Magic Items, the Holy Grail of roleplaying games (for me at least).
There are numerous ways to get your hands on them from killing to making, but the funnest are when you really have to work for them. As DMs, what kinds of ways did you make magical weapons available to your players that were out of the ordinary. And for players, did your DM ever surprise you or entertain you with an interesting way to earn the coveted magical weapons?
My first story:
Going to an ice cave to retrieve some of the required "stuff" for a campaign. Could be any cave for that matter and once through some mindless physical barriers and some dangerous environments that required some skill check, the players finally came to what appears to be a ring of icy towers about 6+ feet high with a base of about 4 feet. I matched the amount of ice towers to the players. Encased inside each mound of solid ice was a barely perceptible outline of a favored weapon.
Being who they are, they immediately started to make short work of the mounds of ice. I had it take a couple days I think. Duration doesn't matter, but they get the weapons. Yeah! They continue on their trek, reach their goal, solve a riddle or puzzle or whatever and find that the weapons they have are magic indeed, but nothing overly special. +1, maybe resistance to cold, small things.
They make their way back out. Problem is, that the entrance is now completely covered by the a wall of ice. Little did they know that each chip they took off the weapons was installed at this entrance.
Ok, no big deal, chip away. Hi Ho, Hi Ho, off to work we go. As they chip away they start to feel the weapons get heavier and heavier. Those that are sheathed, after a little bit the sheathe explodes to reveal their weapon slowly being covered with ice and continue to as long as the entrance is being chipped.
The ice returing is evenly distributed. Ok, a slight dilemna. The ice is thick enough that to get through it the weapons are going to be beyond manageable. So what happened was that they took the extra time to dig a whole straight through the ice and tried to match it to the growing ice around their weapons without chipping too much to make the weapons unmanageable. Finally they got the hole to match the new size of the ice weapons and they happily threw their weapons through the hold to the other side and chipped away at the ice at then entrance till they could all get out.
Then they started chipping away at the ice at their weapons to clean them. The ice did not reapper at the entrance.
Two options at that point. We never finished this one so didn't get to play them. 1) Ice chipped off the weapons anew magically deposited itself to somewhere incovenient that the players will eventually go to. Entrance to another dungeon, exit, whatever plays the best in the game and continues till they get rid of the weapons where they will create for themselves a similiar deal like where they were originally found.
2) The ice could continuously build itself onto the weapons over time so that they have to constantly be cleaned of the growing ice to be useable. Eventually the agony of doing it for so little gain will be too much and the players ditch them somewhere.
Mostly wanted to see how far they would go to keep a crappy magical weapon. I wanted them to be creative with the disposing of the weapons as well. Only logical that they would want to put the weapons somewhere like they found them to 'get' the next set of adventureres that stumbled upon them.
This one could probably go into the items part, and probably will. I have a couple more that wouldn't and why I started the thread. Will post as I have time.
