Ratsticker
Description: Frightful-looking oversized "dagger" with a blade nearly 12" long, prominent blood channels, and a pommel and cross-guards tipped with snarling rat heads. Magical senses will perceive complex but only modestly powerful enhancements. More extensive study will reveal an arcane connection to the moon (or whatever empowers were-creatures in your setting).
Powers: Ratsticker functions as a simple magical blade of no great power, but it does add whatever enhancement bonus you give it to attempts to bully, threaten, or intimidate others when drawn. This may be a largely psychological effect, the thing would make even Crocodile Dundee concede it's a knife.
The other effect of the dagger may go unnoticed for a time. When Ratsticker scores what would be a lethal blow to a creature that could contract lycanthropy in your game system ("living humanoid" is the default here), the damage from the attack is cancelled and the target is instantly transformed, body and mind, into an apparently ordinary rat. The victim's possessions are unaffected and fall to the ground in a heap, while the rat immediately flees the area, hiding if no escape is possible. Attempts to catch the rat should be very difficult if allowed at all, especially the first time this happens.
The rat transforms back into its normal form at the next dawn, usually naked in an alley or vacant building and somewhat the worse for wear. They have only vague, confused memories of their time as a rat, but recall the events before the transformation as clearly as normal, and especially the pain of that last stab.
Possible Origins: No one's certain, but it should be a fairly new thing in your campaign. Maybe some traveler brought it from foreign parts? Maybe it was found in a dungeon recently? Maybe it was bought from a merchant by a footpad that thinks looting empty clothing is way easier than disposing of bodies? Finding out who made it might be part of a story arc, even.
Complications: Victims who've been "killed" by Ratsticker will begin to display the symptoms of therianthropy at the next full moon (or whatever timed event is related to weres in your game), and will become full-blown were-rats over the next 1d6 months unless they are cured. Not everyone will want to be cured, of course. And if there are a lot of Ratsticker-related stabbings, expect the area to have a serious were-rat problem in short order.
Design Commentary: This one might be the basis of a whole story arc around finding a mass cure for Ratsticker victims while preventing a conspiracy of were-rats taking over a city's (or even a kingdom's) criminal underground by spreading around blades that make more of their own kind without being easily traced back to them. Or it might just wind up in a delve to clear a den of freshly-made and somewhat confused were-rats before things get out of hand. One interesting quirk of the blade is that it provides an emergency escape route for its user. A canny villain who's backed into a corner by the party might stab himself to "death" in plain sight, leaving behind a pile of empty clothes in front of a conveniently-placed rat hole, earning membership in the highly exclusive Recurring Enemy Club.
Cool effect, and I like how it could tie into a campaign story. I just like the idea of a blade that transforms on death, though, what if there was a sword of reincarnation that players find and then are boggled by every thing they kill turning into animals and such.
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