The Blade Of The Shifter
Hello, and happy new year! Welcome to this week’s issue of LoreMasters - Your regular source of inspiration, ideas, and homebrew for your TTRPG games. In each issue, I'm going to be bringing you a veritable Heroes Feast of items, spells, podcasts, streams, Kickstarters, and STUFF, so if you like this, please subscribe and pass it on to your close friends and distant relatives.
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The Blade Of The Shifter
Rena landed breathlessly on the cobblestones, her eyes wide and searching. She ran her hands over her horns, a habit she picked up as a kid when worried. It can’t have been him, could it?
She scrabbled to her feet, looking for a way out, seeing the busy street at the end of the alley. Busy means people, which means danger, but also means easier to hide. A good risk, she thinks. She picks up the bag, without that, all this wouldn’t have been worth it, and starts to the opening.
As she almost reached the end, the light within touch, a figure steps out of the doorway, a tall elven figure, with long blonde hair in a thick braid, a wicked smile on his face.
“Hello you. Where you going so fast?”
Rene staggered backward, her mouth wide with horror
“Eldrad? El? I…I saw you die?”
“Oh! Oh? This face means something to you? Someone you cared about? Someone you loved maybe?”
Rena tripped over a loose stone, clattering to the floor, frozen in silence
“Well then, this will be all the sweeter” the elf grins, as they draw a dagger of pure white ivory, smooth and unmarked, handle and blade all one piece.
He slows advances on the prone and fleeing Rena, and with a sudden burst of speed plunges the dagger into her chest. Her eyes flash wide, looking up at her friend, as his skin starts to darken, and thick horns begin to push their way out of his forehead, the nose thinning, bones shifting under purpling skin.
Her vision darkened, the edges closing in, and the last thing she sees before the grave takes her, is her own face, grinning back down at her…
The Blade Of The Shifter
Melee weapon, rare, dagger
When you kill a humanoid with The Blade Of The Shifter, you gain the ability to shapeshift into the victim at will. You keep all your existing statistics and memories, but your appearance and voice change to match the victim. The blade can only store one person at a time, so when you kill another person, the previous person fades.
As any longtime reader of this newsletter will know, I’m always in favour of magical weapons that do more interesting things than simply add a +1, and this blade does just that.
From a design point of view, I wanted this blade to actually be something you need to think about using. It gives you the ability to impersonate anyone, but you’ll have to kill them first. Need to slip past as a guard, you’ll need to make the choice to kill one first. If you kill a BBEG’s lieutentant, suddenly you have a brilliant way into the lair, but you’ve got to make sure you don’t kill anyone else for a while
Additionally, finding the blade with a face already in it is a brilliant way to either drop a plot hook (Who is this person?) or give your players a handy but limited tool.
As always, let me know if you find a place for this at your table!
A Brief Comment On the OGL
No one who reads this is likely to be unaware of the hubbub around the ‘leaked’ changes to the OGL (and the responses from WOTC) over the last month. Far smarter people than me have done the work to explain the changes and impact, so I won’t look to do that here. But I wanted to quickly discuss my response.
As it stands, and by non-lawyer understanding, nothing I write about in this newsletter relies on the OGL to exist. I don’t replicate any contents of the SRD, I don’t charge for this, and don’t reference any of the content that is copyright/trademarked to WOTC. And so under the proposed changes, nothing should impede my ability to just carry on as I am.
But I’m not going to.
WOTC has shown its hand and it’s a hand that doesn’t seem to like or want to aid people like me, making for the community. Whilst the changes won’t impact me, they will impact my neighbours and friends, and standing by them is important to me.
So what will change? At the core, I will endeavor to de-D&D my work here. I will still create the things I want to create, and they will still sit within the same magical medieval fantasy world of these games, but I want to write in a way that you can use them in any game system. I don’t intend to reference specific mechanics, spells, monsters, or abilities from 5e, as you should be able to see in today’s creation.
Games should be open, and this newsletter will be too.
Be kind, and look after each other.