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Putting Magic Back into Magic Items
🕑 Added 2025-07-26 16:33:23 +0000 UTCHere's the broom of flying from the SRD:
Broom of Flying
Wondrous Item, Uncommon (Requires Attunement)
This wooden broom functions like a mundane broom until you stand astride it and take a Magic action to make it hover beneath you, at which time it can be ridden in the air. It has a Fly Speed of 50 feet. It can carry up to 400 pounds, but its Fly Speed becomes 30 feet while carrying over 200 pounds. The broom stops hovering when you land or when you’re no longer riding it.
As a Magic action, you can send the broom to travel alone to a destination within 1 mile of you if you name the location and are familiar with it. The broom comes back to you when you take a Magic action and use a command word if the broom is still within 1 mile of you.
It works, but its description reads more like the tech specs for a magic broom than a magical broom that lets you fly. Here's a pass at designing it for Odyssey:
Hag's Broom
Tier 2 Magic Item
Hags plot and scheme against each other for control of the lingering remains of lost Arcadia. When a hag defeats a rival, she ritually transforms her foe into the least dignified servant imaginable: an animated broom doomed to clean her lair and serve as her steed.
As an action, you can grasp a hag's broom and command it to clean the area in a 30-foot radius around you. As it cleans, the broom bumps into others, sweeps dust on to their shoes, and otherwise behaves in a truculent, sulky manner.
You can also use the broom to fly. A single Medium creature can mount the broom to gain a fly speed. However, you must succeed in a DC 15 Charisma (Intimidation) check to compel the broom to carry you. If you fail, you cannot mount it this round.
Each broom has a specific phobia related to the method in which it was defeated and turned into a broom. The broom makes no effort to share this information. The broom refuses to move within 30 feet of an object of its phobia, and if somehow ends up within that distance flies away from it at the first opportunity. Roll for the phobia below or invent one.
Roll 1d6:
Fire. The hag was defeated with flames.
Cats. The hag was ambushed by her rival while in cat form.
Water. The hag drowned.
Sunlight. The hag was slain by radiant light. It refuses to enter areas lit by the sun.
Blades. The hag was stabbed to death and refuses to draw close to a drawn, edged weapon.
Heights. The hag was dropped from a great height and is afraid of any spot more than 30 feet above the ground.
If the hag who created the broom is slain and her blood soaked into the broom's thistles, the broom turns back into the hag it once was. Tales vary on whether the freed hag owes her rescuer a favor.
Hags and their agents covet these objects. Among their kind, status is derived in part by the number of hag's brooms they command.
Design Commentary
I want something like the broom of flying to feel more fantastical and mythic than the equivalent of a fantasy flying skateboard. My rule of thumb for fantastical designs is this - would anyone design technology to work this way? I want items to have quirks and flavor that reflect that they come from a fantasy world. They aren't tools developed to solve problems, but the expressions of a mythic world where story and meaning take precedence over physics and utility.
The drawback is a good example of this. I want anyone using the broom to remember that it was once a hag, and this hag died horribly. This item is a flexible, free power upgrade, so I like the idea of giving it a weird quirk that players have to work around.
Per my earlier article, this one is classified as a gizmo. You might use it to fly around, but its phobia and sinister nature might throw some curveballs into your life.
I'm also going to let you in on a secret: Part of designing Odyssey is, for me, creating a system that is fun to design for. I'd rather write magic items that look like this than grind out narrow, flavorless power upgrades.
Comments
Michael Sixel
That's my concern as well......the "I don't want to take the chances" on it not working right. I do love the design and fiction, but I'm not sure how players would feel. I guess if EVERY magic item had a drawback?
Brent P. Newhall
Very interesting! I like making the items more fantastical, though I I can see players finding an unreliable item worse than no item at all, and abandoning or selling it after one or two attempts to use it. It's a tough balance! The very dark backstory is also a bit too creepy for my table, and unfortunately, changing it would make the phobia bizarre, so I don't think I'd use this particular item, but I do love the general direction. Sorry to be a Negative Nancy here.
Teyrn Highever
This not only lends each item a greater sense of the fantastical, it also makes each magical item unique with its own history and story/lore. I really like this approach! (Perhaps I may suggest a concept by which magical items could also grow, expand, change, or awaken over time through exposure to new and different environments, locations, or even powerful presences and personalities?)
