Character class: Gestalt of magic items

Game idea status: Non-instantiated; untested

The pitch

In your next tabletop role-playing game, you play as a mismatched assortment of sapient magic items. You are seeking like-minded paraphernalia to add to your burgeoning hivemind. Underneath the magical finery and glowing gemstones is a small, timid commoner who doesn't really know what is going on, but who you have formed a fierce attachment to.

Being a magical treasure hoard

Character idea: You are four or five magic items, of various levels of intelligence and various capabilities. Parts of you can move. Others can perceive their environment. Others can communicate with the fleshy types, or puppet their movements. You work in superb co-ordination, each making the others stronger, and forming a gestalt entity stronger than the individual nodes in your network.

Possible appearance: An old biddy is napping in an ornate wooden throne which walks on four clawed feet, careful not to wake her. She grips a glowing sword as she snoozes – its blue blade dances this way and that, clearly moving her bony arm rather than the other way around. A griffon's head graven upon a shield glares from the top of the throne, held by an animated rope. In the old lady's lap is an hourglass absolutely dripping with fretwork skulls; within, the sand is frozen in time.

Motivation: You are lonely and incomplete. You seek missing members of once-paired items, objects of particular aesthetics to complete your look, magical swords of similar alignment, bored cursed amulets, and so on.

Terminology: You are a gestalt entity. Your prospective compatibility with other sapient magic items you might come across is your gestalt personality. The person you have convinced to carry all of your components around (the ones that can't carry themselves) is your host. They perform tasks for you and in return you shower them in good luck, ability bonuses, conjured food, saleable abilities, magical protections, and adventure.

Legal status: Chances are, the local magistrates' willingness to recognise you as a self-actualised individual is highly questionable. Even in the kind of utopia which does grant personhood to smart objects, you are likely still on the run from covetous dragons and other unsavoury types.

Niche protection: Are you kidding me?

Player characters and hosts

These objects have achieved concordance, or at least codependence, through a history of amicable cooperation. They fundamentally want to remain together; they have no interest in being separated.

Therefore, the character is never at risk of being "parcelled out" by other PCs.

Sapient artefacts are notoriously difficult for a living wielder or wearer to get on with nicely. You have problems of:

• Personality or alignment conflict
• Jealousy or disparagement of other magic items (and their different nature or perceived utility)
  
• Jealousy of the capabilities of the living, or criticism of their perceived weaknesses
  
• Pridefulness; expectation of obedience or submission from all other than the item's maker
  
• Disrespect of the long-lived and unbreakable for organic intelligences
  
• The desire to be carried at all times, to be treasured, to be maintained and given consideration above the bearer's more intrinsic goals
• Items having instinctual control over their wielder or wearer in various ways, and unwilling or unable to suppress it for long
  

It's a rare person indeed – and a meek, biddable one – who meets all the slightly different criteria of a whole assemblage of such items.

Therefore, the character is not at risk of disappearing because it "makes sense" for some other PC to wield and wear them all at once.

At some point, the gestalt entity's host – a person who is probably regarded as something between a valued servant, a sapient home, and a fascinating pet – might die. This is not sufficient reason for another PC to stand in, except as an extremely short, uncomfortable stopgap until the gestalt entity can travel to a population centre to begin the long, arduous search for another truly suitable host. This may or may not be considered a form of character death, dependent on the nature of the particular game.

Game mechanics

Take a character sheet and some scissors, and cut away everything but the important box which says 'equipment list'.

I'm not going to go so far as to instantiate this character class for any particular game system.

Obviously it's going to take some GM work. The following guidelines occur to me.

How to handle advancement:

• Start out with four or five magic items, able to communicate amongst themselves telepathically, visually, and/or tactilely. Between them they should have the ability to move around, communicate with other folks, protect themselves, perceive their environment, and do something that could be leveraged to make money to pay their way. They should also have a short list of utility or battle powers – say, one per item.
• The player should be (e.g.) picking from a set of pre-prepared candidate objects/powers rather than getting to pick all the details of the magic items for their starting gestalt character.
• For character progression, switch up between unlocking new powers per item, and adding new friends to the convergent hivemind. This character class is the perfect use case for 'found advancement'.
• Try to treat this as special; seed the world with possibilities. Don't just say "you're level seven now, so I guess another magic tiara with a compatible personality shows up and integrates with you. Here are its powers." Ideally, you should provide the player characters with leads and clues as to all sorts of things out there in the world and/or lost long ago, and if they pursue the more difficult, elusive, and dangerous ones, the rescued artefact is correspondingly stronger as a reward (after all, the other PCs will be getting more experience because of the higher challenge).
  

Possible items and powers:

• Three cuts from the elsewhere axe open a semi-permanent portal to wherever the last such cuts were made. Also breaks into extradimensional spaces.
  
• Hood of invisibility blinds the wearer while making them invisible. Not too much trouble when other items in the gestalt can do the seeing.
  
• Old slippers of agility are very comfortable; improve reflexes and stealth; worn through at the heels.
• Cursed hat of headlessness flies through the air carrying small weights; seeks legendary 'hatrack of lichkind'.
• Wand of force emanates dangerous gravitational waves and can be used to get around in a pinch.
• An old artefact has expended all its uses as a rod of reincarnation but can still summon woodland creatures and force them to sing.
• Classic flying carpet has powerful mobility and speed, little intelligence, follows its fellow objects like a lost puppy.
• Scarf of glittering fascination seeks other accoutrements in complementary colours; grants wearer powers of hypnosis and authoritative voice.
• Demanding helm keeps full-face visor open except to turn aside blows; acts as immovable rod in times of great and specific need.
• Half-finished golem, creator's whole civilisation long dead and their secrets gone with them, is missing its voice, one arm, and ability to turn around.
• Just the left glove of giant strength only provides said strength to the left side of the body; yearns for its twin.
• Animated tent can pitch self and walk short distances, dragging things with it; also predicts the weather and cleans shoes and tack.
  
• etc.
  

Peril, hit points, and death:

• The host should have baseline commoner statistics, likely boosted by some of the magic items in the gestalt. The person's hit points and skills and things never really go up, and don't matter too much. The player playing the gestalt entity is just kind of puppeteering them, just like the gestalt entity is in-world.
  
• It's possible to play this kind of character in 'high score mode', where the goal is to keep the same host alive for as long as possible while racking up as many magic items discovered and checked for compatibility as possible.
• Alternatively, to better fit in with other character types in a game where everyone is meant to experience true peril, the GM needs to do some work. I mentioned above that you can treat host death as character death by making it incredibly difficult to find a new host: the magic items can't get the quality of life they prefer without a host, so if it happens, they disappear from the campaign.
• You can also start rolling saves or tracking hit points and hardness or making destruction checks or whatever your system already uses for smashing objects up. This means it needs to be possible to repair at a similar pace to the in-game healing rate; that might already shake out of the system neatly, or you might need to make it a property of one of the sapient items.
  
• Regardless of approach, you could usefully level threats directly towards the aggregated items. After all, everyone wants a magic object or two, and this set is hanging around in the possession of some nobody! Alternatively, some of the items might be cursed or diabolic or spiritually aligned, in danger of being exorcised or corrupted or disenchanted. Note that a lot of players really hate when their characters are stolen from or kidnapped, so tread carefully with this.
  

Let me know

If you've tried this or something like it!

Other reading

Willful weapons and the trouble they cause: https://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1648

Interesting magic items: https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2023/04/a-puzzle-from-1978-ad-1st-edition.html

Ideas for awoken magic items: https://githyankidiaspora.com/2015/04/20/wake-up-magic-items-wake-up-dccrpg/

A history of swords with ego: https://www.paulsgameblog.com/2018/01/28/ego-through-the-ages/

Difficulties with intelligent swords: https://www.tenkarstavern.com/2012/12/intelligent-swords-in-ad-1e-whats-with.html

Sapience in AD&D: https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2023/04/a-puzzle-from-1978-ad-1st-edition.html