Creating Homebrew Magic Items for Dungeons and Dragons 5e - Dungeon Master Tips

like The Forge and summon the doors we're going to show you how we comb blue magic items in dungeon dragons edition [Music] greetings Dungeon Master's my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes today we're taking a look at how we homebrew magic items in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition I think magic items are the first place a dungeon master interested in creating their own game material should start the reason for this is they're way more contained than making a new class spell monster or feat they're an easy thing to introduce into your game and your players are gonna be super satisfied and super happy when they get a custom magic item created by you that their character gets to use yeah it really lets you get your creative juices flowing and try out the idea of home brewing but without trying to create your entire own world or campaign it really is a great place to start and we're gonna be focusing on how to create very balanced magic items and a few tips and tricks that we have when we're creating ours because really anybody can make a fun and zany magic item you see giant lists online of people like tell me your hundred favorite useless magic items or people who have created like super overpowered artifacts so we weren't really getting to the brass tacks of how to make a magic item that is appropriate for players across an entire campaign it's not always going to be just a joke that's not always just going to be something that's overpowered or useless but really a unique well balanced magic item that your players are gonna love to have and it's gonna create great memories in your game at the same time there's no harm in having fun with this even though these are useful magic items that can be used across the board some of the ones that we've created our little zany and have some jokes tied to them so some of our crazy ideas that we're gonna mention in this episode as well as a number of other ones that me and Monty have created you're going to be able to grab in the links below you can pick that up check it out and if you want to download it at the end of this episode you can follow along with our process that we use to make some of those items so with that let's get rolling so why would we homebrew a magic item really why not it's a lot of fun it is so fun and it's also one of the easiest places to get started before you decide home brewing your own class or race or spell or things of that nature try home brewing a few magic items there's something really easy to throw into your game and try out yeah they're one of the biggest things that a new DM can use to express their creativity and contribute to their world and campaign setting in a mechanical way that your players can take with you we're all used to home brewing our own campaign setting our own adventures these are some of the first skills that you learn as a dungeon master but creating your own game mechanics is another challenge in itself and magic items are the best place to get started with this because magic items really connect so deeply to the creativity of your world the work that you're already doing we often want to make magic items speak to the legends and myths that are in our campaign worlds that are part of the history and story of the game and that's one other reason why you might really really want to try out home brewing magic items is nothing ties your characters that are sitting around your table into that story more than having a magic item with some lore or history that you get to create that just ties into that if you have a story to tell if you have them like investigating an ancient dragon and you find like this old sword that they've heard tales about that could be something really cool to to have in your game world tie it in make it cool tell your story make it yours it makes it very special and players that get a home brew magic item as part of their treasure are gonna feel really special they're getting a piece of custom material that you've made that's way more interesting that any magic item that can possibly come from the Dungeon Master's guide because it's unique to your game no one else that has ever played Dungeons and Dragons will be able to say that they use that home room magic item of course unless you use it in a future campaign which is another great reason to home magic items I have magic items that I have home-brewed and using reused in future campaigns and I kind of have a little ongoing story for them as they've emerged and re-emerged in my campaign world and different player characters have wielded them the characters from our first campaign some items that were tied to them appeared in our second campaign like elda brooms acts that he used in the first campaign was then a magic item that we were able to find in the second campaign it creates a really memorable long-term experience for your campaigns and you can always be tweaking and improving these magic items from campaign to campaign as a disclaimer to your players when you are home brewing magic items and you're gonna be dropping them in you may want to let them know hey these are things that I've created they may not have been played tested yet if at any point they feel broken or overpowered or maybe even underpowered we should have a discussion on how we can change this magic item to better balance the game yeah oftentimes dungeon masters will introduce a strong magic item that causes problems like that +10 work role chain sword of dragon mulching and decide that the best way to solve that problem is to have a thief come at night and steal it or to destroy it inadvertently or come up with some sort of in-game reason to get rid of that magic item that's actually not necessary and in most cases a player that has that magic item is going to feel way less frustrated if you just come out and say I kind of made a mistake with this and we need to reevaluate it rather than just take it away from them they're gonna be way more understanding and way less frustrated and it's gonna help foster a positive experience at your game table when you approach those mistakes with honesty rather than try to fix it with behind the scenes shenanigans yeah it's all about setting the right expectations right yeah we also want to talk about being creative with your magic items and could draw inspiration from so many different resources I think of a lot of video games that have some some really memorable magic items yeah more so than just the story of our campaign being an inspiration point we can think of all the great stories that we've read any books or novels but especially videogames cuz I think videogames love their magic items yeah and there's so much good stuff to steal in them for your own campaigns yeah and honestly it can actually be really fun at the table for a player to get a magic item that's like the shield of throwing and you're like wait a second I've seen this before there's a character out there as a shield that can be throwing or a magical grappling hook that fires a hook and pulls you towards it seems it shoots a hook like I say it would be so far as shock of shooting yeah interesting where did that come yeah when we jump into actually making a magic item one of those difficult things to do is to assess the power level of your magic item and make sure that that thing is balanced of course magic items and Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition are categorized by several different levels of rarity and these are usually associated with tiers of play to really give you a kind of overview on when you should expect to give these items to your players they're very tied to the powers and abilities that the player characters naturally gain as they level up which means that uncommon magic items are usually associated with tier 1 players so they tend to fall into the abilities that first two fourth level characters gain whereas a rare magic item is appropriate for tier two characters that is characters from 5th to 10th level and usually starts introducing more powerful abilities with very rare and legendary items being associated with the tier 3 and 4 play and getting really really powerful effects coming into play this can be frustrating for DMS who are home brewing magic items because the Dungeon Master's guide doesn't really give you much more than just saying compare it to the other magic items that are there that requires a lot of reading and research to really come up with how that's going to work that said it is an important step and you will get better at home brewing magic items and assessing the power level of those magic items as you do it more often and the methods that we're going to talk about are going to help you learn what the appropriate power levels of magic items are so that when you are creating your own you can calibrate that properly at the same time however the Dungeon Master's guide has a really important point of advice couple things to watch out for when you are home bring your magic items and some of those things to watch out for are things like not giving your players a magic item that lets you do concentration on more than one spell or giving them a magic item that lets them take more than one action bonus action or reaction on their turn these are very important elements of how Dungeons & Dragons works in the rules and creating abilities that change these let players take more than one action concentrate on more than one spell can have serious repercussions that are almost impossible to account for there are interesting ways of getting around these and some magic items do break these rules but in general we recommend you avoid making magic items that let players concentrate on war spells or take additional actions also you may want to be careful about giving players magic items that allow them to take abilities from other classes that can also kind of unbalance the game of it yeah because it kind of dilutes the uniqueness of each class you don't know so much need to worry about spells but raw class abilities like a magic set of armor that grants any character who wears it the ability to rage like a barbarian probably not gonna make the party barbarian too happy when the paladin slaps that on yeah that because suddenly their whole mechanic is undermined by the fact that now you have somebody who can rage and divine smite mm-hmm however a good balancing trick to use with any magic item that you might create if you're worried about its power level is to make that magic item only work once per day rather than having it always on or always a benefit or maybe that magic item only works once ever but that kind of makes it a plot device rather than a magic item yeah but it can still be a cool thing to have this really powerful thing that by making it only used once it can be super powerful but now you have to is that right moment in the campaign to use it I could see making a magic potion that lets you concentrate on more than one spell but then it's a potion that you can only use once and there's probably only one of those yeah ever in the AMA um the other thing that many DMS often do does offset powerful magic items is add downsides to those magic items but you do want to be careful with this because you don't want something that's so powerful that you try to add all of these downsides to because you can never underestimate the craftiness of your players the dungeon masters would do well to remember that there's more players than there are you and as crafty and intelligent as you might think you are it is a humbling experience when your players outsmart you which they will do time and time again and I have seen more than one dungeon master brought low by a homebrew magic item they thought had some ironclad drawbacks only for the players to reveal that they had a smart way of getting around those drawbacks yeah it can really mess with your game so just be careful with that although drawbacks are also a fun part of some magic item particularly for cursed ones yeah just don't count on drawbacks to balance out an extremely powerful magic item so another balancing component that you can use when making your magic items is using a to mint and in general most magic items that are gonna be pretty powerful should require too much when in doubt your magic items should require it but in general magic items that carry a flat bonus to things like armor class attack rolls damage rules these should always require attunement to prevent player characters from stacking too many of them if it is an item that the player could only ever use one at a time for example you'll notice that many magic weapons and magic armor don't require a tomb in because you actually can't benefit from more than one magic item like that at a time you can't put on two sets of armor you you generally unless your dual wielding yeah carry well then you can't carry more than two weapons exactly you don't have more than two hands so there's that built-in limitation already there but like if you created a magic item that gave a plus three bonus to AC you're going to be pretty unhappy when your player puts on a plus three are set a plate arm or a ring and protection and a cloak of protection and winds up with an AC of 28 yeah yeah that's hard to deal with so attunement really limits the amount of things that they can carry and it's very important it's a it's a really important mechanic to build it so once we've got these things in mind what's our first method when we want to create a magic item the first method when you want to create a magic item is to look at other magic items and just tweak them a little bit yeah this is a great way if you're looking for a magic item that just felt fills a gap so for instance flame Tong great magic item it's a rare magic item adds fire damage to attacks done with it there isn't any such thing as a lightning Tong or an acid tongue but you could make it and it would use the exact same rules as flame Tong just with a different elemental type name it's something cool add some lore to it but just take the rules of flame tongue and change the elemental damage that it does and you have yourself a brand new home-brewed magic item same with Dragon Slayer or the demon slaying sword both of those magic items do additional damage to creatures of a certain creature type but you can easily homeroom magic item that used a different creature type even a really powerful or aggressive look one like pork Bane yeah a sort that's famous for cutting off the heads of orcs and now it has that magical power to do extra damage to orcs yeah this is a really easy way of swapping things in and out and you can also do this with spell based magic items for example you could take something like the staff of fire or the wand of polymorph and just change the spells that are in those items for spells at the same level now most of these items have an amount of charges per day and generally speaking you want to keep the charge rule in there as well yeah so usually if a magic item can cast more than one spell it usually has multiple charges and it expends a number of charges equal to the spell level and then regains charges usually with a random roll that never fully recharges the item yeah and if it runs out of charges there's a chance that that item is exhausted and behavior surveillance yeah right one of the things that you can also do with both spell based items and magic items that you're tweaking is you can also make them more powerful and increase the rarity to suit so for instance we could take that flame tongue and say now it does 46 points of damage it's a greater flame tongue weapon and maybe that's a very rare or even a legendary item now because it does so much extra damage on a hit you can also change what type of item it is so for example the flame tongue maybe it's a halberd maybe it's a great club maybe it's something other than a sword and so just adding these little things kind of help you tune it to a certain player at the table as well if you really want to give that flame tongue out but there's nobody that's using sort of the person who is using a sword is already using a magic item but the person who's using a halberd is not there you go you can reshape it home-brewed a little bit and you have a new magic item this is also a great way to mess with players expectations for example if they find a jeweled skull they might think oh man that's a demi-wedge no actually a helm of brilliance the jewels are the jewels that would normally be in a Hal of brilliance and instead of wearing it they have to hold it to cast the spells in it I love doing this because it makes it harder for the players to predict what the magic items that I'm using are it makes the magic items much more strange and mysterious and then when the players go oh this is actually a helm of brilliance or oh this is actually a cape with a mountebank but I have changed it into a portal gun then they go oh this is really cool now and it makes the item more special in a unique way our last one is going to be the most difficult so once you've tried doing this for a while and you've tried creating your own magic items based on the ones in there based on spells that you love you're gonna be creating your brand new magic items from scratch yeah and this is where you really want to let your imagination run wild or you want to get creative and not worry too much about the mechanical power at first and then once you've come up with the idea think about okay what is this magic item doing and level character would it be appropriate for I find me personally what I'm hombre magic I don't want I'm creating magic items I love stealing ideas from other people yeah and I find working with another person or another dungeon master one of the best ways to homebrew items because you can really just bounce ideas around and make sure that you have someone else to kind of that what you're creating we came up with our list pretty fast just by spewing ideas over yeah each of us would help reshape those ideas and because we were working with an objective what we were actually trying to do is we said we wanted to make one magic item of five different types for every rarity yeah and so that meant that we knew we wanted to make an item that was a legendary sword we knew that we wanted to make an uncommon wondrous item and that was a cool way to just get a bunch down at once and really flex the muscle of how you homebrew an item and I really recommend this because again time and time again I see so many Dungeon Master's just default to making useless magic items or making really really powerful legendary items but if you build the muscle of making an uncommon or rare magic item something that isn't super powerful you'll get really really good at making those high-level special items I find that a lot of DMS who are getting started with this are worried that their magic item isn't going to be cool enough and they really want to impress the players at the table one thing to take into account and we said this the whole time but don't underestimate the value of a little bit of lore and flavor text to really bring those items to life you don't have to have the most incredible mechanics built-in it doesn't need to be a 10 plus 10 sword for somebody to go oh my that's a really amazing sword or us or magic item that has a page of rules associated with it I would rather as a player have a magic item that has a page of cool lore and a beautiful drawing then a magic item that has 10 pages of rules yeah a +1 sword can be so much more if you add like a little extra quirk to it like it's a plus-one sword that can shoot lightning once per day yeah and then you call it something cool and you add lore on how it got that ability all of a sudden you have this item that makes people at the table go oh that's really neat even though it's a simple sword that shoots lightning yeah right it's just a plus-one sword and you added once per day ability and that was how we made one of our first magic items which was our lightning leap bow where we're just like we need to make a bow because there's no there's there's only one magic bow in the dungeon master scribe the oath bow so we're like we got to do a bow we there's not a lot that does lightning let's make a bow that like causes lightning to arc and jump around and we kind of just iterated a bunch of ideas we wrote out like okay so what if it just shot a lightning bolt and I was fine but kind of basic yeah right but we tried a few different things and we ended up with this magic item that it turns the arrow into a piece of electricity sails through the air hits somebody grounds into them and then causes a small version of Chain Lightning to jump out and I think we made that only work once per turn a little bit of damage added a saving throw to it and we ended up with something that really isn't much stronger than a flame Tong yeah and yeah it's a really fun item especially since there is a lock of bows we're kind of filling that gap there and making something that's really cool for somebody who uses a boat again at the same time taking an item that I isn't very exciting I would say in terms of its capabilities but allows the person who gets it to use their imagination on how they might use those abilities and also you add some really cool flavor text I'm thinking of one of my favorites the cloak of 1 million ants so we got totally into this inside joke I think we just threw out the name and then we're like actually that's a really cool item and sometimes naming the magic item is all you a good name is all you need to get excited because we're like what about a cloak of a million ants and we're like what would that need so then yeah having a cloak that once per day allows you to turn into a swarm of insects which actually can really help with getting into small spaces or hiding or getting away from things there's there's actually probably like a million uses 1 million ants that we haven't even thought of for this cloak that that people who are creative are going to use this cloak and say this is this is great I can use this for so many things I love it because when we were developing this we were like oh is it a little bit too close to a druids wild chain is it a little bit too close to polymorph but one of the cool things about it is that a swarm is a really unique creature we added some rules to it it only works once per day and it lets the players be creative with how they use it because ultimately a swarm of insects is not that very powerful in combat so it's not going to replace a moon druids wild shape by any stretch of the imagination yeah but players are going to get creative with this item we're gonna have a lot of fun with it so we're really excited to know what people think about the cloak of a million ants at the same time we also want to explore what happened when we made a consumable in Italy what are the bounds of an item that only works once per day or once ever because then it's gone exactly well what's the the potion of undeath was that I was a consumable yeah I forget where we got the idea for that one but we started to think about okay we love we love the undead yeah we love things that animate the dead and we also love magic items that have to deal with life and death definitely so we made this potion upon death that you pour it down a corpses throat and it reanimates them for I think we said in the first version one minute and they're just brought back to life immediately so it works pretty much like the revivify spell but it turns them into an undead creature this decays over the course of one minute yeah and then they slowly are losing hip points throughout that minute until they just die again yeah yeah and so we just got this idea of a crazy thing that doesn't exist in D&D but is kind of based on a couple different ideas because of course the remove of I spell is an easy way to bring somebody back to life really quickly there's lots of spells that let you animate the dead or bring somebody up as an undead creature but not with their former class abilities combine these two together and you get an interesting magic item that you could actually give to low-level characters as a way of overcoming a difficult battle but I could see all sorts of crazy ways of using this potion in creative ways I'm imagining a party that doesn't have a healer that can that can raise the dead and so one of your party members dies you've finished the battle you pour this down their their throat and you're like we need to get you to a healer right now we have one minute ahead huh that could be a really funny scenario yeah we also started to look at like with a bow we also want to look at what does a creative pole arm and we really wrestled with this because sharpshooter and great weapon master and pull our master are such powerful feats and we wanted to make a polearm magic item that felt unique but wasn't necessarily gonna make the pole our master Sentinel great weapon master fighter in the party super overpowered yeah so yeah so we really rack their brains with this one it's like us it took us a few giraffes but we came up with I love the name of this one yeah that's called the gravedigger and it's a large pole arm shovel were we inspired by shovel knight for this one oh right the shovel come from I think that I I don't know where it originally came from we did mention shovel knight and as they were disguise I was also thinking of I play war machine and I love the cygnar trenchers and I was just thinking this idea of like well what if there's a magic item that let us dig a trench magically and then we talked about like you slam it into the ground and you have like a certain amount of spaces that you can dig a trench and if there's enemies in that trench they fall into it and might fall prone and then there's a few other elements to it so and you can use that ability was it once per day I think what we ended up doing in the final version of it and again with any of these magic items that we're talking about we're gonna tweak them a little bit more and if you have any feedback for them let us know because we we want to make sure that they stay is awesome items that are cool for people to use in their campaigns with gravedigger I think oh we end up doing was gave it charges and you can do a 5 by 5 by 5 cube for each charge that you expended yeah which would let you dig a 25 foot deep pit but that would be everything you could do and really again this is another example of where we looked at other spells like the move earth and shape the earth and moulders can trips tweak them a little bit made them fun put them onto a cool item and that worked out really well it's a little bit of a hybrid of using a spell based magic item but masking that spell underneath some cool rules but the other thing that I absolutely love our intelligent magic items so fun so fun for role-playing as a DM and I think that just adding a personality to a stock magic I know from the Dungeon Master's guide perfect way to make everything complete unique yeah it's such an easy way to homebrew an item you take any item and add a sentience to it once again we've been using flame blade a lot but yeah you take flame blade and you make it a talking flame blade that has a personality and wants you to do certain things it wants you to burn things yeah we're already starting to get super creative now and like we're generating new ideas right here in the moment and I didn't want to say that for the process of creation having somebody that you can create with is the best way it is so much fun to work with another person when you're making that your veterans oh thanks it is it is no it is it is and so don't make it a solitary exercise whether you are creating my dependence with your other players and other dungeon masters or you want to share your magic items with us on the channel and we'll talk to you and give you some ideas about how you can make them super awesome so this has been our guide to home brewing' magic items in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition we hope that you feel inspired to get creative now these are just our methods everybody does this sort of thing differently we hope you found something useful in it if you have your own methods you want to share with us or if you've created your own magic item you want our feedback on it please tell us about it in the comments below we'd love to have a chat with you working together on magic items is how we make cool and unique things so we'd love to engage with you on that one and we talked a lot in this episode about the tiers of play so if you want to check out our video on that it's right up over here our video about warding magic items right over here also has lots of great tips about assessing the power level of magic babies please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in a dungeon [Music]

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 245,143

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book, magic items, homebrew, magic, weapon, gear, loot

Id: l1gfDiaEpG4

Length: 27min 52sec (1672 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018