Hey gang.
I’m running a campaign where the players are looking for eight magical items, once owned by eight powerful mages representing the eight schools of magic.
Right now – through the power of Plot™ – they’re looking for those items for an influential but shadowy collector. They’re supposed to deliver the first batch of three items together. When that happens they’ll find out that they were inadvertently helping a criminal collector. A representative of a historical society will tell them that these artifacts belong in a museum.
And here’s my problem: I want them to have these magical items, which of course have cool powers. And I don’t know how to do that.
My plan right now is, that the museum isn’t interested in the actual powers, they just want to display the items for their historical relevance. So they’ll magically pull these items apart into two identical ones, where one retains the power and the other the history of the item (scratches/wear and tear).
I am not completely satisfied with that idea, because it seems far-fetched and I’d like to hear your ideas, if you have any, on how to resolve this.
Thank you and a thousand dm’ly kisses to you all.
For safety reasons, a magical museum might well want to avoid putting actual items on display, especially since Illusion magic makes it trivial to create simulated substitutes crowds can safely interact with. This also keeps security budgets manageable, since even a magical museum probably doesn’t have the kind of money to protect the arcane equivalent of a small nuclear arsenal.
So the museum researchers might be happy keeping items on indefinite loan, as long as they know the borrower and have guaranteed access when they need it. This way the mage owning the item is responsible for keeping it safe, and arcane historians–who definitely didn’t spend all those years in magic academy just to play guard–don’t have to.
As a bonus, this method gives the party a quirky but knowledgeable NPC contact who can give them clues or set up sidequests whenever you need.
That’s great, maybe they’ll display illusory copies. Thank you!