Items in Disguise
Hello everyone, and welcome to another exciting edition of Magic Market, where we bring you new magic items and other excellent trinkets to stock the shelves and fill the hoardings of nasty beasties of various sorts. Seeing as this is Illusion Week here at Necromancers of the Northwest, each of this week’s items are coming straight out of one our early magical vaults from way back in the day when we calling ourselves “Illusionists of the Isthmus.” Get ready for some cool illusory items.
Sword of Illusions
Not truly a sword, at all this item is actually a naturally petrified white rose which once belonged to Oliver Swift, considered by many to be the greatest illusionist to ever live. While Oliver used his talents primarily to dazzle onlookers and terrify neophyte adventurers into taking up nice quiet lives as town guards, occasionally he found himself in circumstances when he would have to defend himself. During his career he became an accomplished swordsman, but found that he disliked taking heavy and unsightly pieces of iron with him everywhere he went, and so to further his ego, he simply enchanted one of his favorite pieces of eccentricity to assume the form of a blade when he needed it. Unfortunately, Oliver had neither any talent with creation magic nor transmutation, luckily for him he had achieved such a talent for illusion magic that false reality was as lethal as the real thing.
Any creature holding the sword of illusions can cause the beautiful fossilized flower to assume the form of a magical bastard sword merely by speaking the Oliver’s famous magic words: Perfidium vera! Whenever the command words are spoken, the rose assumes the guise of a +5 equivalent bastard sword of the wielder’s imagining. While the sword functions identically to a real magical bastard sword, the first time it interacts with a creature (makes an attack against a particular creature, or is used to perform a combat maneuver check against a particular creature, or any other action which falls into the GM’s discretion) the target is allowed a Will save (DC 16) to disbelieve the weapon and suffer no ill effects from interacting with the blade.
A character with the Spell Focus (illusion) feat who speaks the command words can choose to sacrifice a single illusion spell he has prepared, or a single unexpended spell slot that he could use to cast an illusion spell he knows. If he does so, he substitutes the saving throw DC of the sacrificed spell or spell slot for the item’s saving throw DC.
The transformation lasts for one minute. If a spell or spell slot was sacrificed during the activation of this ability, the transformation instead lasts as long as that spell’s duration (in the case of a prepared spell), or for the longest duration of an illusion spell you know of the spell slot level that you sacrificed a (in the case of a spell which could have been cast spontaneously).
Veil of the Sorceress
This magical veil is made from a single piece of unnaturally sheer grey silk, fastened to a cap of colorful wildflowers so that the veil falls to cover the entire face of a creature wearing it. The cloth seems damp to the touch, though any attempt to extract moisture from the veil is wholly in vain. Though the garment is unscented, any character that dons it is immersed in the unmistakable smell of crushed blackberries.
Once per day, the wearer of a veil of the sorceress can spend one minute describing the form of any living creature aloud, at the end of which time the wearer is immediately enshrouded in a powerful illusion that makes the character appear as the creature described, as though he had been affected by the spell veil. The quality of a disguise is dependent on the quality of the description given by the character wearing the veil of the sorceress, with the item granting only a +5 bonus on Disguise checks if the character provides only a loose description of the creature (such as a “a large black dragon with horns and plenty of scars”), or a +10 bonus for an accurate description of the creature (requiring either that the character succeed on an appropriate Knowledge check made to identify the creature, or that the character have firsthand experience dealing with the creature). If a character can deliver a suitably poetic description of the creature, he gains a +15 bonus on any Disguise checks made to appear as the creature in question (including checks to appear as a specific individual). This typically requires a DC 20 Perform (oratory) skill check, though poems of a certain quality may confer this bonus even in the face of poor delivery. If a character fails to succeed on a either Perform or Knowledge check, he receives only the +5 bonus granted for giving a loose description of the form to be assumed.