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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen | Player's Guide
Secrets of Crafting / Nature Crafting

Bestowed Gifts

Source Treasure Vault pg. 166 1.1
In fairy tales and folklore, stories abound of heroes receiving special items out of gratitude, friendship, or simply a desire to assist them on their quest. A nymph might grant a token of their favor and agree to act as an artist's muse, establishing a long-term relationship that will ripple out through that mortal's life for years—or perhaps even generations, as the nymph continues to look over those who came after. On the opposite end of the spectrum, an aging unicorn approaching their end might willingly sacrifice their horn to grant a hero great powers at the cost of their ebbing life.

From these two extreme cases, a pattern emerges: in each, the gift establishes a lasting bond between the giver and recipient. For this reason, a bestowed gift is like the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs: giving the gift freely grants it power, meaning those who would attempt to wrest it through theft or violence are doomed to fail. The connection between the giver and the recipient plows a magical furrow and plants a seed that can grow with time. For this reason, relics are a perfect way to tell this type of story. There's even a shared nomenclature that hints at this connection: the abilities relics gain are called “gifts.”

However, even if your group isn't using relics (or introducing one would be too complicated or long-term for the situation at hand), a bestowed gift with the powers of an otherwise-normal magic item can still make an especially meaningful moment in a campaign, far more so than simply purchasing such an item from a store or finding it in a hidden cache. A player is likely to remember a scene where a faerie queen spins a suit of autumn's embrace armor for them out of the plants of her domain, surrounding their character's body and protecting them from incoming harm for years to come, more than if they bought the same type of armor during downtime.

Bestowing Gifts in Your Game

Source Treasure Vault pg. 166 1.1
Even if you're granting a PC a gifted item based on an existing magic item's statistics, consider tweaking it in certain ways to make it more distinct without requiring an entirely new item and stat block. For one, gifted items typically only work for the creature that received the gift, or perhaps an heir or protegee of the initial recipient if the gift is passed down. As when the gift is initially received, the intent remains important; a bestowed gift keeps its power when earnestly given to an heir as a true inheritance, but it loses its power if transferred for a sale, quid pro quo, or other attempt to cheapen the gift into a commercial exchange. Beyond that, consider adding an item quirk or two that you choose specifically to match the nature of the creature gifting the item, rather than rolling completely at random.

If the creature granting the gift is especially beloved by your player, or the whole group, but you'd rather not have them tagging along everywhere, another option is to make the gifted item an intelligent item with an imprint of the creature's personality, or just a conduit to speak with the creature from afar. Be careful when exercising this option, as you would with any intelligent item, as this adds another NPC to roleplay into the mix. Intelligent items are people, not possessions, even though they take the form of objects.

While a bestowed gift is more memorable than most treasures, you can easily take them into account using the normal method for treasure distribution. Keep track of bestowed gifts just like you would any other magic item using Core Rulebook Table 10–9: Party Treasure by Level, counting them among the items that the party received as treasure during that level.

Bestowed Gifts as the Baseline

Source Treasure Vault pg. 166 1.1
If your group particularly likes bestowed items, you can use them to replace most or all other forms of treasure in your campaign. In that case, you're establishing a narrative where pacts, connections, and friendships with supernatural creatures are extremely important for adventurers and other creatures hoping to unlock the power of magic items. This has several interesting implications on the world at large. For one, since bestowed gifts aren't usually transferable by violence, theft, or monetary trade, it would mean that looting magic items or buying them at a store are off limits. Count any bestowed gifts against the party's treasure for that level and consider adding an additional handful of consumables to their treasure allotment to counterbalance the lower flexibility in their treasure. Alternatively, consider presenting them with a consumable garden or similar option.

Depending on who and what are capable of bestowing a gift in your campaign, PCs with significant power could use the Crafting skill to bestow gifts of their own unto their fellow adventurers, which could limit the necessity of binding ties with magical creatures. Regardless of the variation, a campaign where most or all magic items are bestowed gifts tends to either be lower magic in general or else have an extreme degree of interconnectedness, full of magical creatures that bond with heroes to an extent greater than most settings. For a lower-magic feel, you can also use the automatic bonus progression rules to handle all the item bonuses for you so that you can focus on handing out gifts that are more thematic and meaningful to the PCs.