When you take damage from a creature within 5 feet of you, you can use your reaction to make a melee attack with the spear against that creature. The spear also sheds bright sunlight within 30ft. When you hit a target with the spear, it takes an additional 2d8 radiant damage.
The spear grants a +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls. The blessed weapon of Heliod, Khrusor is imbued with the power of the sun. The wielder of the spear can utter a prayer of command as a bonus action to cause the weapon to emit bright light within a 30ft radius, and dim light for 30ft beyond that. Once used, this feature cannot be used again until the next dawn. If the wielder of the spear spends 10 minutes in prayer to Saint Umwarg at dawn, this magical weapon grants them temporary hit points equal to 2d8 + their Wisdom modifier.
D&d 5e tales from the yawning portal magic items torrent#
Her followers are searching tirelessly for this holy relic, for they believe that, should a worthy champion wield it once again, their faith shall spread across the known world in a torrent of blood and holy fire. When Umwarg fell in battle, her blood soaked the haft of the spear, causing celestial runes to burn into the wood. Requires Attunement: yes (Clerics and Paladins only)Ĭarried before the zealot hordes of Saint Umwarg the Chosen, this simple spear with a red gemstone embedded in the tip is the focal point for her growing cult. With those three ideas in mind, let’s make some magic spears. The idea, in essence, is that magic is strange, dangerous and otherworldly, so the items touched by it should be too. This ethos is strongly represented in the Old School Renaissance (OSR) community, where player ingenuity and strangeness take precedence over skill checks and the much-maligned concept of “balance” every time. This is a solid approach, but runs the risk of being a little dull, so make sure you compensate by making the item an interesting part of your world: imbue it with political power or symbolic authority attached to a religious organization make its original owners very interested in getting it back make it the key to unlocking ancient secrets and riches beyond your players’ wildest dreams.Īnd then the final approach I like is to make it, like, real weird. Feats, spells, and racial or class abilities are all great source material, not to mention that they come “pre balanced” in a sense.Īnother approach is to make the item provide a very incremental buff (hence the +1 weapon) that makes it (and the player) feel a little special. When you homebrew a magic item, one way to keep things “fair” is to imbue it with an ability borrowed from somewhere else in the game. At lower levels, it’s very easy to push the needle either way, so we need to be careful. On the other hand, an underpowered (or worse, boring) magic item is quickly forgotten, lost, or sold, which once again is no fun for anyone. It’s no fun for anyone, let alone the poor DM who feels like they have to rebalance all their encounters. Fights feel too easy, the player sees their own character abilities (not to mention other magic items) as useless by comparison, and the rest of the party starts to feel decidedly underpowered. Giving a player an “overpowered” magic item, therefore, runs the risk of throwing your whole game out of whack. Characters at lower levels have more limited resource pools: hit points, abilities, spell slots – you name it, low level adventurers are probably going to find them in short supply.
When creating a magical item for low tier play, you have to be careful. Therefore, if we want to do more than just give a 2nd or 3rd level hero a basic +1 spear (if you do, you’d better have a kickass backstory ready, because +1 weapons are probably the most overused and flavorless magic item type in the game) we’re going to have to get creative. Two of the three magic spears available in the official 5e rules are artifacts of staggering power which would feel out of place in the hands of a low-level adventurer.