Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

As I wait for a fix for a problem I pointed out...

The Ring of Pain’s Reward is a very nasty take on the classic Ring of Vampiric Regeneration. This particular variant regenerates more for the wearer depending not just on how much damage they inflict on other sentient beings, but how much pain the other being experiences in the process. Ordinary combat transfers hit points on the order of 1 per 5 points of damage; taking called shots to vital spots or choosing weapons that inflict more painful damage (by adding barbs, poison, acid and so on) will improve the ratio; called shots with something nasty will transfer at 1 to 1.

If the wearer explicitly tortures a helpless victim to death (the long slow and agonizing way), it will regenerate lost limbs, dissolve scars, and even remove years of aging. Unlike a normal Ring of Regeneration, the wearer does not have to have suffered the damage while wearing the Ring of Pain’s Reward; one of these and a couple of dozen captured peasants are enough to heal up a whole party that’s hobbling along suffering from maiming or organ damage, and a human could stay effectively immortal by torturing one person to death every few years. Anyone benefitting from the Ring must be conscious enough to inflict pain on someone else. (Taking stimulants that would otherwise kill them and quickly setting to torture will get the job done.)

This is a very powerful item, but the behavior it encourages is thoroughly and despicably evil. (It doesn’t coerce the wearer. It doesn’t need to.) It makes a great goodie for a master villain; not only will it affect the villain’s M.O., you get to watch the players wonder how to deal with the thing once they defeat the villain and capture his treasure. For added fun, call it an artifact, make it require a special quest to destroy, and you can have random nasties show up to try and wrest it from the PCs any time things get slow (the equivalent of Raymond Chandler’s principle of having someone come through the door with a gun in his hand). By no means, however, should this be allowed into a campaign with a munchkin, unless you have a plan for helping the munchkin reform through the plotlines that will open up when they start using it.

This kind of effect is also a splendid one for an evil deity to bestow upon a morally upstanding character if the former owes the latter a boon and the latter is too proud to ask for one. (The morally upstanding character will then suddenly start spending large efforts in ways of subduing opponents while hurting them as little as possible... or become corrupted... either way, it adds to the fun of roleplaying.)

In Seas of Chaos, the party captured this from a pirate king, debated about it for a while, and handed it to Naymo, our Chaos-based shapeshifter who already had Regeneration and was least likely to be tempted by it. As expected, he scarcely used it, and wound up dipping it in a spring that was created where the tears of a god of healing fell to earth, at which point its function changed drastically: every time he used one of his innate powers to transfer someone else’s wounds to his own body (where he would regenerate them away), it “charged up” with energies that would occasionally “ground out” in various minor theurgical effects.

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

What a beautiful solution to a nasty item! I love that.

[mithriltabby]

One of the things that I’ve been enjoying in Seas of Chaos is the notion of circumstantial enchantment, where an item can acquire powers or have its current ones change or grow as a side effect of being in a very highly magical situation. (One of the classics is the sword piercing the demon’s heart and becoming more powerful because of it.) It’s a great way to reward for the roleplaying of “and this is my father’s axe and it belonged to his father before him!” and sticking to a consistent weapon rather than upgrading every time something nifty comes along: that axe that started out mundane may wind up becoming quite nifty after it cleaves enough nasty magical creatures, gets dipped in mystic pools, blessed by grateful angels, etc.