The Left Hand Key
Origins and Backstory
The Left Hand Key was originally created by a High Cleric of a Cult of Undeath Worship, whose soul became trapped within it after they blasphemed against their god. This act awakened the object and imbued it with a singular purpose: to spread undeath and blight the living.
Functions
The Left Hand Key is a (un)holy symbol and powerful magic artifact.
Alignment: chaos
Intelligence: 12
Egoism: 4
Extraordinary Ability: telepathy
Languages Spoken: the language of the undeath
Passive Abilities
It desecrates an area of 600 feet around it.
It causes unnatural mist (blue-green color, caustic, fetid odor) to rise around it.
It attracts negative energy.
The Mist
Once per exploration turn, if indoors, roll 1d4 x 10 for visibility within 300 feet of Key.
Any plant life within 600 feet withers and dies from exposure to the mist.
Any teleportation spell (including Dimension Door) or spell that opens gateways to other locations or planes, if cast within the mist, will either transport or open up a gateway to the Negative Energy Plane.
Negative Energy
Once per month, in the presence of any dead, the Key will channel the negative energy it has absorbed, into an “Animate Dead” effect, as per the spell, creating 2d6 HD worth of undead. These undead are loyal to the Key itself, not the current wielder of the Key.
Active Abilities
The Key can function as a holy symbol.
Its wielder can see through the mist.
Once per week, the wielder can use the Key to cast “Animate Dead,” per the spell, creating 2d6 HD worth of undead.
Note: Undead created through the Key’s power are ultimately loyal to the Key itself, not the wielder of the Key, While the Key and wielder’s aims and purposes are aligned, the Key will transmit commands from the wielder to the undead thralls. However, should the aims and purposes of the Key and wielder diverge, the undead will always obey the Key over the wielder.
Full Transcript
Note: This is an unedited AI-powered transcription so it will be full of errors and misunderstandings. I may come back to clean it up, or not, but here it is, warts and all.
Happy Tuesday.
Everybody can't tell up in the background, I'm in my country, my last well, I'll leave tomorrow and we're trying to do some spring stuff around here. And it's cold.
Why?
Actually colder inside than it is outside, though. The I heard the low tonight is going to be 30 degrees.
So it'll be cold. It'll be cold everywhere.
Hope you can see me, hear me, all that jazz. All right, with a whopping five votes, let's hit this, refresh this one last time just to see.
Close the voting.
We got a magic item.
Closing the poll is closed.
Not a particularly close race if you're wondering what the poll was all about. So this stream, which is, I guess the second one, and what I hope to do ongoing for as long as I can manage, is that we can create stuff as community stuff. We need stuff we'd like for our games, real practical stuff. So for this, I don't have an agenda in mind in terms of, oh, I need to have this, I need to have that. So I threw the poll out there and didn't get a ton of response back. But I know everyone interacts in a different way. And I know for some folks, like for me, for YouTube, I usually watch YouTube on my TV, so it takes a lot of effort. If someone puts something in their community tab on YouTube, I won't usually see it because that's not usually how I interface with YouTube for other folks don't want to log into other spots, I get it. I'm going to try to find some tools. But trying to do things kind of on the cheap really means utilizing technology and apps and things I already have at my disposal in the forum I already have. And I would like more people to come and hang out DND do stuff. So it's there in the forms, but that might change. In any case, we got a magic item. Now the next option hey, Krista. Hey, son of sofa man. Now the next thing is, well, we need a magic item, or we've decided on a magic item, but what kind of magic item? And one of the thing I'm going to have to work out over time is.
Coming up with tools because I.
Simply don't have I don't have any kind of oracle set up for asking questions like this. I thought I might go to the Tome of Adventures line. If I can find it, maybe I can open it up and see. Maybe we can roll some dice.
Oh, I think this is the old one I pulled up. Where's the new one per chance? Might have to sort that out.
Might have to sort that out another time. So what do we got? So folks who are in the chat, what kind of item?
Whoops what kind of item do we want? Just ask some questions. Maybe I should use a list. That's better. So maybe the questions we want to ask ourselves is what form does it take? Does it take? What function does it have? Who made it? For what purpose was it made? That's probably some good things to get started.
All right, so Christer says, how about an item which incurs some sort of curse over an area, something that PC needs to remove to save the area? It's a good idea. Here's some tea for the working man. Hey, Jason. Something in what makes undead spawn generates mists, et cetera.
Okay, well, all right, let's see. What function does it have? Why did I delete that? Can I expand this now or what? I'm going to have to drag you.
Out so I can mess with you more easily.
That's that okay. That's what I want to do.
All right, so let's see something that makes undead spawn generates mists, et cetera.
Oh.
Multirminus is semi cursed. Are there faves, like, plus two armor that increases a wandering counter frequency? Well, we'll go with the let's see. Well, semi cursed is interesting. Let's put that over here.
Maybe it has some benefit also. But it's semi cursed.
And maybe the curse, the curse part.
Something that spawns undead generates mists.
What would the curse be? Maybe it desecrates the area. I guess if it's semi cursed, it's got to have one good thing. One.
Say, power. And then let's call that and then we'll have a curse. And so the curse desecrates desecrates the area.
I like we'll do some with the mist.
Mist is good.
DND add some. I mean, there's visibility issues. It's also just creepy, especially if you're in a building or something and there's mist. Or maybe it's outside somewhere.
Causes unnatural let one n unnatural missed. No, it's not. Is it two N's? That's what I had. Okay.
Unnatural missed. Maybe the color is weird. Call it, let's see, I don't know.
Some kind of blue green. All right, so Christopher's got some missed notes, don't know what the power is yet. And then I don't need this anymore. So on the mist, is that a lot?
Roll a D ten veron to see how far you could see the mist swirling. I'm wondering if, practically speaking, that's a lot because everybody's rolling extra D ten S. And then it might be.
I'm.
Wondering if it might be a little bit too it gets a little too complicated. I like the idea that it hey, squirrel. Harmon. I like the idea that affects visibility, for sure, but maybe just once per.
Exploration turns.
What are we saying? Let's see what's our normal DND? Here's the other thing which we have to think about. What do we really think of in terms of visibility? So part of my thinking is it could be outdoors. Could be indoors, right? So if it's indoors, maybe outdoors, it might probably won't be that much mist unless it's super powerful because it's just winds and things are just going to picking it up and sweeping it away. So indoors, I guess.
If indoors roll.
What do we think?
What's our normal?
I guess we think at our max line of sight, I guess we don't really have one, so maybe it's easier just to say what your line of sight is here.
So we can roll.
And how swingy do we want to get? Hey, Terrence. We haven't missed much. We're working on a magic item, the nature of it. We're currently on. We don't know what it looks like yet. I have these questions here I came up with what forms to take. We don't know yet. We're working on its functions. There's a curse. It has some kind of power. The curse is that it desecrates the area and then it also causes an unnatural mist. Now, in terms of the mist, it affects visibility. And because it kind of swirls and ebbs and flows, it's something we're going to do once every ten minutes or so. But you could probably expand it to once every hour, really, depending on how gritty you want to, how detailed and potentially complex you want to get with it. Derp says, have the myth, make a layer action. Maybe have a couple of different options. Each initiative at 20.
Wow.
I might say. So what I would say instead, Derp, is if we're going to do something like layer actions or some equivalent, I would have that to someone mentioned. Who was it mentioned above that null terminator said that it's speaking to them as a kind of a holy symbol.
Which.
You could put here in the powers. Right. And so maybe that any kind of special powers it would give would be on the person who activates it or otherwise or does something with it, somehow engages with it. And then we would attach that power to them, which we could put in this powers area. Right. So that the person can do things. So for visibility and I'll say also the powers, I have this keyboard that's not great contrast in the keys and the colors, especially when I don't have a lot of bright light on it, which I don't right now. All right, so apologies for misspelling and having to kind of come back and.
Correct myself so wielder can see through the mist. I think that's good.
Once per expiration turn. If indoors roll, let's call it gosh.
One D, four times ten. For visibility within I don't know.
We'll call it we'll make it fairly sizable, 300ft of.
Object.
We don't have a name yet either.
I didn't what form does it take?
We also didn't even ask what it's called.
What is it called? Can I undo that? There we go. How did I get that? I want that underneath. Oh, there it goes. Okay. Oh, sorry. Yeah.
Happy to zoom in.
Hopefully that helps.
So we got so far, we don't have a name. We don't know what form it takes holy symbol. Now that I'm zoomed in, I can.
See that I misspelled it.
Holy symbol could be in many shapes, right? So that's got that power that presumably some sort of cleric or anti cleric can wield it and by doing so, they can see through the mist. It desecrates the area. It causes the unnatural mist. We can change this color. I just think it's interesting to give these things colors. Maybe even smells. Sure. As always. Just let me know.
Apologies.
1000 apologies. So the curse desecrates the area, causes the unnatural mist. I suppose depending on who's got a hold of it, it may or may not be a curse. But from the player's perspective, from a neutral, OSR, good standing party, right. That is a curse. Maybe it had some effect on the wielder also. That could also be a curse. What other powers might it have? What could somebody do with this thing? Terrence asked if this creation is an effect or side effect. Well, it's kind of I suppose you could say it's a side effect. It's always on wherever this thing is around. Because the original concept that Christopher was saying this is something that affects an area that the party might have to go remove it from someplace or someone. So that cursing. It's always on. It's not that somebody chooses to desecrate. It's just on. Christopher says spawn skeletons. I'm not a huge fan of just, like, the monster spawning device. I wonder if there's a way maybe we can maybe we can write it up in a way that is less to me. And again, this is just a taste thing, right? It feels kind of video game to me. It's like, oh, this thing and skeletons are I mean, obviously the game we don't have to we don't have to show it spawn skeletons. But I'd rather give it something maybe that can work on you, put it in a suitable environment. So, for example, if it's in an area with skeletons, maybe it attracts negative energy. And that negative energy we could think about maybe what that does and maybe that so you can kind of I feel like we can kind of get towards a somewhat spawning undead without it being just like undid or popping out of nothing. But if you were to take this to a graveyard and hang around with it for a while maybe we can come up with a mechanic of in the presence of the dead. Over time, we could roll some dice and it will transform X amount of those undead into so many skeletons or zombies or something else. Christopher says it kills plant life so bad, guys, keys to make crops fail or something.
Let's see.
Terrence says maybe it's an explicitly evil chaotic for a resurrection item designed to awaken an ancient evil. Like it just cast raised dead on its own. Yeah, kind of.
Yeah.
The idea would be that maybe we could roll a die once per month. And any undead with any dead, any forms, maybe you can even roll dice. Either it attracts some kind of formless undead, like a ghost, or in the presence of corpses or skeletons of some kind, undead will form. So we kind of get to the spawning undead without it being like a spawn box in a video game, if that makes sense. Frederick says an evil cleric occultist raises the Dead detect party.
Yeah.
So there are two ways to look at it. One, we could make it a power, which means that this is something that the anti cleric or the evil cleric will use actively. And then there's the stuff, which I guess we're calling the curse. Maybe I should just call it.
Here.
I'll do this instead. I'll change these. It's not really a curse in the.
Sense I think no, I want to go. No. Why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? Not you. You.
I want to change that, but it's not letting me go in and change those.
Okay, there it is. Here we go. So we'll call this passive powers, right? And then we'll call these active powers. Passive powers.
Happening all the time. Active powers. It takes a command, an interface, the will of a wielder to do. Son of Sofman wants to call me Mist caller. At this point, the mist seems kind of like just the least of its.
Effects, but we can put it out there. I'll just put in what form we.
Can think of the form.
So let's see.
Maybe it's got once per.
So that.
The user can use raised dead once per night.
And then we'll put a little note.
Here for the negative energy aspect.
Just so I can remember what we're talking about. Once per month, the object let's see. In the presence of Dead, the object will channel the negative energy it has absorbed.
I'm not going to try to write it illegally.
It's right until he raised dead effect, as per the spell.
I don't have the books in front.
Of me to look up.
Light spreader is another option. I guess you're looking at the plant thing. I'll put that under side effect.
I'll put that as a name.
I feel like the theme we're looking on is more undead as opposed to just killing things. I'll put that in part of the mist.
That's a mist effect. Any plants life within 600ft withers and dies from exposure to the mist. All right, so we've got keep putting.
My glasses in my mouth.
I need to not do that.
Mist being a doorway to a darker dimension.
That's interesting. I wonder I say with some thunder. Let's see. Let me see. Where is my hold on a minute. Let me see. Where is Vxpert set? That's what I want. I open that here. Okay. Just want to look at the I.
Know I can go to other sources. I'm just using VX because it's easy. I'm wondering if we so what I'm going to think of is that.
All right. Clerical spells, cure light wounds, detect evil tech magic.
Light protected from evil purity.
Purify food, DND water remove.
I can zoom in on this too. Blight, no trip to alignment. I'm not saying it has to just know clerical spells, I'm just trying to get some ideas here. So we've got the Raised Dead is.
A fifth level spell. So that's a serious business.
Maybe it's got to be rarer than that. Once per day, once per night.
Maybe is a lot.
Maybe once per some other maybe.
I don't know. We'll see.
Okay, and then what do we got?
Under wizard stuff?
Where do we start to get transportation magic?
Let's see. Second level, third level, fourth level, dimension door. What do they say about dimension door? I forgot.
These are all in they're not in alphabetical order. They're in.
Level order.
Okay, so Dimension Door says the spell will transfer the casting creature to any place within 300 DND 60ft.
So we're going to add a little quark here. Any teleportation spell and you know, including Dimension Door OSR spell that let's see, opens gateways to other locations or planes. If cast within the Mist.
Will either.
Transport or open up a gateway to.
I don't know, what do we saying? Darker dimension to dimension. I'm just going to call it to the Dark Dimension, whatever it is. One would have to flesh out what that means. So instead of giving because I don't want to you know, the thing is like I mean look, we could just pile on an endless bunch of powers.
But.
Don'T want to get too crazy. This already does a fair amount of stuff. But I like the idea that if you're in here and you're battling this cleric and things are going poorly, you decide to dimension door, teleport out or do whatever, and instead of you getting home wherever you thought you would go yeah, I'll put that in there. Call it the plane of the dead. Though the weird thing is, I don't know, maybe it has to be somewhere else because I don't think that a Hades like god would be down with items that are creating undead. I don't think of undead as being a thing that is a natural partner with the God of the Dead because you're kind of robbing them in some ways of some of their you're taking away age 80 Hades Agency. But we can keep it in there for right now. We can switch it up or do something else.
So we're not giving it.
So the Mist has some really interesting effects. Visibility. It can go down, potentially be pretty poor. Plant life is going to wither though. This is more the plant life, practically speaking. Players aren't really going to be going to care, but it's going to certainly be the kind of canary in the coal mine of, oh, this thing is here. And then the teleportation spell it's one of those fun things that you could have this item in a game and it might never come up that the party ends up doing something. But if they do, if they either grabbed it and decide to teleport back home, oh, look, we got the thing. Let's teleport back home, or we got to get out, or something like that. It's a really fun moment when it's.
Like, no, because of that mist, this.
Does not work the way you think it's going to work. And then chaos ensues. Do we feel like, in terms of the powers, I don't know. Once per night, raise the dead is pretty darn strong. Maybe I'll say once per week. When you want to give it anything.
Else to do, we go back to the.
Go back to our spell list. One of the things that might be something kind of lower level, maybe there's something can do.
So we could take I don't know what happened there, but full moon.
Yeah, I wonder. Yeah. Let's read Raised Dead, because one thing I try to get away from sometimes is making it rely on combat.
Right.
So, obviously, of course, there are going to be situations in which this cleric could kill somebody and not go into combat, but I don't want to necessarily make it kind of necessarily combat oriented that this is something that they're going to be doing. Strike down someone DND raise them. I mean, that is cool, though. I like it. But I always had that little pause of, like, do I want to make it sort of turn the focus to being combat? I like these other things we have because they're not really they're great atmospheric stuff, they're great prep stuff, but this is not the do that sacrifice is good. Let's read the Raise Dead spell, and then let's see if either we could tweak it or what does it mean? Okay, so raise Dead by means of the spell, the Claire can raise any human, dwarf, halfling, or elf from the dead. So right there, it's humanoid. So we got that covered.
And let's see.
An 8th level cleric can raise a Dead up to four days dead for each level. The cleric above 8th, four days are added at the time. So basically, the more powerful it is, powerful cleric, the more Dead something can be. A raised character's one hit point cannot fight. Cast spells usabilities, carry heavy loads, or move more than half speed. These effects will be healed after two weeks of complete bed rest. And this healing cannot be affected by magic. A raised Dead cast against one undead creature will slay it unless it makes its saving throw versus spells. All right, so actually, we don't really want raised Dead, because I was thinking of raised dead like undead. But the raised Dead this is more like a resurrection type deal.
The verse of the spell Finger of.
Death creates a death ray that will kill any one creature. There is no effect if the creature makes a saving throw versus death ray. Lawful clerics will only use Finger of Death in life or death situations. So we really don't want raised dead. We really want like a create undead type deal, which I don't know if they have in BX. Yeah, I was with you. I was thinking raise dead, but yeah, it's a different kind of raising. I don't have the stuff, so in front of mind that I thinking about.
It, what else do we have?
So where would be the kind of rate do we have a.
No, but.
We could do some kind of create undead spell.
Or effect.
I mean, it's not even a spell. This is an effect, so we don't.
Even have to to do it, and.
Then we'll just you have the same thing. I don't think I'm not sure it actually exists in the expert set. I'll look for it. Maybe it's unless it's under wizard. Okay, we'll start from the top. We've got maybe death spell.
Death spell magic. None of those Wall Stone teleport tolerance magic. No.
Oh, there it is. Anime Dead.
All right, so it's their fifth level magic user spells.
Let's see what animate dead does.
Let's go down there and read animate Dead. Did I pass it already? There it is.
All right, this spell allows the caster to make animated skeletons or zombies for normal skeletons or dead bodies within the range. All right, so we use a spell as our reference then. It already has the built in stuff of it needs to be around it's not spawning it from thin air. It's spawning it from it's pulling them into material, if you will. These animated dead will obey the caster until they're destroyed or dispelled by magic spelled by a cleric or dispel magic.
Okay, what level?
As a I guess we'll say twelve.
I like that. 1212 is a good number. Or should it be something like seven?
Or maybe we can just give it a number. We'll call it two D six.
We'll say two d six. So yeah, I keep going to the wrong page. Okay. Animate. That.
Abnomate.
Animate goodness. All right, then we got over here. We'll switch this up.
I keep doing that.
I can, like, off one letter on my keyboard. Come on. Okay, for the spell animates two D six HD worth of undead. All right, so we got a couple of things.
We don't have a name yet. We don't know what form it takes. Ultimately, its function is it's a holy.
Symbol, and powerful artifact is a chaos. I'll call up an unholy symbol in a sense. Unholy symbol and powerful magic. Oh, goodness. Keyboard magic. Artifact alignment. Come on. Where are my glass? Alignment is chaos.
Where's my hold on, I got to.
Pull something else out here. No.
Guys got any other ideas here. I'm just going to pull out.
Was that monsters and treasure? Right? Is that what I'm trying to do?
I think that's got the.
For magic swords. I think it's in here.
And I'll use we can roll up some stuff.
Right? Does it have the magic? Yes, it does. Okay, so we'll pull this out.
I didn't know I could do that. This is interesting, actually going to put.
A reader in there. Holy moly. Well, looky, dar, I didn't know about that. Score.
I wish I'd known this before that.
I could embed PDFs in here. Son of them are going to none. All right, this reader. Oh, I can zoom in. Oh, my gosh. Garsh.
So very convenient, though. I really just wanted.
Scrolling. Scrolling. I really want to keep going. Here we go. Into the treasure types.
All right, so we don't know the form yet. I'm not going to use this to do the form, but I'm thinking it will.
So it's got a chaos alignment I want to use. All right, so we got that. So it's chaotic. Here we go. So we're going to roll.
Should we set as intelligence or pick? Because one of the things I like, I think, especially with the idea that just sitting in a place, even if nobody's wielding it, it might just create undead, is that it's got its intelligence, and so if nobody's around, it will command its own undead. It will do the thing it needs doing. It's not afraid to get its own non hands dirty. In terms of well, we know it's.
Got.
Active powers between the active and the passive powers. Well, holy symbol is not really I.
Wouldn'T call that a power.
Definitely. Once this got one power animate dead, two powers desecrates the enemy. Third, the mist four tracks the negative energy.
So it's got at least four powers.
Which means it's got to have at least ten. What do they have as extraordinary abilities?
Flying, healing. We're going to say it's intelligence twelve.
What are we thinking? It doesn't have to be brilliant to be vicious. No, but the more powers it has terrence in this system we're using here, the more powers we're kind of backfilling it. Right? So if you were doing this for a magic sword, which this is intended, you would roll its intelligence and then figure out how many powers it has from there. We're doing a little bit backwards. We have determined it has three or four powers, and now we're backfilling what that would mean in terms of intelligence. So you're right in that it doesn't have to be smart to be vicious, but in this case, it kind of has to be the way at least per the white box. It's kind of got to be smart to be powerful. Intelligence twelve. Which makes it something that you don't necessarily want to mess with.
Hey, Phil. How's it going?
And now we've got a couple of.
Things whoops I didn't mean to do that either.
That's the one thing we have scroll.
Bars and then scroll bars. It's hard to okay, so we pretty.
Much already have it. Let's see how many languages it speaks. Or should we give it I think I'm just going to go ahead and give it.
I'm going to say telepathy. It's got telepathy.
And then we can speak well, we.
Can roll to see oh, stop doing that, please.
You can roll to see how many languages it speaks.
Where is my where's Dice Maiden? All right, you can't see Dice Maiden.
But I'm rolling it right now, and.
I need to roll a d $100. I got 33. One language. One language. What's a good language? I suppose common.
We're keeping it very generic. Right. And I would encourage you, if you're taking this to use in your own game, don't use common unless you want to. There's something like if we had a language of the dead, I would say, oh, it speaks the language of the dead. I mean, I suppose we could still give it that.
Sure. I'm going to call it Language of the Dead.
OSR, maybe.
Undead.
Negative. Negative. Abyssal Terrace says you hear a darkly ominous chuckle in your mind.
Why a chuckle? Why is it chuckling?
Is this a situation where it's in the next room and the party's fumbling trying to get the door, figure out what to do with the door? DND they're failing their breakdown doors checks, and they're just rolling terribly. And so it's chuckling at them from the next room.
Okay, so coming back to this, is.
There anything else we want to be?
We got that. Here we go. Egoism. I'll put that under.
I got to stop putting my glasses in my mouth.
Egoism.
Okay, so the white box is talking about intelligent, magical swords, but I like to use these for magical items of all kinds. So I'm going to read these, but we're going to swap out sword for this thing or for just any item in general. Only something with intelligence, seven or more will have an egoism rating. Egoism ranges from one to twelve. The higher the number, the greater the ego of the item. The egoism of the item will cause it to do the following lead its user past better items, lead its user into great danger in order to well, I guess this one's particular for swords, but basically want to lead it potentially lead its user into great danger in order to exalt in whatever its function is. So for this, if this item had a high egoism, it might want to lead the cleric to where a bunch of dead bodies are so that it can do its thing. That would be the equivalent here. Allow itself to be captured by the highest level creature or character, which is closer to its station. So this thing, maybe it was originally a very powerful cleric item, so it's going. To want to get back to a very powerful cleric, and it's not going to be satisfied if your first level cleric has it, require a share of captured treasure be given to it in the form of better stuff. Interesting. So maybe in this so it's talking about swords, talking about wanting a better scabbard or some magical devices to guard it. In this case, maybe you'd think of a case, something you carried in the box that it goes in all this stuff. Obviously, the magical devices and things would be things that it would want. Also. Whenever any situation arises where any of the above possibilities exist, the egoism of the item comes into play. It is always exerted in its relationship with its user, although the true rapport although true rapport may be gained if the alignment and aims of the character or user coincide with the origin or purpose of the item. The determination of each of these factors is as follows. Okay, so I'm not going to really go too far in the mechanics here, but it's just kind of what happens.
With.
What happens in different situations with the egoism. So what are its purposes? So we think of the purpose of the item, which I think I have.
I thought I had it. Yeah.
For what purpose?
No, sorry. For what purpose was it made?
I think it's to raise undead.
Raise undead. Here we go. Put this in here and Blight, the.
Living insert cackling sounds at the end of that.
And then do we have anything else? No, we don't.
Okay, so we don't.
How do we calculate the egoism? Was there a table here or what? DND I miss that.
I guess we can just roll two.
D, six or one to twelve.
So I guess it's a basically, the idea here is you're supposed to add the intelligence and the egoism together. And this is what's kind of in these little sub paragraphs here talking about what happens when the item wants to push its own agenda, when there's some kind of potential conflict. I guess I'll just roll a D twelve, and we'll take that as the egoism.
Like, I think too much of it at the moment. Four. Okay.
What other ideas do we have about this?
Speak to me. Speak. Just going to do some formatting here. This is a powerful item, but it's not without its cost.
Even a reasonably powerful creature could end up being controlled by it rather than doing the controlling.
Okay.
So the couple of things we do need I like that kind of backstory.
I don't think I had an origin or did I? I think I had I kind of.
Had who made it?
All right, this can go in the garbage. So the objects original owner owner's soul was imprisoned within the object after after they after they last fiend against their god. So we still don't know.
We still don't have who made it.
Oops, but we'll put this in there. Also, throw this. Okay.
What is it? We got to think of what form. What does this holy symbol look like? Or unholy symbol look like?
What?
What is it? What's the shape of it? What's this physical we need some physical characteristics. What does it look like? What is it? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? How does it taste?
All right. Originally created by a high cleric of an of a we'll call it a cult of undeath worship.
Terrence likes the idea. The spirit within the item has a hard numeric goal of undead to create, to release itself. I don't know if a hard numeric goal, but maybe it just has to keep doing it. It'll be weird if it's like, oh, I did 666, and now I get out.
Taste. Charcoal berry fin.
I don't even know what that is. Is that a breakfast cereal for monsters?
Part of what was it? Part of a balanced breakfast. Charcoalberry fin flavored.
The newest flavor coming to Lucky charms.
Charcoalberry Finn.
All right, we need to know what it looks like. I mean, there's a cross. There's kind of ANC like things, which is kind of a cross still.
What are some symbols of death? What kind of symbols of death do we have? All right, I'm going to put this pop this out. It's a koolaid flavor.
Sounds, I guess.
I don't doubt it.
All right, so I don't want something super obvious. I kind of like, maybe like a life symbol that's upside down or inverted somehow.
Actually, maybe we'll do life in art. The tree of life. Yeah, ANC got it.
I'd love to see something that we.
Could kind of reverse in a way, but these don't look super reversible.
I mean, reverse in a way where it's not like, oh, it's an ONC upside down. Probably need to play around with some of these.
Something skeletal.
Army said skeletal arm in the hand of a man wired together with lead.
Okay. All right, let's see if I can.
Find a picture just to put in.
Here until I can generate something aben abid DND. Oh, God. This keyboard. Okay, let's see what did it. Or play on the trope of inversion.
Have it as a large old key used as a lock.
That's interesting, too. Well, we can look at both of them, but I'll take your delta arm.
And hand.
Wired together with lead, a.
Golden dove that seeps blood from the eyes.
Terrence whoa.
Sophomore says I have mid journey generating image for inverted symbol of death.
That's true.
I could do that. I'll put one in real quick in mid journey, and if something good comes.
Out, I'll drop it. Let's see. All right, so we're talking about hey.
Midjourney, imagine.
A an inverted I don't.
Think this is going to come out. I feel like the you always got to massage these prompts, and I feel like I'm going to get stuff like a black and white image that's been let me try something here.
A holy symbol made of an arm bone and a arm, a skeletal arm and hand fired with lead. Inverted symbol of life. We'll see what it comes up with.
I guess I'm good. I will.
Oh, I typed something in wrong. Yeah, I did. My bad. Hold on a minute.
Redo. I need a redo.
Misa.
Okay, we'll see what happens with that.
If I get something good in the.
Next minute or so. What else have we got?
Okay, what else do we have left?
So we need a name. Still miss caller blade spreader.
So far we've got this.
I'll see if Mid journey gives anything better or different. We got functions. It's an unholy symbol and powerful magic artifact. It has a chaos alignment. Intelligence is twelve, which means it's very intelligent. It's got an egoism of four, which.
Is mill the road a little bit.
Less than mill the road. So it's able to work with others. It has telepathy and it speaks the language of the undead actively. It's a holy symbol obviously if used by a cleric wielder can see through the mist that it creates through its passive powers and then once per week they can animate dead and then passively it's going to desecrate the area that it's in causes the unnatural mist and attracts negative energy. And we have some notes on the negative energy that once per month it's going to just on its own it's going to cast an animate dead spell, animate dead effect as per the spell. And then when you do that you're going to roll two D six to see how many hit dice of undead are made. And then the mist. If you're in the mist and you're not the holder of the item, then your visibility is going to be one d four times ten and you roll once per exploration turn to see because all the swirling and comings and going to the mist, any plant life within 600ft is going to wither and die from exposure. And then if you cast you're unlucky enough to cast a teleportation type spell including like dimension door or any kind of gate type spell instead you're going to be taken and we could probably change this to the negative energy plane maybe is a better.
Energy plane.
So you're going to get hijacked going over there and then who made it? It was originally created by a high cleric of a cult of undeath worship and then the backstory was the object's original owner's soul was imprisoned within the object after they blasphemed against their god and then it was the purpose that was made for which it is striving to complete is to raise undead and blight.
The living son of sophomore man says we need new names.
Well I'm all ears. So let's have it. Let me check on Mid journey to see if I got anything interesting?
I got a few. Well, let's see. That work. That didn't work. Hold on a minute. Let me paste.
So here's what Mid Journey came up with. Any of those ink pen says, why not teleport them to insert undeath DeeDee's plane? I mean, you can we're being very generic at this point. So I don't know what an undeath DeeDee's plane is, but just in my mind, I connect undeath with negative energy. So the negative energy plane is would be the DeeDee of Undeath's plane. But if they have their own domain residence somewhere, yeah, you should insert that instead. But just because I'm being very generic and I'm not trying to create, at least not today, a god and everything else on top of everything, I'm just using negative energy plane as a stand in. But absolutely put in your plane of choice. Yeah. You would take this and do with it what you will. Now, in terms of if this are going to put this into some kind of book or something, then there would be setting information attached to it. But just for today, since we're just working on the item, I'm not trying to get into the weeds on things because we could endlessly get in the weeds and all kinds of stuff, but.
For now, we'll do this.
All right, so what are folks liking the which one do people like? The left hand of darkness.
OOH, I like that's.
Would that mean that we would do this one because it's a left hand, or do we still like the two hands? Which one of these? I'll generate a couple more because why not?
Actually, hold on a second. Let me just see something first. I'm on the latest. Okay, so, yeah, let's I'm having Mid.
Journey do another couple.
I suppose. What are some other holy symbols? Look at Catholic. They got lots of holy symbols, don't they want?
So there's the idea of the key. I'm thinking more physical things, not this kind of thing.
I was hoping more for what would be I don't know if this will get me anything. I don't think this is getting me anywhere that I want to go. I have to figure out what things they're called.
I mean, like, if they had, like, scepters and things like that, they're all pretty neat. Two hands wins between the two picks.
Well, I actually had more than two picks.
There's actually four here. So we're not dealing with the skeleton.
Heads like the two hands.
I got one more set from Mid Journey. These are all one handers.
All right, so before we make a.
I mean, not even really truly final, but just eight.
And here's the second. So let me put these next to each other. Okay. So.
You still like this one the best, or one of these newcomers went out. I do like some of these extra detail on some of these.
That one's really creepy. Talisman.
Oh, I see in the prompt.
You mean I could try one more set.
I wonder if Talisman gets you more jewelry types, though.
That's not bad.
Do we see it as more of something that the guy's waving around or something that he's just kind of got around his neck? But I'll try Talisman, and we'll get.
One last set in here.
This one I like that it's complete.
I mean, this is nice complete, too.
Because it's only got three fingers and.
The thumb, which is kind of creepy. Interesting. A miter also good. This one shows the bottom, too. Let's see. Mid journey is working.
Mid Journey waiting on Mid Journey. Any last things here? What do we like about do we like that Left Hand of Darkness for the name? Does anybody else have names they like better or just other ideas to throw in the mix?
Let's see.
Top right.
Bottom left, old bottom left. Okay, this one's kind of cool. And it's got that left hand, right? That's your left hand.
I do like the the one with the two hands is kind of cool, though. It's weird, but weird, I think is good.
I don't know.
I feel like I could sell myself on just about all of them. Parents likes these evil hats.
Let's see.
No, we're still waiting on Mid Journey.
For our last set. Son of Soviet.
I like the idea of using the name to subvert expectations, perhaps take it even a step further and have the name unrelated to the item at all, like Hands of Providence or something like that. So I think there'd probably be a couple of names, right? Because I could see here we have to I don't say I want to say be careful, but we have a couple of things, right. So I doubt in the lore that the original owner called it the Hands of Providence if they didn't mean it that way. Now, for them, Providence, you can get into some fun of well, for them, Providence means something else. Like, maybe the way to think about it is say, well, what would be good? What's a neutral kind of word that we can look at and say, like, destiny would be one, right? The Left Hand of Destiny. Like OOH.
What's that?
Well, the original user believed that the destiny of the world was to be embroiled in undeath, and someone else might think very differently of it. But unless it's something that someone is deliberately, in time through the ages, decided to DND. It could be decided to I got to rehabilitate the name for some reason. Then maybe they would, but I don't know. They would just take on a name opposite to itself. But we could think about, like, what would the person who made it? Because Left Hand of Darkness is cool, but it's highlighting the sort of danger terror of the thing, right? It's evilness, but maybe what would somebody call it if they didn't think that that was evil. They might not call it the Left Hand of Darkness if they are like but the darkness to them isn't dark. It's dark to us. It's not dark to them. Maybe something like the Left Hand of I don't know, I'm not sure what it be, but I think that might be a good way to look at it. But I don't know that someone just make like, a trixie name, like Ha, like the Cape of Good Hope kind of thing, like to try to trick people to get it. Because remember, this thing can just generate undead from wherever it is, and it's fairly powerful. So I think that people would be trying to I mean, if you're an evil cleric and you know this thing's out there, you'd probably be trying to.
Get a hold of it.
So I don't know if it's sense if it's kind of trying to and DND, how would it trick people to it?
I'm not sure.
So I don't know if they would kind of try to it or somebody would try to change the name specifically, but I could see it being that it sounds good to them and it can sound good to somebody else, but then when you get the context, you're like, oh, they meant this in a bad way.
Yes.
Left handed path is definitely a nickname for evil magic. Yeah, like sinister right, sinister left handed. Okay, so here's our last two, this area.
Well, one of them is kind of.
Cool because it's a little bit more abstracted. All right, these will be the last ones. I know. We're overtime. We're in overtime.
All right.
So this one's kind of neat only because the thing I like about this one is just that I like that they abstracted it for whatever reason. This one came up with the it's kind of a hand, but it's not literally a hand.
That's kind of interesting.
I don't know where it got the ball thing from. Curious to see what its references is playing out for Talisman. This one super creepy with the skull kind of in the hand. It's got the left hand again, I didn't tell it left hand. It's doing left hand. Seems to be emphasizing left hand all on its own. So miss Rule number 104 naming things is difficult. I like the idea of keeping the left hand. So maybe we just got to think of the left hand.
Of what?
I mean, I like left hand of darkness, but if we want to think of something that's in a sense tricky or something that maybe we could play with having the double meanings, then maybe.
Is there something here? Oh, there is something here, and I didn't mean it to be top right. Yeah, that one does have some cool stuff.
I like it in terms of you can see DND, it looks like they almost made it bronze or something.
It's cool and it's got the skull.
It's got this funky stuff.
Then this one still is cool.
I don't know. There's a lot of neat stuff. This is one of those things that the fun things with generators like this is that you could sit there and get a bunch of images and you're going to get a bunch of stuff that's really cool. And then it's almost hard to just pick one because they've all got some neat stuff, neat elements.
All right, we are past the hour. We're actually fairly well past the hour.
I'll play around with this some more. I'll post the stuff. I'll post what we have so far in the forums. So go to forms hex press, and in this, I do a topic for every stream. In this stream topic, I will post these images. I will post what we came up with and then we can continue discussing and potentially workshopping these things a bit. Oh, Starkey.
Oh, cool.
Like Starkey. Starkey's Machine. I know it's Starkey and Hutch. I like it.
Ink Pen.
But yeah, definitely. If I had a name that was two words put together like that, I would totally be trying to fit that in all kinds of things.
All right, folks.
Well, this was good.
This was good.
We don't have the name yet, but we will continue working on it. But I like what we've got. And next week so I will put the poll up for next week, either this afternoon or tomorrow. So stay tuned for that. If you have a chance, come over to the forums. Yes, you have to make an account, I apologize for that. But then you'll get to interact with everything anyway, which we're doing. And then you can vote on next week's. And it would be cool if maybe at some point we could circle back to some of these and then look at things like, well, what? Dee Dee did this? What was the cult? Right, maybe next time we say, oh, we'll work on a cult and we can tie it in so that we can start of putting together a web of these different things that we're doing. I really need to figure out what's keeping me from getting my password emails in the form so I can finally log in. I'm not sure I will look at it offline or when I get offline null terminator. There's something I can trigger from my end, I will try to trigger it anyway. Apart from that, have a great rest of your day. At night, whenever you end up watching or listening to this, if you can give a thumbs up on your way out, that'll be awesome. If you found yourself in here, DND you're not subscribed. DND you feel like subscribing, that would also be awesome. Other than that, have a great rest of your whenever game on and I.
Will talk to you later.
Bye everybody.