Items of Creation

It's said that half of an adventure's successes are determined beforehand in town. Actually, nobody's ever said that, but I figured it would lend some credence to my words if I make it sound like an established idea. Really though, asides from preparing spells (which only some of us get to do,) before every adventure it's wise to properly equip oneself. How can you be exactly sure what you need, though? Rope and torches are safe bets, but will you need a mirror? What about a shovel, or a crowbar, or chalk? How much easier would things be if you had antitoxin or holy water? Will there be a water hazard? A cliff wall to be scaled? A chasm too wide to cross...?

Forewarned is forearmed, but most of the time you'll ultimately be guessing at what obstacles you'll encounter, or simply settling for the most standard useful items and hoping ingenuity will take care of the rest. After all, it's not like you can afford to haul around every single mundane tool and semi-magic item in existence 'just in case.' Wouldn't it make things so much easier if you could, say, choose which items you brought after the fact? I'm not advocating for lying about what's written on your equipment list, but rather relying on a single item that can replace a whole suite of mundane tools on a whim!

Trickery Devotion

It's a rewarding feeling to make the most of low-level spells. Knowing you're working within a restricted but open-ended set of guidelines makes for the most delightful creativity, and creativity is often what helps you achieve greater power than the game designers ever counted on. A chief example is unseen servant, mentioned in a previous article as an excellent way for a low-level spellcaster to expand on his or her combat actions. Of course, non-spellcasters should be allowed to get in on that fun, too.

Feats, one of those things that every character gets, aren't quite the same. Even if you carefully sidestep the lousy "+1 to something" ones, they're almost always set in what they can or can't do. Power Attack is a great feat, but it's not like there's a wide variety of things you can do with it. Surely you can get a versatile and open-ended feat you could use in a different manner every day? For just any character to pull that off, well, it will take some real... trickery, won't it?

Iron Heart Surge

Tired of needing to be a spellcaster to perform supernatural feats? Man-with-stick has long been able to perform truly ludicrous damage outputs, but asides from just hitting things with a stick, he has no versatility or special defenses to speak of. Surely being able to remove negative levels, blindness and antimagic fields is purely within the realm of the spell-slinger, right? Well, have we got news for you.

Aptitude Weapon

For the sword-swinging adventurers of the world, you don't have to worry about spell selections. Your big choices in leveling are going to be feats, those precious resources that all-too-often give less than they ought to. Feats that add a bonus to something you can already do - what one might call "number feats," since they only make your numbers go up - are rarely worth it. While it's nice to be able to do something better, it's more important to be able to do something at all. The other option is "ability feats": those that give you more options in what you can do.

Asides from the more general combat maneuvers (tripping, disarming, sundering etc.) most ability feats are going to be hindered by specificity: if you want the option to do something cool with your weapon, chances are it's going to have to be a specific kind of weapon. Want Boomerang Daze? Well, you'd best be using a crapsack boomerang or it's not happening. Think of it as the divine/arcane split, except much more unfair and crippling. We're not here to complain, though, we're here to break the system open a little and make it work for us. This game is about open-ended character creation, and one should be able to fit together options however they please. So wouldn't it be nice to make use of all those neat weapon-specific feats on whatever you like?

Bloodstorm Blade

For those of you whom distrust the Tome of Battle, turn back now, for there is nothing here to assuage your skepticism.

The book was written to give more options to the sword-swinging mundanes of the D&D world, and with them a bit of a power boost. Some of the abilities on offer tread dangerously over the line between "powerful martial techniques" and "reality-bending nonsense that even magic would have trouble pulling off." While a lot of the most abusive combos in the system aren't exactly obvious and require a lot of book-diving to pull off, sometimes you get a real doozy that was somehow designed that way. Enter the bloodstorm blade, a prestige class based around throwing weapons. Not throwing "throwing weapons," mind you, but throwing melee weapons. I won't bore you with all the details, but if you read the following ability and don't immediately cackle at the possibilities, you ought to re-read it until you do.

Unseen Servant

D&D is a fantasy game, and like in any fantasy game, it's best to take advantage of whatever niceties you might not have access to in real life. Spellcasting, a stronghold, a girlfriend (come on, you're not fooling anyone)... oh, and of course, boot-licking toadies. Problem is, hirelings aren't reliable for much more than taking up space, and golems will break the bank before they can break anyone's face. So how's a player to make do? Thankfully, there's an effective and low-level way to score yourself a helper that's so loyal and thoughtful that it doesn't even give you an ugly mug to have to wince at whilst giving orders. That's right, we're discussing the spell unseen servant, for all those of you who wanted to experience the thrill of friendly poltergeists for hours every day.

Fabricate

On the previous episode, we talked about using a spell to create most any material you wanted. Conjuring up hundreds of pounds of raw materials at a time can be plenty useful, but sometimes you want something a little more refined and purposed. Say, if you want a snazzy-looking carriage, a mid-level caster shouldn't deign to call up a bunch of darkwood and then laboriously craft the whole thing with his bare hands. As it happens, there is a spell that is the natural next step from minor creation, one that lets you create any sort of fashioned object so long as you have the raw materials on hand. The spell I'm discussing is fabricate, the haymaker in the one-two punch that is creating abstract wood carvings during your downtime... or useful items, if that's your thing.