Hi All,
I have an artificer in my AoW campaign, and he's very excited about the retain essence ability. For those who aren't familiar with the class, the ability allows artificers to break down existing magic items to a craft reserve (a pool of XP) for creating new magic items.
All seemed well and good until the party defeated Telakin and were deciding what to do with the mind clone machine. The LE duskblade wanted to keep it and use it, but the artificer and others thought it would be better to destroy it by retaining its essence. After a few minutes of thought, I decided it was worth a 8000 gp magic item. What should I do with scenic magic items (that don't have a price) in the future?
Looking ahead, I'm thinking he's going to have a field day with the cursed magic items in Zyrxog's Museum. The unholy +2 dagger alone is worth 32,000 gp. That's a lot of XP for crafting, although he might need to save it until he's a little higher level (the craft reserve goes away each time you level). DMs, have you allowed players to sell those cursed items for their market value anyway? Is giving the artificer a huge pool of XP for crafting going to be a problem? A friend who also DMs has warned me that artificers can be very dangerous given enough time and money.
Sincerely,
Derek
An artificer is strong, for sure, but not nearly as strong as an intelligent, think outside the box, scheme and plot player. Cursed items, if the curses are known (remember, most curses don't show up on most magical radars) can be sold for their listed price; somebody somewhere has a use for just such an item. If I were a bad guy, I'd send a cursed unholy dagger as a gift to another bad guy whom I wanted to placate, but hopefully remove from the picture.
And yeah, artifcer is awesome with retain essence, but it still takes them time and money. How do you handle the materials cost of item creation? I found it helps to use this little house rule: when making an item, at least one "material" must be of at least 1/10th the item's full market value (this includes when an item is upgraded, use the full, not the difference). This could be a red dragon tooth worth at least 1800 for a +1 flaming burst longsword, or the choicest peice of shell from a monstrous crab worth 100gp for a +1 "wooden" shield. My party's sorceror is feeling the pain of finding something worth 11,000 as the frame for his lich phylactery!
This houserule sets a precedent for item crafting in relation to the GP limit of communities. Small communities have inexpensive "materials", while to make the real power items, you need larger communities to afford such things. This means you can also give out "material" loot. Be sure to adjust the normal loot accordingly, based on how much you think they'll make use of the "materials". If they don't use them often, minor adjustments, but if they go out of their way to use them and the items made from them, a more significant adjustment may be neccessary.
Such loot sells for half, but can be counted at it's full value for item crafting purposes. Just assign the material a "role": offensive, defensive, fire, ice, death, healing, etc. The tooth of a powerful monster could be offensive, scales defensive, troll blood could be healing, wight dust could be death, etc. Remember that only a 10th of the value must come from one item, and the remaining 90% can come from smaller peices.
I admit this is a moderately complex houserule, and one that isn't for every game. But I think that if item creation is going to be a big part of your game, this houserule helps answer a lot of questions when they come up, and helps generate even more adventures and ideas out of the item creating process.
First and foremost, retain essence requires a day per item. That's a 24 hour day and not an eight hour day. Also, the artificer must be able to craft same said item. So no draining the next artifact that the party comes across.
Two things come into play when you start enforcing these two rules:
1. No party wants to sit around and wait a day per item and no DM should, in most cases, let a party sit somewhere in the middle of an adventure. If there's no sense of urgency, make one.
2. The party loses the gold from that item.
This means that it will cost the party time and money. Both are limited early on and thereby should be considered valuable. If not, then reduce one or the other until they become valuable again.
Also, if you are really hesitant concerning retain essence, you can toss in this houserule. "An artificer's retain essence ability does not stack, i.e. when you drain an item of experience, you hold that experience until you use it. You cannot "stack" this experience with experience that you are holding from another item. You could argue that it's from the same source, i.e. your class ability, and thereby should not stack. Loose argument but it may work for you. Personally, I did this to keep my artificer from becoming a magic item vampire. The idea is similar to a mage "holding a spell" until he can cast it. The mage can't hold more than one spell at time.
Also, watch your downtime. You will find with an artificer with downtime = magic items and gold. A smart player will employ a caster to work together to make tons of gold. Now, there are loopholes with this process but it's not really worth your time arguing it. I have found that when I am trying to consider how much downtime to give a party with any type of crafter, I think in terms of what could this party make with infinite wealth but "this" much time. Now, your clever artificers will game this idea too. Not to worry, the worst that they can do is create multiple lesser magic items versus one major magic item in the time allowed. Just be sure that these magic items don't stack or can combine for a superior effect, even if the party spreads these items out amongst the party members.
You are doing the right thing though. When in doubt concerning crafting totals and the like, seek the boards here or at wizards. Just remember to ask the DMs and not the players. I have found that DMs want balance and players want the entire scale.
Bard and Atch, thanks for the comments and suggestions. I don't think I'll be house ruling the artificer's ability just yet, as we're still getting acquainted with it. What I may do is just make it clear that some in-place magical effects (like Zyrxog's scrying pool or his cloned stone brain) are too foreign for the artificer to pull essence from. I'll let him at the cursed items, since a clever party could indeed take advantage of those without an artificer.