as well. Finally some of the choices like lesser bladethirst and lesser erupting replace the damage done on a critical hit with an alternative damage option like an additional point of one type of energy damage or dazzles the opponent for 1d4 rounds.

All in all I think this is a nice little enhancement that can be added to any campaign to give the players new and interesting options at lower levels rather than just your average +1 run of the mill longsword, without breaking anything within the campaign. And speaking of adding to a game, since there are 20 of them, a nice solid 1d20 to randomly generate one of these for found low level weapons sounds fun. Since I haven’t playtested these at all, and I find the options interesting, I am going to rate this a solid four and a half stars for use and suggest a round up to five.


An Endzeitgeist.com review

5/5

This pdf is 5 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 3 pages of content, so let's take a look!

I'm a fan of low-magic, gritty settings and my players tend to find magic items on a basis where the items actually matter - hence my personal love for Legendary Items (that level with characters) and alchemical items that offer quasi-magical benefits.

But standard-rules have a discrepancy there -between masterwork items and even +1 weapons, there's empty space, treasure-wise, and this pdf tries to remedy that.

The item-qualities cost 500 GP and a total of 20 are provided and range from weapons with retractable hooks to acidic weapons - that only deal regular damage upon critical hits, but splash the foe as a flask of acid would upon crits. There are some of these minor enchantments that trade in the bonus damage on critical hits for alternate detrimental effects, which personally, I like.

The Dense quality is also interesting - the quality offers -2 to CMD, but also +1 to sundering attempts, whereas the jittery quality provides its enhancement bonus not to damage, but to initiative, making this particular enchantment rather useful at higher levels. Another quality allows you to heal enhancement bonus Hp on a critical hit instead of bonus damage and then there is the least spellstoring weapon - which makes it possible for the weapon to discharge a spell of up to 1st level upon striking the target creature in exchange for the regular additional critical hit damage.

As a further balancing mechanism, the quality also halves the weapon HP and adds the broken condition upon releasing a spell thus. Really like this one! Another weapon is simply awesome - lighthurling. While requiring multiple rounds of concentration to properly use, the wielder can once per day throw force-damage dealing stars at adversaries.
"Vengeful" is also a great quality - within one round of being critically hit, 1/day, the wielder can declare an attack a smite that deals an additional 2d6 damage to the wielder as well as the target.

Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to Interjection Games' elegant 2-column b/w-standard ad the stock-art sigils complement the pdf nicely. The pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

I didn't expect to like this pdf - at all. All the more surprised was I upon reading it and finding the presentation completely professional, the mechanics interesting and the balancing sound. At low levels, this pdf provides a significant boost in variety, one that is not necessarily lost in high levels and the design decisions are rather cool and uncommon. Add to that the low price and I can gladly rate this 5 stars + seal of approval. Author Bradley Crouch has delivered a nice offering indeed.

Endzeitgeist out.


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Reviewed first on Endzeitgeist.com, then submitted to Nerdtrek and GMS magazine and posted here, on OBS and d20pfsrd.com's store. Great job! Cheers!

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