IT'S 3.5 DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

WELCOME TO HELL

Not a virus used as a weapon, but a weapon used as a virus?

Dungeons and Dragons 3.5


where diplomacy = mind control

>>6347204
There are none, really. A malevolent entity trapped in a weapon, using mortal souls like fuel to craft itself an army, is actually a pretty kick-ass concept.

>>6347204
>>6347227
>>6347272
While the concept is sound, the game used it CRAP.

Using 3d6 and "what the Gm says goes" would be a better system.

>>6347272
Lawful Evil warhammer called the Self-Forged?

Give them a hivemind for more lulz.

I love the idea. Thanks for the inspiration.

None specifically. Sounds awesome.

>>6347272
>>6347272
Really. Before this whole thing gets lost in the 4efag stuff, I do want to say I think this is a very creative idea on behalf of the OP and I would definitely encourage something this cool.

But would a sufficiently intelligent being create exact copies of itself? In a similar scenario, they could be lesser controlled personalities. Otherwise you could have the different sword identical personalities come into conflict as a plot point.

Really, I think instead of a town it could work with something like an Elite group of Knights. I.e, the sword has made 5 or 6 others so far and are trying to take over the PCs next, etc. The town thing seems to kind of cheapen the rareness of intelligent items concept.

The lost treasure of the devil Voneumann!

>>6347361

It could work if the hivemind idea was implemented, so they all work together as one.

The item would need its creators to have sufficient XP in reserve to make what is likely an expensive magic item. Although I think there's some stuff in the BoVD that lets you sacrifice people to get free crafting XP.

And then there's the issue of money. This wouldn't work in some farming village, but it could in a sufficiently developed area where resources are available.

"Hey there, Emeraldhilt! What can I do ya for?"

"Hey, Rubypommel. I've been running this body for about forty hours straight, it's starting to lose manual dexterity. I feel like a change, what do you have in a middle aged male?"

"Oh, you're in luck! Ol' Blue's just been fed and watered, I think he's about ready for another tour of duty. Let me get a scabbard strapped on him, I'll bring him right around!"

Combining posts.
So the real one controlling the people and communicating with its mass-produced lessers via hivemind?

I like this idea, OP. Consider it stolen.

*nick*

>>6347361
I thought the opposite, actually. It'd be a creepy town to find, where all the people are just automatons, all controlled by an item on their person, and slaving away making more of these items until they die from exhaustion, or the item takes a portion of their life to build.

And then, of course, there would be the merchants, or rather plague carriers, who bring the item to other towns and cities to sell it there, where it begins to take over.

At that point, it's not really an intelligent item, so much as it is a swarm of intelligent body-snatchers.

>>6347407
OH SHIT that's fucking awesome

>>6347361
It does not make en exact copy of itself, it creates lesser copies that it can boss around. Those copies make large amounts of cheap minions that can control the weak-minded, but they have little will of their own and require the master blade to direct them.

The rareness of magic items thing is circumvented by the fact that the creation of this item eats away at the soul of the crafter. Once there are enough blades, all the master blade needs is an army to sacrifice, and for it to be remarkable enough to fall into the hands of a person who had a lot of influence to begin with, such as a king.

>>6347204
THAT IS FUCKING EPIC! I AM GOING TO DO THIS TO A TOWN IN MY GAME!

>>6347430
That is an excellent horror angle. I was thinking about it a different way, i.e like clones of the personality. A hivemind would make that very effective.

>>6347398
One of the reasons I suggested a smaller group was this stuff. What if the King's ceremonial sword has been controlling the royal line for decades and has been controller the army through host swords, etc. There's a lot of stuff you could do with this.

>>6347410
Hivemind = one mind, many bodies. This is not a necessity. In fact it would limit the original.

Easily commanded minions is what he's after. Vessels that he can channel his power through, but that have enough autonomy to carry out his wishes.

>>6347497 What if the King's ceremonial sword has been controlling the royal line for decades and has been controller the army through host swords, etc. There's a lot of stuff you could do with this.

Sounds good.

I like the idea a lot OP. I'm not super familiar with the mechanics for intelligent items, but I don't think its technically legal... but, probably not too far of a stretch.

I'd make it the cheapest, most useless intelligent item. A little silver bell, or something like that... so that people could make them by the dozens before dying of XP drain.

Walk into a town and see a bunch of withered corpses covered in mounds of little jingly silver bells...

i cant be bothered looking up the actual rules, but off hand i can say this wouldnt work
a: the skills acquired by intelligent weapons are pretty average. 10 to spot etc.
b: the skill required to forge an intelligent sword with a high ego is huge. cl: 17+ most likely.
the sword will not have the caster level unless if can possess a high level mage or cleric. Both of which have high ego resistance and a low desire to hold a magic speaking sword.
the sword would at best be able to make +1 or +2 swords. Both of which would cost 4-8k in gold each. So you would need a massive pile of cash as well.

>>6347204

Great... Stormbringer meets the Borg.

>>6347361
>>6347430

I would run it as a hybrid of the two. The villagers are all working themselves to death to gather resources and raw materials but don't seem to mind. When they can no longer work they happily jump on some sacrificial altar to further the cause.

The lesser items they create are only 'activated' by proximity to someone bearing one of the swords, so they can be distributed far and wide before any suspicion is raised.

The every infestation works in three stages, first, infect more people with new artifacts, then create a new sword or swords as the resources warrant (slaughtering everyone else in the process), and finally sending the new swordbearers out to take over more towns.

The adventure hook would be stopping one of the swordbearers from taking over a small village. Then moving on to try and stop them from taking over other villages. Finally finding out that, guess what, you've stirred up the wasps nest and you can expect to find first hordes of mind controlled villagers coming after you, and after that a god damned legion of mind controlled zombies wielding intensely magical swords intending to carve you up before you can disrupt their little plan.

>>6347728
Wow, that was really quick and creative. Good job man. Is there anything else we can help you work out? It seems like you got everything figured out!

>>6347407
I'm trying to imagine this, and it's fucking awesome.

Also, creepy as hell.

>>6347692
I think that you are right and it probably would not work, if you use only the core three, but you have to think outside the box. what if the magic item (not necessarily a weapon) was an animated object with levels, or what if it was a LEGACY weapon?

Congratulations, you just created the Clockwork Horrors.

>>6347938
no... what is scary about these is that they are like a virus. they kill you from the inside. they could be unseen. one item could decimate a country. it would be even crazier if the weapons got a hold of a population of dragons or some other powerful race like mind flayers or even devils. can you imagine the party marching into hell to save the devils from the horrible weapon virus? or it could be a plot by the devils to destroy heaven.

>>6348005
Fairly sure anything powerful will notice the sword and say "lol no"

>>6347931
ok guis, let's do this. open up your copies of weapons of legacy and flip to page 185. look at table, 4-3. i think that is the one we should use because it is the least expensive in gold cost.

>>6347931
*shruggs* i don't have a problem with approaching it as a theory, but the op asked for reasons why it wouldn't work.
in response to your reasons why it might outside the box, if the sword has levels then it is a character. Which means it uses its own xp for crafting rules, unless you look in BoVD stuff.
If you want to run it as an artifact, then sure it can do it. But what god would let this loose? and why wouldn't it have been hunted down and stopped in history past?
I prefer the 'evil cleric with a horde of ghouls, which as they attack make more ghouls' infinite debacle. Primarily because its a hard setting, but beatable in lots of ways. Destroying high level magic items is mechanically hard and boring for the pcs.

>>6348116
you could use the intelligent legacy ability, but you could save some time and legacy ability slots if you create the weapon intelligent AND legacy to begin with.

>>6348177
what you say is true, but i still want to see if it can be done... somehow.

One problem I foresee is the power level of the copies.

If you are handing out +1 swords of mediocre to hordes of burnt out & brain dead level 0 minions then, well, it just seems a lot of bother for no real gain.

And, as lot of these minions are going to be nothing special, you need to create copies that have some real smash behind them. Can they really generate enough XP / resources / dead beef / whatever from some village to make something like this? And in enough numbers to be worthwhile?

It still seems like a neat scenario. The evil prime weapon may not be savvy enough to see this problem & just go about it's business giving you an interesting, and well armed, twist to the standard zombai invasion story.

Personally, I'm flashing on what Saurons' ring would be like trying this plan. Ring O' Power: "Boss, yer an incompetent asshole so screw you. I'm taking over the world on my own. Let there be rings, many, many, many rings."

;)

>>6348371

suppose the item in question is more insidious then that. like a vampire or something. only creating copies of itself when it could afford to, or in order to keep its host too weak to fight it. it might not even make copies of itself all the time. it might, as was suggested earlier, make lesser copies that it could control and pass them out. this would not be an enemy that would reveal itself by marching on a city. it would surreptitiously attack slowly from within.

Oh god I love /tg/.
Fucking stolen.

>>6348540

It's going after the "ye olde nobility" so that's a plus. We don't have to control everyone in reach to get the evil in the drivers seat.

But one problem is that D&D traditionally portrays the upper levels of the nobility as being high level themselves, thus you need something extraordinarily potent to take them over & maintain control. And it doesn't seem fun nor true to the scenario if all we do is take over 1 or 2 upper class dudes. And I think there'd be too much "detect evil/curse" SOP in place for something to make any headway.

Since you suggest subtly - maybe what's needed is for the evil prime weapon to exclusively go after the middle levels of the hierarchy? The general plan being once the mid level dudes get enough power together they steamroller the higher ups & take over more directly.

That should provide plenty of weirdness & creepy horror & "what in the hell?" to throw at the player characters. It ends up a race to save / axe the people in charge.

Has potential.

ioun stones could do it. they would have to be a hive mind in a set of x stones, then they could be created faster with each stone having a different ability to contribute to the group. they could diversify, evolve, get lost, get found again, sneak around anywhere, and continue to function if some of them where lost, and the host would have to make multiple saves against them.

FUCKING STOLEN

but should i use the Virus Sword of the Magical Sword controlling an empire for generations?

One thing to think about is what is the vector this sword would use to transmit to other populations? Sure, you could have sword merchants sell it, but if the swords are weak individually, it may require a number of them together to empower the hive mind and take over a city. The solution? Transfer ownership en mass.

The most likely way you'd learn about this is that a town of peasants recently broke ties with the empire. They started spending all their time manufacturing weapons then declared war. From an outside perspective, it just looks like a normal rebellion where the peasants trained into a well drilled militia (hivemind) and started forging a bunch of swords.

Even with amazing swords, it's still inevitable that they'd lose. Then the question becomes who gets all the magical swords that belong to the now-dead? That's right, fucking hive-mind starting up in the kingdom's military.

>>6348822

Nasty. And there's some subtlety for ya!

>>6348822
yea... nice one.

>>6348846
Thanks. I got the idea from lancet flukes. Basically, they are parasites that grow in cows. It's hard for cows to pass on the flukes to each other, so instead it the fluke drops its eggs in the cow's shit. When insects eat the cow shit, the lancet fluke larvae burrow into the insect brains and command them to climb up grass. Thus, they are sitting at the top of the grass where the cows eat, committing suicide so that the parasite can infect new hosts.

There's actually a ton of parasites that do this. Cat parasites that cause mice to be suicidal and seek out cats to be eaten. Wasps that lay eggs inside their hosts and after the eggs burst out, cause the host to protect the newly hatched eggs with its life. Malaria for example makes mosquitoes reckless in biting humans (makes them always think they're hungry, even when they aren't), and also makes humans give off pheromones telling mosquitoes that the infected person is tasty.

Nature is fucking terrifying. I shudder to think what would happen if bacteria could cast dire charm.

>>6349092

There are bacteria like that in humans, about 1 in every 5 americans has a colony in their brains.

Scientists do not know exactly what behavior they change.

so if the caster level of the controlling item is the caster level used for creation and the hosts exp is used, then an item can create another item that is identical, provided that the prerequisites for creating itself, including spells feats skills and ect are contained within the item and transferred to the host. you would not even need legacy weapons or anything. just a lot of leg work figuring out what kind of weapon you wanted to duplicate.

>>6349092
Riders Virus, from GURPS Aliens.

Nightmare fuel.

>>6349419
there really is nothing to suggest the sword has a cl equal to what it took to create it.
What you guys are after is an artifact, not a magic item.
Its a cool idea for a small campaign, maybe 10th lvl characters, trying to track down and destroy all of the copies, so the original can be unmade
but don't expect the normal rules to support the idea...cos they really don't

>>6350482
yes indeed, the rules where not meant for this, however it clearly states on page 215 of the DMG that the CL of the item governs the abilities of the item, granted the authors had no idea that we would be trying to create such a thing, and if you ran it past the official channels they would no doubt shoot it down. i on the other hand am willing to read the book literally and say that because the item has a CL it meets the prerequisite of having a CL for the purposes of crafting an item. i will further admit that it is not clear whether the controlling item would be able to use its' own CL while possessing a host. it might be forced to use the hosts' CL which would be a problem.

>>6347204 What are the reasons why this would not work?

Because commoners have very finite XP pools, and adventurers have good will saves.

More to the point though, that plan will work as well or as poorly as the DM wants it to.

If you want to use that as a plot, it works. If you don't want to use it as a plot, it doesn't work. Who gives a fuck what the rules say?

>>6350720
you could create an ioun stone with an ego of over 20, base it on a dark blue rhomboid ioun stone and replace alertness with craft wondrous item. it would have an exp cost of only 1000.

>>6350787

OK, now we have an entire town with craft wondrous item. And that is all. Not much of a threat.

>>6350815
you speak too soon sir... the magical properties of these items would be randomly determined. they would get 4 minor magical abilities, 2 major ones and one random dedicated ability. the dedicated ability is really the kicker because that is where the 10d6 fireball is at.

>What are the reasons why this would not work?
Because the crafting rules exist for PCs, not NPCs. If you want to have an evil magic sword that takes people over and drains people's life force to make more of themselves, just do it. Don't bother fiddling with NPC XP.

>>6347361
>implying that only 4Efags dislike 3.5
No, I don't like 4E either, but 3.5 is shit and you should feel like shit.

>>6351219
>implying that 10d6 fireballs are worth anything, especially compared to the dimension door ability
You fucking faggot.

>>6347361
>>6351234
the example of the ioun stone i gave before is for the most powerful type of intelligent item. if one of these existed then they would no doubt make lesser none reproducing subservient stones. something like bees i'd imagine.

This idea's fucking brilliant.
I rather like the idea of the swords sucking their wielders dry. Maybe the initial one makes sure all duplicates have the right crafting feats, maybe even levels in artificer or the like. From there it gives them the ability to move/dance/what have you. If there's anything left, it makes the sword more viable offensively, both for combat, and to attract others to take the new parasite sword itself. Once the victim has run dry, it then sacrifices them ala the BoVD rules, reaping the XP and using that to finish out crafting the new parasite blade.
At least the very first should have sufficient power and ability to be an adjutant of some order, and go about producing a lower-power chain of command that chews through a town, then makes its own way off to find more victims.

>>6351243
well... when you take into consideration that all of the ioun stones are acting on their own initiative count and that a human could have any number of ioun stones at one time, they could hit with, say, 10 10d6 fireballs, in the same round, or 20 10d6 fireballs. they could also use 15d6 greater shout, or phantasmal killer if you prefer.

>>6351243
your right... i'm a fagot... goodnight.