Ridiculous may be a misnomer -- "broken" will be close, if not too much an understatement.
Background: I'm running a homebrew PF/3.x gestalt game, and my players have recently advanced to level 3. The characters are transients in a large city in the mountains, and have already started earning a positive reputation in the low-/middle-class district in which they've found housing. I have opened up the beginnings of four major story arcs, but given the PC's capabilities, they haven't been able to shake much loose yet in getting them advanced/resolved. In the interest of helping them gain enough power to really start moving things forward and to give them a crisis that will help "gel" the party (so far, they've just been associated collaborators in events, more by convenience than purpose), I want to give them the gift of plutonium.
There's no way my seed concept can be fully realized without an artifact-level item. I am aware of the problems such a thing may entail; please don't belabor yourselves doling out the historical cautions -- they are taken for granted. If you are aware of a pre-existing item that satisfies the following requirements, please point me in the proper direction.
- This item can function as either a heavy mace or a scythe.
- This item can animate dead (not necessarily as the spell) with no limit on number produced, with no material components required (apart from relatively intact corpses), and increases the maximum HD of undead its wielder can control by some arbitrary number.
- This item could function in a manner similar to the 3.5 "Weapons of Legacy", scaling its benefits as the wielder's character level increases.
- This item will grant negative levels to non-evil wielders (likely at a ratio of 2:1 on the good:neutral range).
- Use of this item will result in a scaling-DC alignment shift; it does not need to be intelligent (I am thinking of utilizing an "addictive" track to justify its ever-increasing use.), but it could be.
I think that's my baseline. Thanks in advance for your contributions.