The Seeker: Eldritch Artifacts

 Magic Items are really cool

I love the idea of a class who interacts with the world primarily through their craft. This post is about the seeker and their Eldritch Artifacts.

The goal of artifacts

Artifacts should offer two things:

1. A unique ability
2. A spell list including one cantrip and a spell of each level from 1st to 5th.

An artifact should offer an ability other artifacts don't. I begun the occultist with three important artifacts: The Black Mirror (Now called Magic Mirror), Claw of Obliteration, and Watcher's Eye. Admittedly, two of the three artifacts are about damage - it's my personal philosophy to offer a damage, support, and utility effect when first creating something akin to this. Let's take a brief look at each item.

Magic Mirror offers a strong utility. It provides information about each creature that fails to save against it per long rest, and it offers divination spells. A utility effect that offers no direct combat or social advantage should be very strong and tempting, so the list of creature properties you can scry is flexible and numerous.

Claw of Obliteration offers "damage". When you hit something unharmed, you do full damage. I place quotes around it because you don't deal more damage than normal, but instead increase the average damage by 50% more. How do I figure 50%? Each die has an average damage count, so let's take a d10, which has an average damage of 5.5. If you're dealing 3d10 damage to someone, that's an average of 16.5 damage. Against a full health target you'll always deal 30 damage, which is essentially a 50% increase in damage. It's not exact, but for the purpose of balance its close enough. The claw offers damage spells, as well as spells that raise the dead, as the claw is themed for undeath.

Lastly is the Watcher's Eye. This is simultaneously utility and damage. You'll always know where the target is, you ignore disadvantage with attack rolls, and ignore cover up to 3/4ths. While, again, this doesn't directly increase damage, it offers utility to increase Dormant Damage. From now on I'll use Dormant Damage when referring to an ability that increases potential damage without increasing minimum or maximum damage. The watcher eye is really powerful - it has a 10 minute duration once per short rest. Spells offered by the eye revolve around sight, such as Darkvision.

How many artifacts?

Here's a great use for negative space: I don't need to put any effort into figuring out how many artifacts you have. I'll have the class start with three, which is three spells, three cantrips, and three artifact skills. That's more than enough to start with. Then I'll increase the amount of artifacts in junction with gaining a new spell level. This solves two things: Players know when they gain a spell level they get a new artifact, and it increases how many cantrips they have available in a natural way. It also spaces out the artifact amount nicely over long periods. While this will result in a massive amount of known spells, the player can't hand pick each spell, and thusly should be fine balance wise. If the player is picking an item just for the spells I think I might be doing something wrong with the artifact skill. I want players to pick artifacts for their flavor and skill first, and spell list second.

Another design philosophy for my artifacts is I'll have any upgrade effect increase when a new spell level is gained. Example: Arcane Ward allows you to turn the requirements of any armor to Intelligence and wear it without proficiency. Because Heavy armor is valuable, it needs to come later, so I'll make the artifact grant heavy armor, but only at 5th level when you get 2nd level spells. The spells it comes with is already valuable enough. I could make it 3rd level, which is when the Artificer can use the same effect on Heavy armor, but I decided to push it to 5th level anyway to make it coincide with future artifacts. Plus, the class is already quite tanky.

Artifact effect or spell list first?

This is a hard question, and I think it can work both ways, but typically I think of a cool effect for an artifact before making the spell list. The item is the core fun of the class, so it should always be fun and useful. If I can't find the right spells I'll either create my own or adjust the flavor to fit the spell list without affecting the ability it has.

Wrap up

I think this should be good to begin with. I think the next post will be about expanding on later features.