Magic Items in HQ2

From: L C <lightcastle_at_...>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:24:41 -0400

 So let us wander afield to something related, but not the same.

In HQ1, one solution many people settled on for magic items (well, lots of item possibilities) was to give them stats; make them followers, in a way.

So, taking a staff from an old AD&D module I stumbled upon recently, we could make a staff that has electrical powers. (There are enough lightning gods in Glorantha that making it dedicated to one of them is easy. Or, you know, a sorcerer makes a magic staff.)

 In HQ1, assuming you are going the "item as follower/has stats" route, then you get something like:

Magic Staff of Lightning:

       Glow with light: 10W
       Dancing globes of electricity: 15W
       Lightning Bolt: 7W2

  Flaw: Limited charges (You could do this last one by some hard number of uses, or you could give it a stat and after every use roll to see if the staff runs out of charges. You could even make it a scaled loss, where how bad the loss against this stat is tells you how long you lose power. Complete means the staff is useless.)

  OK fine.

How would you handle this in HQ2. Presumably, if the item is made in your campaign by a character as their staff, it would have stats in accordance with chargen. Great. Let's say instead that you have placed this in a scenario. We don't use stats in a scenario. Do you list these as significant ability with some recommendation of where they should lie in relation to the PCs? Do you list it with some recommendation of where it should be in relation to the NPCs in the adventure? Do you peg it to the baseline? Do you not give any recommendations at all and leave it to each GM to decide what the staff actually does?

LC