[RPG] How to you play as an intelligent item

character-creationdnd-3.5eintelligent-magic-items

One of my players desperately wants to play as an intelligent item. I know intelligent items exist as "npcs" and I was hoping for some canon way to do this for him. Or at worst home-brew it.

Character level 6 so a lot of the classes that grant demon possession of item stuff or mind swap stuff don't work great unless he pays a spellcaster to swap him into things. Are there any ways to play as an intelligent item?

Best Answer

The Sword & Sorcery book, Book of Eldritch Might III: The Nexus, written by Monte Cook (one of the authors of 3e DMG), has 3.5e-compatible rules for intelligent magic items as NPCs. These rules contain a 20-level class for intelligent items, skills and feats. The catch is that the items cannot gain XP themselves, but need to be fed by others; but you could think of something as the DM.

As an "official" example guideline; the TSR AD&D 2e sourcebook Books of Artifacts has a short section that describes the way intelligent magical items are made. For this a high-level spellcaster has to put her own life force into the item. The caster looses all prior race and class features and all physical statistics; effectively starting the game as a new character with 0 XP. She retains alignment, can speak in previously known languages. As an item it only gains XP for activities it participates in; for example a "sword only earns XP for slaying monsters", not from achieving story goals. At each 100k XP earned, it gains one new power.

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