Monday, April 19, 2010

Magic Item: Cerastes Staff

Cerastes Staff: Though ancient of design and -- like many other objects of their kind -- attributed to the neu of more temperate climes, the cerastes staff has found its greatest popularity amongst the traveling spellcasters and mystics of the Golden Reach and its desert borders. Appearing crafted of bronzewood carved with a sheath of tiny scales and bound with copper rings, when held up to the sun a cerastes staff shines transparent, like brazen glass, and reveals intricate internal clockworks of gold and adamant and garnet. Usable as a weapon, a cerastes staff is more useful still when its fangs are bared.

A cerastes staff is a staff +1. As willed by the bearer of the staff, a pair of small bronze fangs or "horns" may be extended from the side of the weapon; if these horns are used to draw blood -- even a scratch will do -- the staff will negate any one poison affecting the bloodied individual. The staff will then store the poison to be used against a target by deploying the fangs once more, and will not heal again until the stored toxin is expelled.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you empty the stored badness into a vial?

taichara said...

@eliyes:

Nope; you need to use the horns against a proper (i.e. living or at least able to be harmed by toxins) target.

Unknown said...

Keep up the good work. I love the vivid descriptions of your items, on all the posts. I'm running a fourth edition game, and part of the upcoming plot-line involves a hand-out to the PCs of a long-dead scribe of the King's, a famous historian. I needed pages to round out his rather thick journal, and many of your descriptions on items such as this staff, and the magical flowers you detailed on a much earlier post, helped me to fill in a good amount of side pages. Thank you.

taichara said...

@joshbehrens:

Many apologies for the delayed response, and many thankyous for the kind words.

I'm very glad to hear that my posts have been useful for you :3