Homebrewing a Magic Item

So I get alot of questions asking about how I go about making the magic items that I do. People tend to get intimidated when it comes to designing things for their own game or for others to use. Honestly the two biggest pieces of advice I can give you are -

RESEARCH THE EFF OUT OF THINGS. Like look at the type of magic item you are making and read through what they can do, see what their limitations are based off of rarity levels. Look up spells, feats and class abilities that may be similar or have aspects that you want to focus on for the item. Pay attention to the wording they use to limit how things can function. Those are the phrases and words needed to make sure your magic item stays within the power curve so as to not screw over a DMs game.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO BREAK THE MOLD. This might seem a little bit in conflict with my first piece of advice but you can't know how you can break the expected without know what is expected. The more magic items you research and consume, the more of them you create you gain an understanding of some underlining things with them. Power curves, potential loopholes for being OP, gaps in what magic items are out there, things that would be cool for themed games etc. The more you do the more confidently you can break away from everything else that is currently out there and make something that stands out a little more but doesn't destroy a campaign.

As you can see a theme in both of my main pieces of advice for this is about not breaking a campaign for a DM. Honestly players have the chaos potential of doing this on their own so as designers we need to help limit how much our magic items contribute to that. But let's go from generic pieces of advice to actionable things. How personally do I go about creating a homebrew magic item?

Well as I have never written it down before bare with me for a moment. Actually you know what lets make one together right now for the 'Fun Free Stuff' page! If you aren't familiar while I'm bored and scrolling thru TikTok (follow me on there @justgayhere) I will occasionally come across something that I'm like 'aw yes this needs to be a thing' and I'll make it available for free on this here blog thing once its done. Now I don't just do magic items I've done monsters, subclasses, etc as well. But lets do the crazy cool stone that @moleculardrugs posted.

You can gain alot of inspiration and fun by just using cool things you come across as the foundation of a fun magic item for your player. When you look at that stone what do you see? Take a moment and write down 3-5 cool things you notice or think about it. I think about its cut, its color and obviously the cool patterns going on within that look like holographic magic sigils of some kind. These images shift, move and seem to meld together at points. What does that invoke in you when you apply it to a world like D&D? For me I instantly thing of the various forms of magic involved in moving or teleportation of some kind.

So I've decided that teleportation or something similar to some of the short range poofing abilities is something I want for this item. Now the research begins, for this one the most logical place to start is obviously spells. Things like misty step or thunder step for the poofings are good reads, so are the bigger ones like teleportation and plane shift. We also have monsters we can look to who have cool abilities in the same wheel house, ones like the phase spider or blink dog. Don't be afraid to dig through more there are plenty of things to pull from!

From this point if you are comfortable with it I suggest taking the wording from these to apply to your magic item, you want to keep as much of it 'on card' as possible. It cuts down on the amount of flipping or fiddling a player might have to do to be able to use it during a game. I try to help DMs to keep the game moving with the things I make because I feel your pain bro. At this point it is also completely valid to build this magic item as something that has charges to use to cast spells with effects you want and leave it at that. Don't be afraid to leverage the existing spell lists where and when you can, the language used in them has been curated over many editions to keep it within the power curve. If you are going to just use spells though pay close attention to the spell level - this will effect both the rarity level of the item as well how often the item should be able to use it before needing to be 'reset'.

Let's take a combo approach so I can show you what I mean in action. For this magic item I'm going to have a minor ability be a small poofing for when you are in trouble. To build mine I looked at the Phase Spider's 'Ethereal Jaunt', the Blink Dog's 'Teleport', the Ghost's 'Etherealness', and the Shadow Dancer's 'Shadow Jump'. I also reviewed the wording on the spells - thunder step, misty step, and dimension door.

As a bonus action, you and one additional willing creature can magically teleport up to 50 feet away to an unoccupied space that you can see. All equipment and items that you are wearing or carrying come with you.

We will put some charges on it to limit useage.

This item has 3 charges that can be used in the following ways:

Add in a few larger abilities - maybe teleportation or plane shifting.

2 charges can be spent to cast teleportation circle.

3 charges can be spent to cast plane shift

Kind of want to add in a sacrifice option where crushing the gem does something too.

You can choose to crush the gem, destroying it. Doing so permanently etches a teleportation circle centered on you that can be memorized for use with the teleportation circle spell.

But also a way to sacrifice charges for something that may save the party's life.

1 charge can be spent to save your current location in the gem's memory, you can later spend charges to teleport back to this location. A saved location can be used in conjunction with a teleportation spell you yourself casts. Once you have teleported back to the location it is wiped from the gem's memory. You can also spend a short rest to wipe a stored location from the gem's memory. This charge does not regain until the location has been teleported back to or wiped from the gem's memory.

All together that will end up looking something like this -

A big question you might have is how do you determine the rarity of an item based off of the perceived 'power level' it has. Its not a hard and fast rule but a quick way you can get a feel for where it should land is by looking at the level of spells the item uses, how often it can be used, how it effect action economy, how expensive it is AND what tier of play is it best suited for. Depending on your answer to one or all of these it will shift up and down the scale, how much each of these shifts it you'll have to learn with practice and research similar magic items. BUT a good starting point can be found in the Dungeon Master's Guide under 'Magic Item's in Ch 7. It talks about what level each rarity is associated with and how the rarity ties into your world. Start there, get comfortable with it as you learn what shifts it up and down as you make items.

For the magic item above my brain does something like this for calculating rarity level -

3 charges - 3 saved locations, or 1 saved location + 1 teleportation circle, or 1 plane shift

plane shift = 7th level spell, 250 GP + attuned to a plane; Wizard's get their first 7th level spell at 13th level

teleportation circle = 5th level spell, rare chalk worth 50 GP (consumed); Wizard's get their first 5th level spell at 9th level

bonus action ability closest to misty step = 2nd level spell

permanent teleportation circle roughly costs about (50*365) 18,250 GP or 1,825 PP and a year's worth of time

teleportation circle is normally limited to bard, sorcerer, wizard and arcana domain cleric

plane shift is normally limited to cleric, druid, sorcerer, warlock and wizard

Even halving the cost of a permanent teleportation circle and splitting the difference on the levels that Wizard's can get those spells you are still looking at a solid 'very rare' rating.

This will all seem disjointed and hard to do to at first. Its that way for everyone. But the more you do it, the more practice you gain in homebrewing items the better you will get. Soon you'll be able to look at an image and bang out a magic item for it. Or get a cool idea and be able to take it from vague concept to item card in 2 seconds flat. Designing is equal parts science and art, just like alot of things in life even if neither of those professions want to admit it. Also magic or items might have different rarity levels depending on how a DM sets up their world. Maybe teleportation is super easy and cheap to come by, that might drop this item from being very rare to uncommon. And if you ever have any questions or feel stuck feel free to reach out for some help!

With that little rambling over with, I’m JustKay your regular DM Dalliance on the web and I’ll see you next post.