[RPG] Can Dwarven fighters or any non-casting Class create “magic” weapons

dnd-3.5eforgotten-realms

I would like to discuss how did Bruenor Battlehammer craft Aegis-fang. According to the Forgotten Realms Campaign Manual, Bruenor does not have any spell casting class and no mention of an Inscribing Runes Feat. I am aware that a Runesmith (RoS) can imbue a Rune that can be cast by anyone, however all material components are used while inscribing said Rune. Bruenor used diamond dust, a pretty common spell component…

I have had more than one Dwarven player ask why he could not create a magic weapon when Bruenor did in an "Official" WOC Book. Do I just chalk this up to Salvators' literary license?

Best Answer

It’s just the usual conflict between rules and narrative that is all over D&D 3.5. In reality, The Crystal Shard, where the forging was first described, was written in 1988, long before the 3.5 rules were written.1

As it turns out, D&D 3.5 is not just poor at emulating all manner of characters from other media (cf. character build for Gandalf in D&D 3.5), it’s also poor at emulating characters even from its own media. The rules of D&D 3.5 just don’t line up as well as most would like with the narratives that the rulebooks and novels suggest they go with. If you follow the rules strictly and allow them to dictate the narrative setting, what you end up with is the Tippyverse, or maybe Eberron if you include an arbitrary level cap and deus ex machina dragons to keep things in line.

It is a common criticism of Forgotten Realms, for instance, that it has all these epic-level mages holing away in towers doing apparently nothing (because, by the rules, they could solve pretty much any and all problems with barely any effort, because Epic Spellcasting is broken). This is necessary to have a game since it’s not much fun to run to the nearest sympathetic archmage and have them fix it with a wave of their hand, but it causes conflict between the rules and the narrative.

The narrative-rules interactions also have problems in the reverse: the ranger class is largely supposed to let you play as Drizzt Do’Urden, but since he was a bit of a Marty Stu kind of character who could do everything, the ranger class gets a bit of everything at a drastically cut-down rate, and ends up being quite poor at doing any of those things.

So basically, what Bruenor did is not something players can do by the rules. As Ruut mentions, there are ways to create magic items without casting “spells,” and there are ways of upgrading special magic items you already have, but Bruenor wouldn’t have had those.

It is worth noting, however, that while Player’s Guide to Faerûn gives his class levels, more books were published after that time. In particular, Races of Stone was printed well after that point. It includes a battlesmith prestige class, which was likely an attempt to provide a class that could be used by Bruenor or someone like him to produce magic weapons like Aegis-fang.

  1. In fact, not only was this prior to Wizards of the Coast, who wrote 3.5 in 2003, acquiring the D&D license from TSR, this was prior to Wizards of the Coast, which was founded in 1990.