Custom Magic Items: Culth’s Rage
Custom Magic Items #2
This is the 2nd in a series of posts revolving around the various magic items my group and I have managed to put together for play during the decade or so campaign we’ve been playing together. This item was created after the release of the 5e 2024 edition for a Monk character and is not intended to be balanced.
I encourage to you take a look at my personal rules around creating custom items for players, detailed in the first post in this series. As always, the item images have been badly composed by DALL-E2. No other use of Generative AI has been used in this post.
Culth’s Rage
The rationale behind this item is as complex as the player character it is intended for. The Monk player character Sen is a quiet, powerful character who struggles to reconcile their own quest for justice and a dark and terrible hunger for violence steaming from a traumatic early life. To further compound this brewing schism within the character, they contracted Lycanthropy early on in the campaign, forcing the player character to regularly confront their violent, bestial side.
Combat wise, Monks are very safe in combat due to their consistency. They can self heal, shrug off unwanted status effects, slow fall, have lots of movement options, attack without worrying about being disarmed and don’t rely on items for AC. I wanted to give the player character some options that would help push them out of their comfort zone. Now that the player characters are mid level, they all have a good pool of HP so that high risk, high reward combat gambits are more viable. Any opportunity to emphasize the darker vein of violence and bestial fury that lies under the calm controlled exterior of Sen is a joy.
Acquisition
This item cost a reasonably large GP and some specific crafting ingredients taken from the corpse of the item’s namesake Dragon. The player characters had been collecting grisly trophies and body parts of the various Dragons they had slain throughout their life as adventurers and I wanted to reward that. Using the Steam and Steel forge masters as a means of creating these items (with a little help from a mysterious 3rd party we’ll not go into here).