Pale Soul: Carved of a solid length of translucent and pure white jade, Pale Soul is a scepter the size of (and eerily bearing a faint stylized resemblance to) a human femur. The scepter's shaft is delicately carved in low relief with curls and arabesques that make up glyphs of the soul; one end is tipped with a sculpted demisphere, the other with a vaguely scroll-shaped finial. In darkness Pale Soul glows faintly with a soft pearly light.
Possessing Pale Soul grants an individual the ability to contend with restless spirits. While bearing the scepter one is immune to the life-sapping aging of ghosts and similar undead, and may strike at incorporeal undead (and similar disembodied spirits) as if they were material creatures capable of being harmed with nonmagical weapons. Used as such a weapon itself, Pale Soul inflicts 1-6 hit points of damage. Pale Soul's bearer may also use the scepter to sense for incorporeal undead and intangible entities within a 100' radius; the creatures glow a faint pearly white to the eyes of the scepter's bearer. If the bearer of Pale Soul is not a cleric, they gain the ability to turn undead as a cleric of their level twice a day.
However, Pale Soul is an intelligent being in its own right. With every bearer it grows more powerful, insistently whispering into its owner's mind the necessity of devoting their life to the destruction of the restless spirits. More worrisome still are the scraps of the Codex of Beljari, which suggest that the soul of each bearer is absorbed into the scepter upon death, melding into the eldritch consciousness that is Pale Soul.
Pale Soul may not be abandoned nor sold. It must be given freely with all knowledge, or else taken from a deceased bearer.
3 comments:
This is pretty cool, but I think that it needs to give clerics a bit of a boost. Why not just allow the bearer of the scepter to turn undead 2/day as a cleric of their level, in addition to any turning ability they may already have?
@David:
Not a bad suggestion, but not something that I wanted to do (I batted around a similar idea while I was creating the item).
The reason I didn't is that it just wasn't in theme for what I created the item to do, which is that it was not created for clerics. Sometimes things just don't balance out that way.
Also and more importantly, in BEMCI there are no limits on a cleric's ability to turn. So for a cleric, adding more "turns per day" would be meaningless -- they already have infinite "turns per day".
Can you tell it's been a while since I last played BEMCI?
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