So you think you great grandpappy's sword may be magic? He was a Hero of great renown and slew many a name-brand monster with it. It's old, it's survived great battles with only aesthetic damage and by default must be magic, right? The family stories tell of it lopping off the toes of an Iron Colossus....
Most likely you're wrong. Enchanted swords are insanely rare, in a world inundated by swords and related edged weaponry, only a fraction of a percent of existing weapons will be magical and only a tinier fraction will be of Dark Lord-worthy kickassiness.
That does not mean it doesn't have value. By all means if you're forced to sell your family's heritage, educate yourself and get top coin for it. Don't take it to a pawn shop like some common druggie. Research that shit, boyo. Expend some jangle to get some jangle.
Who made it? When? Smiths on every world become collectible due to the quality of their work. Does it have a Maker's Mark? This is stuff you should know if you have to part out your family's glory to cover your gambling debts or whore-tabs.
If you're counting on someone who buys and sells magic items for a living to tell you fair and true what your blade/various item is worth, then you should walk in backwards with your pants down and your ass pre-lubed, cuz you're gonna get fucked son. Real proper like.
No dinner first.
For you rank novices out there, here are some clues that your family blade may be magical:
1) You dropped it one day and it lopped and anvil in half on the way to the floor
2) It landed point first in a marble floor and sank in halfway to the hilt
3) Once unsheathed, it refuses to be sheathed again until it has tasted blood
4) Armor doesn't seem to make a difference to it
5) It glows every now and then
6) Someone you're descended from pulled it out of a fucking rock
7) It talks to you
8) It turned a 16 year old turnip farmer's son into the greatest hero a nation had ever seen
9) Your ancestor was given it by a watery bitch from a lake
10) It has an exaggerated SCHIIIIING! sound when you pull it from the scabbard, or you can hear dark choral music whenever it is unsheathed.
11) It never rusts. Ever. Can't remember the last time you oiled the damned thing....
12) It bursts into flames when unscabbarded
13) It'll cut through an Iron Colussus's toe.
But for fuck's sake, do some experiments with it before you spend coin on someone divining its 'powers' for you.
If you can't make it do anything special, but can't seem to hurt the blade either, then you might just have a non magical but incredibly well crafted weapon, which can be worth as much or more than one with an enchantment. Collectors love rare and master-built things. Just because Grandpop's sword can't hurl fireballs or injure ethereal beings, doesn't mean it isn't a Masterblade forged by a legend.
Magic ain't everything when it comes to vintage weaponry.
And speaking of that, weaponry ain't everything either. Most adventurers' worth the name are all kitted up with magic items. The heavy hitters, that is. Armor, cloaks, vests, gauntlets, boots, bags, backpacks, pouches, codpieces, wands, staves and rods, virtually anything might carry an enchantment.*1
My Aunt Maggie used to have a Tattered Cloak of the Barren Furrow, which when worn during sexual intercourse, would kill any potential pregnancies. She rented it out with great success to teenaged girls in the surrounding villages at 3 coppers a night. I only saw her wearing it once because it was always booked. She used several years worth of the proceeds to buy a slaving ship and the rest, as they say, is history. She built a small empire which my Father eventually inherited, expanded greatly and left to me when I bludgeoned him to death. I can still remember him giving me advice in between blows to his noggin with the bronze gargoyle...
Things like: "Aargh! Hit me harder!" and "More to the right, no YOUR right!" and "Aim for my temple you dim-witted fuckhat!".
The only reason I remember Aunt Maggie's infanticidal outerwear is through family legends and because after it ran out of charge, she used it for a goat blanket and when I was a kid I mistakenly thought goats were cool animals.
So don't readily discount retired Barbarian Uncle Ned's War Loincloth, or Great Aunt Vaiya's Knobbly Wand That Mysteriously Vibrates. What about your Great-Great-Great Grandad's Greaves of Grievously Grim Goll-Thwacking? Yes they look like budget, pressed tin shin guards for the economic and hopeful soldier, but maybe they grant the ability to kick a foe's gonads up through his throat? Have you tried that?
How did it work out for you?
That's the thing, ya never know for sure. Magic items never come with an instruction sheet, with the exception of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, they and their use were either passed down to a successor, or were lost with the death of the owner.
For those with the economic wherewithal, this is where the Research Mage comes into play. Research Magi are fucking worthless in battle, but invaluable in identifying and learning about Enchanted Items. They live for it, the chubby, pimply faced bastards. They can't resist a challenge even if it could end in their sudden and unexpected deaths.
In some ways they might even be considered more ballsy than those spell-slingers who go into battle. At least in battle you can usually see what's trying to kill you and how it's attempting to accomplish it. Poking around with unknown and potentially lethal magic items normally doesn't come with an long life expectancy.
Which is why, as a successful and wealthy Dark Lord, you have to seek talent out and more importantly, be willing to pay for it/find it's weakness and exploit it. Despite my nominally evil nature, I've found through experience that paying generously works better in the long run to more Dark Lordly methods, such as holding an asset's family hostage, torture, curses and smacking them in the head when they get out of line.
Greed is almost always the best weakness to exploit in my opinion. People under your control become terrified of losing the easy lifestyle and casual luxuries your reign has afforded them and that fear alone can be worth countless hostages or innumerable small cruelties.
A content asset, as much as I hate to admit it, is better than a vengeful, angry or frightened one any day of the week.
Luckily for all you up and coming Malevolent Madmen and indeed, anyone out there with a bit of coin and some suspicions about a certain item, I've made your lives easier with yet another of my seemingly endless innovations: Magic Item Research Enclaves, or MIRES in DarkLordSpeak.
MIRES are "freelance"*2 corporations who employ vast networks of research scholars, historians and mages to expertly identify various magic items, weapons and armor, and figure out, for a fee, how to use them without killing yourself and those around you. To the beginner or journeyman adventurer utilizing a MIRE may not be realistically affordable, especially if they find out you that what you have a +1 Sword of Mild Annoyance, or a mostly spent Wand of Ballistic Hamsters. The sale price of which wouldn't even come close to covering the MIRE's fee. Therefore you either try to learn enough about the item to discover if it's even worth the expenditure, or you fucking gamble, plain and simple.
BUT if the item in question turns out to be a potent magical thang, their fees will more than be made up for by figuring out what bit of arcane kit you've wrested from the clutches of it's former owner and how not be instantly maimed or killed when using it. If your item has certain drawbacks, such as taking a year from your life with every use, making you impotent or infertile or even something weird like transforming you into a tasteful reproduction of a popular watercolor for six hours a month every third Wednesday, you're gonna wanna know about it.
It could be really important.
After a MIRE has given you a result and you decide to cash that motherfucker in*3, they will frequently suggest you use an Auction House or Purveyor to make the sale for you, for a percentage of course. All MIRE's have partnerships or associations with multiple sale outlets because frequently their clients have acquired a Weapon or Item that is completely outside of their experience or Class. What the hell would a Ranger need a wand for? Or a Wizard need a morningstar?
Sell that crap and buy something Class-appropriate for fook's sake. The Pros will get a better price for it than you will, because they know people like me, and you're just a dungeon looter. No offense intended.
There ya go, would be Dictators everywhere. Be smart with sales of your eldritch booty, don't just let some mid level operator rob you blind because you're drunk and stupid. True Dark Lord material will always come out on top in financial situations as well as the decimation of one's enemies.
Hope you learned something today, toady.
-Wroth Lord Hurderoth
Colder Than Broth On Hoth
*1 As a scholar of weird and unorthodox Artefacts, I can tell you that one of the single most unique and irreverent magic items ever created was Mollifer's Drumstick of Immolation. The story is long, but to put it inna nutshell:
Two Wizards were drinking heavily and gambling on a number of table top games that only Wizards would understand or be able to play. They dined indiscriminately on roasted chickens as they gamed and drank and eventually, as Fate would have it, they made a Wager.
One of the Spell-Monkey's wagered the other that he couldn't Enchant a well gnawed chicken bone in sixty minutes or less.
As anyone even mildly educated on Enchanting knows, imbuing an inanimate object with magical power is a painstaking and time consuming job requiring precision, patience and an extremely high level of competence. It isn't at all like Warmagery, where spells need to be fired off in an instant. Enchanting consists basically of convincing something that doesn't have a mind that it should listen to you when you suggest it should become magical. That it will like it.
The result was that a small, underdeveloped chicken femur was transformed into a handheld holocaust that could emit a stream of liquid fire over 20 feet for a period of 30 seconds a day, parsed out however you wished. Mollifer accomplished this Enchantment in 58 minutes and 47 seconds to win the bet.
His opponent then immolated him with it, thus cementing its Name forever and ensuring he didn't have to pay up on their wager.**
**I bought it at a rummage sale some three centuries later for four copper pieces as a 'folk art' drumstick. My research department discovered it's secrets for me (which I pay them exceedingly well to do) and current market value on it is something like 8,700 to 10,000 gold marks.
*2 And by "freelance" I mean I own and run every single one of them. Very profitable. Occasionally I open new ones just to fuck with the older, more established MIRES. I subsidize them to keep divining fees artificially low, thus shaming these potbellied non-belligerent magic-mooks.
*3 I recommend using a Purveyor or established Auction House for selling anything even remotely mid-range and up. Yes they are going to charge you up to 25%**, but they have buyers available to them that your alehouse-hero ass doesn't. Serious money people looking to buy interesting shit.
**My advice is haggle for 15%, but be careful with threats because any organization that has many Items of great power and value in its possession at any given moment will have a fuckton of firepower to protect those Items.
