Treasure — Advanced Old School Revival

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Treasures are declared supply that impart special abilities when characters use them.

This includes magic items and magical armament. A key design principle for treasure outlined in this guide is that "Treasures and spells should provide heroes with new abilities, not modifiers to rolls. The point of magic is to let players do impossible things (like fly or turn into ectoplasm!) so if all a spell does is modify a roll, it isn't all that magical."

For this reason, no magic item or armament in the system should provide a strictly mechanical bonus (there are no +2 swords or amulets of protection that add a +2 to defense, and so on). This is because treasure in OSR+ is about wonder, not utility.

As Arnament

Treasures that are in fact magical armaments function mechanically the same as a normal armament (they belong to a specific weapon, armor, or shield class and yield the tactics and damage appropriate to the class), but they also have an active and/or passive ability. In order to make magical armament flexible enough to be used by whomever discovers them, you can let the player decide what class of weapon is discovered; otherwise you would want to roll randomly.

Magical armament should be more rare than other magic items because armaments already have the innate function of being useful in combat, so you should set their rarity at 4 and above.

Life Drinker

The ruby-red crystalline weapon is warm to the touch and pulses with secret life in your grasp. When you deal damage with this weapon, you recover 1 HP.

Armament

Weapons

Rarity: 4

Weapon

In the example above, the Life Drinker could be any class of weapon (including Missile); the weapon class has no bearing on its function as a magic item, so you can either have the player roll for it, or let them decide what class it is when they discover it.

Rarity Calculus

When designing a new treasure, use the below calculus to arrive at a rating. Items start a rarity 1, unless they are a consumable, in which case start them at rarity 0. Each modifier is cumulative, so if the item summons something and confers a spell-like ability, that's a total of +3, so the item would have a rarity of 4.

Benefit	Modifier
The item confers an ability comparable to spell-like effect (+1), the ability is better than its spell-like equivalent (+2), or the ability is more general than the spell-like equivalent (+3)	+1 to +3
The item confers an ability comparable to a kit or skill	+2
The item confers an ability comparable to a technique	+4
The item summons something	+1
The item confers an explicit mechanical benefit ("you gain advantage on parrying," or "confers soak of X")	+2
The item is healing adjacent (level 1)	+1
The item is healing adjacent (level 2)	+2
The item is healing adjacent (level 3)	+3
The item is a shield	+1
The item is a weapon	+2
The item is an armor	+3
The item is an especially powerful permanent effect or broad immunity (e.g., "immortality," "immunity to psychic spells")	+5
The item has a limitation or conditional use case (e.g., "can only be used in darkness," "only works against undead," it has a "conspicious" appearance, or requires attunement)	-1
The item is cursed	-3
The item's deleterious effects also affect you	-1
The item is consumable but its dosage is equal to its magical strength	+1

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