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would add another considerable advantage to using these items. The DM will also have to determine the experience and sale values of magicfocusing items. It is suggested that the sale value be relatively low — say, 1,000 gp per level of spell focused — to encourage PCs to keep these items and use them. However, the experience-point value could be proportionately higher, even as high as the sale value itself. If the sale value is kept low, the DM will have to take steps to prevent PCs from buying large numbers of focusing items with ready cash. The easiest way to do this is to make them very rare or even entirely absent from the open market, generally introducing them only as “found” items. The DM may opt to assume that magic-focusing items are the occasional, accidental by-products of failed attempts to create “real” magic items, and that the mages who create them are generally too disappointed over their apparent failure to concern themselves with what their faulty creations can do. This would explain their low sale value and their general absence from the open market, and it would also help explain how such things came to be lying around a dungeon or in the hands of monsters. Special cases Until now, we have considered only items through which one and only one spell may be cast. On occasion, the DM or designer may want to design an item that would focus several related spells. For example, a wand of fire focus could convert spells of appropriate levels into burning hands, pyrotechnics, fireball, fire charm, fire shield, wall of fire, and meteor storm. Such an item would take the place of several single-function focusing items, and so would be rarer and much more valuable. A character should probably acquire no more than one or possibly two of these devices even in a very long career of adventuring (it is always important to place focusing items with care — since they do not wear out or become used up, they tend to become permanent fixtures in a campaign). Multi-function focusing items should work muck like the single-function kind, as detailed above, and they carry the same basic advantages for the character and for the DM. Multi-function focusing items have an additional benefit for character development, in that they encourage magicusers to specialize in a certain kind of spells (fire spells, alteration spells, artificialmotion spells like levitate, fly, telekinesis, teleport, etc.), which gives the character more of an individual style. Another way to add color to multifunction focusing items is to give them a greater variety of forms (staves and other personal objects, articles of clothing, musical instruments, etc.), since there would be no need to make it convenient to carry and use large numbers of them. Thus, spectacles of visual spell focus could focus clairvoyance, infravision, wizard eye, and all the 12 JULY 1966 detect spells (a magic mirror or crystal ball would also be an appropriate form here). A glove of Bigby’s hand focus could focus all the Bigby’s hand spells, and a bag of conjuring focus could focus unseen servant, all the monster summoning spells, conjure elemental, and Drawmij’s instant summons. The latter item would work like a bag of tricks— the material components for the last two spells would have to be inserted into the bag prior to casting the spells, for game-balance reasons, and there might still be some game-balance difficulty with adjusting the casting time for a conjure elemental spell. Another advantage of the multi-faceted focusing item is that the character is less likely to “outgrow” it. A flute that focuses sleep is a fine item for a 1st-level magicuser, but it would probably be sold off around 3rd or 4th level. However, if different tunes on the same flute would also focus confusion, fear, and Otto’s irresistible dance, the item should remain highly useful throughout the character’s career. A second variation on the basic singlefunction magic-focusing item would be the magic-enhancing item. Such an item would focus one and only one spell, but it would also improve the spell in some way — increase the range or the duration, heighten the damage, etc. Many forms of “enhancement” come to mind, but the simplest would be to have the item allow the spellcaster to cast the spell as if he or she were one or more levels higher in the profession, so that a 5th-level magic-user could use a wand of fireball casting +1 to cast 6d6 fireballs at a range of 16“, a 6th-level magic-user 7d6 fireballs at 17“, and so on. This item would be closely analogous to a fighter’s sword +1. It should be noted that an enhancing item would not allow a magicuser to cast a spell of a higher level than he is able to learn, but merely to cast spells of appropriate levels more powerfully. In some cases (such as charm person or invisibility), enhancement in terms of spell-caster levels will have no effect, so such spells should be avoided or handled differently in enhancing items. Like multi-function focusing items, enhancing items should be much more valuable and much rarer than ordinary focusing items, and they should likewise be placed with great care because they tend to become a permanent part of the campaign. What about other classes? It may seem strange that, up to this point, this article has considered focusing items only for magic-users and not for the other spell-casting classes. The fact is that I have only made use of the concept for magic-user items in my campaigns. Few of my players have run illusionists as it happens, and as for clerics and druids — well, magic-focusing items for them have their own special problems. Magic-focusing items for clerics and druids would tend to usurp part of the deities’ role. Deities decide, in person or through intermediaries, which spells their respective clerics may memorize on a given day. A highly chaotic deity who objects to the use of command or a warrior-deity who considers spells such as sanctuary and feign death “sissified” would not be happy to learn of magic items that would allow his clerics to subvert his wishes in these matters. Since such items would be useful primarily to circumvent the deities’ authority (at least, the deities would tend to see it that way), and since clerical magic items are created only through the aid of the deities, it seems highly unlikely that such items would exist. If the DM takes his role as deity seriously, and plays it carefully with regard to the granting of clerical spells, the need for clerical focusing items can be obviated. The player may not know what situations the day’s adventuring may have in store, but the DM (and therefore the deity) should. The DM-as-deity can therefore adjust the cleric’s daily spells according to what he is most likely to need. This could take the form of gentle hints from the deity or intermediary, or it could be imposed on the cleric perforce, although much coercion should not be necessary if the cleric character is being role-played with a fitting sense of the importance of his deity’s opinions. If an emergency situation occurs that no one (including the DM) could have foreseen, and the cleric legitimately needs to change a spell post-haste, I think it not unreasonable for a deity to grant a hasty prayer to that effect, from a cleric in good standing. If for some reason the DM still wants to give the cleric a focusing item (perhaps a “shopping” problem, as alluded to at the beginning of this article), such an item would probably take the form of a special holy symbol, icon, relic (though not in the “artifacts and relics” sense), censer, prayer wheel, etc., and should be created and closely monitored by the deity. The best spells to focus would probably be “bread and butter” spells such as the various cure spells. Even then, the use of such an item by an evil cleric would have to be very closely monitored. The DM may decide that the cleric’s deity can cause such an item to cease functioning at will. If druids are ruled to have personal deities, rather than simply worshiping nature as an entity, they will have the same problems with focusing items as clerics, above. If not, druidical focusing items could be very interesting and very useful to the character. Druidical spells are generally cast very close to nature, and the most distinctive ones usually require a natural setting; animal friendship requires the presence of a wild animal, entangle requires undergrowth, etc. Focusing items might not only enable a druid to choose from such spells at will, but to cast them inside caverns, dungeons, etc. For example, a length of green vine or ivy or a rope woven from willow shoots might allow a druid to focus entangle, and to use the item itself in the place of undergrowth, indoors. Such an item would certainly make the druid more effective in indoor and
underground adventures. DMs may have differing opinions on how this would affect game balance, depending on how they view the relative strength or weakness of druid characters without such advantages. As always, it is important to remember that it is easier to introduce a focusing item into the campaign than to remove one. Focusing items for illusionists would have all the advantages of magic-user items. There is the aesthetic objection to the creation of complicated illusions with the mere wave of a wand or the touch of a ring, all the more so since illusionist spells are supposed to have elaborate somatic components. There is also the more serious problem of what it does to the deception to have the illusionist wave a wand or other obvious magical item in the direction the illusion is about to appear. (I have played a character who had just this problem with a conventional wand of illusion.) Of course, spells that illusionists share with magicusers which are listed on the table above could be focused through wands, rings, talismans, or amulets also (though not the same wands, rings, etc.), and some other defensive and personal spells, such as change self, gaze reflection, and blur, could also be focused through rings. Forms for focusing more elaborate illusionist spells might include silk foulards (for misdirection or the various versions of invisibility), or paint brushes for making detailed illusions that no one will see until after the illusionist has finished them (such as hallucinatory terrain, massmorph, and programmed illusion). Such paint brushes would not logically have to shorten casting time, and could in fact lengthen it for the last two spells. The shortcomings of brushes as focusing items for on-the-spot illusions such as shadow magic and shadow door are obvious. A week later, just after the most recent playing session, the Designer and the DM take time to pat each other on the back: “Well, how did it go?” asks the Designer, knowing what the answer will be. “You would have thought I — excuse me, you — invented the wheel. I haven’t seen that magic-user so happy and self-satisfied since the day he toasted his first orc!” “Such a simple concept, but with so many potential applications. . . . It almost makes me wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner.” “Yeah, that’s probably what the guy who invented the wheel said, too. . . .” D RAGON 13
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