I'd like to name-drop your magic items

[tavis]

Following on the success of the thread in which I asked for PC names, I'm hoping to collect some stories about magic items in your games that I can use as inspiration for an Other Editions product I'll be writing over the next few months.

As before, my motives are both noble (wanting to make sure that contemporary RPG writing maintains a connection to the history of actual play) and selfish (hoping to outsource some of the effort of inventing everything out of whole cloth). And I can't guarantee that the way in which your magic item story winds up being presented is at all faithful to the original or give you official credit, although I'll be glad to acknowledge your contribution here and elsewhere.

The things I'm looking for this time are more widespread:
- out-of-character stories of how magic items impacted your campaign in a memorable way that would help me think about what good magic item design should do
- campaign narrative-type stories that might be passed on and become part of the lore about an item
- ideas for items, and names of PCs/NPCs connected with them, that I can appropriate for that lore

It isn't necessary to go on at length, although details like names are valuable because those are especially hard to make up!

[makofan]

Not a really exciting story, but here it goes

Manjet Singh Shokar was a PC ogre in one of my long running campaigns (Rules Cyclopedia and Mystara). His successful retrieval of the fabled Lance of Justice converted him to Lawful Good, and thus alienated him from his tribe. He befriended a wandering desert nomad, and together they set out adventuring, eventually joining several other characters.

The Lance of Justice, if grasped by any non-Lawful Good person, would convert the person to LG unless they successfully saved vs Spells. If they did save, they were burned for 2-20 damage and dropped the lance.

In game terms, it was a standard lance with +2 to hit and damage. Once per day, the player could invoke the Lords of Justice, and for the next 1-10 rounds (randomly rolled by the GM) the lance would do quadruple damage.

The interesting game story behind this was thus:
While exploring the Isle of Dread, the third-fouth level party was charged by a triceratops. Shokar, the 8' tall ogre, set his spear in the ground, called on the Lords of Justice, and waited. Everybody else ran.

Shokar rolled a 20 (which we were treating as double damage). So the lance did x4 for ability, x2 for critical, x2 for being set vs charge. With a STR of 19 (hey, he is an ogre after all) he had +4 to damage. He rolled a 10 for damage, which gave 16 after adjustmenst, multiplied by 6, for 96 damage, the highest damage ever recorded in combat in my entire GM career stretching back to 1979.

It also stopped the triceratops in its tracks. Years later, the player still remembers the day he killed a triceratops in one blow.

In game turns, a +2 lance is not overpowering, but the once/day ability gives the player a chance to turn heroic in the one combat that really matters. My player called it "dialing up death".