Post
Tue Oct 20, 2020 8:13 am
Mechanical Question
So when I was a kid my brother was my DM in a 2nd Edition series of games. We went up against a Cthulhu mythos type creature. To help us, he had given our party access to these gems - multiple green gems and one yellow gem. When a character held the gem, and concentrated they would be in this dark empty space and they would see ten glowing blocks, and they could either push or pull them. Pushing them would result in the gem being used as a weapon, pulling them would encase the wearer in a magical field. Those ten blocks were the charges. I never knew what the damage was, but the AC was +1 per block used.
Green gem stones would recharge at 1 block per day, while the yellow gem didn't recharge that way (we knew it COULD recharge, just not how). We later used the yellow gem as a bomb - another feature that we were able to discover is that if we compressed ALL the charges together the gem would become unstable and start to glow, then when you threw it, it went BOOM. This is how we banished the eldritch horror thing to the great beyond.
I always thought it was kind of a neat thing and want to incorporate it into Shadows. I'm going to be calling them "Elemental/Chaos/Power Gems". The storm heralds had them as sapphires. You hold them and you find yourself in a storm, lightning and wind gusting throughout and the vague sense you can grab lightning or grab wind, and doing so results in damage or defense bonuses. Recharge through exposure to thunder storms. The attack is a ranged magical attack doing 1d6 damage, while the defense is +2 vs missile weapons as the wielder is enveloped in powerful winds (they disappear shortly beyond the wielder so don't effect or protect anyone else).
So my questions:
1) Does the mechanic work?
2) Have you heard of anything else like this?
I have a lot of other concepts to explore on this such as an earth focused one, a nature one, a fire one, an ice one and so on.
