PC gets a sentient weapon

>SPONK!
Truly, the sound of betrayal.

Discuss it with the player beforehand. If they're down for it they gradually switch from playing their character, to playing the weapon.

Or explain that the weapon is occasionally going to do things on its own, and they'll be given a save or opportunity to try and resist.

The PC is the weapon, the "PC" is just inventory

We'll you could set it up that the character starts with the sword and always wields it. Thing is, the character is an npc and the sword is the player. If the sword changes hands the character changes bodies. Probably works a bit better when it's an amicable agreement and not forced possession.

>Half the time they'll probably just pawn it off when it starts showing signs of being more than just a +1 longsword, though
give the sword a compelling feature, that the wielder can't bear to part with it. this makes the sword's influence harder to dispel, we could say the effect wears off after 24 hours of not touching the sword.

>SPONK!

God, Stormbringer is a prick.

He even is a bigger fuck than the literal gods of fuck. That's a lot of fuck.

That's just a normal /k/ scenario. They fuck Mosin Nagants, you know

>No Elric, you never wielded me
>I wielded you

Tell me about stormbringer

It's an asshole.

What the fuck is his problem?

Nothing, it just likes murdering people and stealing their souls.

And becoming the mightiest entity in the new born world after indirectly causing the slaughtering of the gods.

>Eyelander
>+X Vorpal Greatsword (Cursed)
>The wielder of this greatsword suffers a -4 to their base CON score. Upon an enemy's decapitation, the wielder adds +1 to their base CON score and +5 to their movement/walking speed (these effects stack up to four times).
>In addition, a decapitation adds +1 bludgeoning damage on a successful shield bash attack, +2 if the attack is after a charge of at least half the user's movement/walking speed (this effect stacks five times)
>Every decapitation after fourth bestows temporary HP equal to their CON score (this does not stack)
>Any status changes are lost upon removal of the weapon.
>"This bloodstained blade is haunted by dark spirits that speak whispers to it's wielder, encouraging them to sever as many necks as they can." Something about Will saves to resist the voices that increases in difficulty with each head taken. Alcoholic intoxication gives advantage.

>How do you actually pull this off?
Frostmourne hungers, bitch.

>Sponk!

Comic books are wonderful

...

The buff needs to stack more. Also the eyelander is a pretty chill guy once you get past the decapitation part.

I too have heard Blue Oyster Cult's Black Blade.

Yeah, meant to put +2 CON add and possibly a +1 to crit chance to make the vorpal that extra bit easier. Also was trying not to make it so so good that it's like
>Look at this, it's like that cursed Berserker Sword, but better
>Why's it cursed then?
>...
But yeah, that's pretty much how it works in-game, it's kinda terrible, but after two or three heads it's pretty worth the effort.

>sentient weapon pull this shit
>gets thrown into the shitter

I wonder why Elric didn't do just that...

Tried it first.
When you're an anemic cripple who used to need drugs and magic to survive, and then lost access to said drugs and magic, Stormbringer serves as a crutch.
In the first story, after it causes much sorrow, he tosses it over the side of the ship he's on. It hovers above the water, like an asshole, while he collapses in pain; eventually, he dives over after it.
Much later on, he gets a few years of respite, with a wife and a kingdom, and the sword gets locked in a vault. Until evil wizard kidnaps the wife and he's all, 'well, fuck it'. Which was incorrect for him, sure, but it worked out okay for the world.
(Srsly, stories are totally worth reading. And if you read the first Conan story - 'Phoenix on the Sword' - back to back with the first Elric story - 'The Dreaming City' - you get a good sense of what Moorcock was going for - the opposite of Conan, not in a douchebag deconstructionist sense, just in an 'opposite' sense.

This reminds me a whole hell of a lot of Swordbearer, a book by Glen Cook(Of Black Company fame).

Oh, that's easy.

You create a spell that, when cast, transforms the target into a sword of immense power. After which you have this sword with a personality, take it and smelt it.

Then you take a poor abused youth, inject the molten weapon into them, and voilà!

You have your own personal swordman, controlled by a sword that can materialize and dematerialize at will.

Black blood was such bullshit. They started using that stuff for everything.

Same show, different example.

Kind of humorous, but it holds true. Have the weapon grand useful power, but come with a fickle nature that requires the wielder to please them.

Alternatively, offer the player bonuses at certain decision making points.

Say the character is prone to taking prisoners and showing mercy: have the weapon whisper to them after having incapacitated an enemy, offering more power in exchange for killing said enemy. Ramp it up from there, with bigger and better deals until the character is essentially taking orders from the weapon.

Very, very carefully.

To keep from just having the sword take over the actions of the player, you must be willing to go for the total mindfuck.

Trick 1: Have the sword alter what the PC sees, opposed to what all the other players see. While your whole party might be meeting with a kindly old king, mayhaps this player sees cruelty and malice in the king's eyes. Or on the other hand, have the team be fighting the big bad and have your one character see regret and sorrow about him. Either do this subtly by passing notes OR do it blatantly and hope you have a group that is willing to not metagame the info and have the sword presented as something that increases insight or perceptiveness... or just have the sword be Obviously Holy or Magic.

Trick 2: Keep the specifics of the sword a secret and subtly fudge your dice rolls like crazy. If your character can hit angelic creatures more often and do extra damage each hit, then you are subconsciously influencing them to hit angelic creatures. If your character has the option of fighting an angel or demon for the exact same experience, they'll probably go for the angel. Also, secret features of the weapon can also subtly influence players. If your character gets two hits for every swing for a specific race of monsters or against specific people who may or may not follow a certain god, they will be more likely to fight those who they have a great advantage on. In my experience, most TT gamers will rationalize a crazy amount if it means that they get easy-to-see benefits... a benevolent paladin would even sometimes sacrifice innocents if it gave him a +12 greatsword of smiting.

Trick 3: Place your characters in situations where you're not describing the same thing to the entire party. A maze of labyrinths, the caves of illusion, your players split the party... as long as you have a great excuse to use techniques where you can give your affected PC different info from all your other players, this is a great chance to have the sword influencing your player. Maybe they see a ravenous pack of man-eating goblins instead of kids at play... or maybe they "see the truth" and "realize" that the coven of warlocks is "actually a group of priests under an illusion".

Trick 4: If you give the weapon a voice, give it one that seems benevolent. Give a paladin the "Holy Righteous Talking Sword of Smiting" and he'll probably tend to believe it when it says that it "senses evil" in someone and that that NPC needs to be put down. Do this often, and in the beginning, make it be true. If you train your PC to always trust his sword, then until you finally come out and tell him that his sword is actually the "Lying liar who lies Sword", he'll rationalize quite a few atrocities as "neccessary for the Cause".

Trick 5: In the end, put the character in an untenable situation. Force your particular PC to face off against the others in his party... or at least for the rest of your party to have to deal with the uncertainty of the one PC. Maybe have an outside NPC point out how much the PC has been acting against what your party is trying to do. Or maybe have the sword reveal itself as, if not the Big Bad, then at least A bad guy.

Of course, this is all assuming that the sword is working against the aims of the party. If it isn't, then just let the character do what it wants and pretend it's the sword doing it. It'll let you have your sword-wields-character fantasy without disrupting the player playing said character.

tl;dr - Mindfuck the PC into doing what you want.

youtube.com/watch?v=XCxL3-Fl7bM
Relevant

>PC picks up the weapon
>roll to save vs. death
>if it fails, take PC's character sheet away from the player
>hand him a character sheet for the weapon
>in the weapon's "equipment", write in the name of the PC that just picked up the weapon.

Its about 90% of his stat block.
Even rather insane murder hobos of the highest D&D caliber would keep their swords if it meant avoiding deleveling from level 25-30 to level 3-4.

Mind you, if you do those without giving the player any chance to realize there is something wrong, you are just going to end up with a pissed off player.

Great song.

Glad somebody finally went and did Arioch's work.

Frostmourne hungers, indeed

because it's a new idea and could be interesting, stuff gets stale after a while and you wanna try something new.

I hear Slaanesh once fucked a chainsword. Even if it was fanworks it does sound like something Slaanesh would try.

>that eyedick
for when you need to be really, REALLY intimate.

so some kind of, weapon that pulls your soul into it every time you kill with it, but it's immensely powerful so obviously your pc's will wanna keep using it, but after say like 100 kills with it it completely takes them over, turning them into the new bbeg. i like that idea

I was thinking something along these lines, only maybe more in line with say Fight club.

...

Best fucking girl(?)

Pretty disappointed that Ctrl+F doesn't bring up anything on Majora.

>But a mask isn't a weapon!
It's a magic focus. About the same function as a staff, minus potentially beating a kid to death with it.

>not beating someone to death with a mask
It's like you're not trying.

>Mask of Headbutting +20

Well, it DOES admit to it, at the end.
>"Farewell old friend. I was a thousand times more evil then thou."

It's basically THE sentient demonic sword. The reason you have them in fantasy is because of Stormbringer.
It basically spends the whole fucking series of stories ruining Elric's fucking life and killing literally every single one of his closest friends, loves, and allies.
The only guys who manage to survive are guys who spent most of their time in other dimensions, AS FAR THE FUCK AWAY from Elric and his goddamn sword as possible.

I've done it before and it's pretty fun.

The key is, you've got to get the player on board with the idea. If they're interested in playing it, then there's no need for a bunch of rules and rolls to force them to play it. If they're not interested, it's not going to be any fun no matter how cleverly you try to force it.

The BBEG is trapped in the weapon and convinces the players to unleash it. Then they have to either defeat it or seal it back into the weapon to set right their mistake.

I mean, that thing was pretty damn pointy. You could probably stab somebody to death with it if you tried.

Kinda, sorta.

Before Moorcock wrote his stories he read a lot of fantasy, and one of them was "The Broken Sword," by Poul Andersen. Which is based pretty closely on Norse myth. It involves the cursed sword Tyrfing, which always brings victory in battle, but which also always sooner or later brings about the death of its user. Tyrfing doesn't talk but it becomes pretty clear that it has a mind of its own and is quite a bit more evil than the fellow who owns it, who is already no prize--Valgard the Changeling, a soulless animated ball of mud left by Elves in a human infant's crib for them to raise in place of the human infant the Elves stole. Valgard is a bandit, murderer, and pirate. Tyrfing is worse--and may even bring about the end of the world, in the wrong hands.

Lots of characteristics of Elves that we have in modern fantasy RPGs come from this story as much as they come from Tolkien. Andersen's Elves are humanoid but utterly inhuman, cruel and capricious, with a horrifying sense of humor, androgynously beautiful, unpredictable. It's like Tolkien Elves, but they're all bipolar, into heavy BDSM, and off their meds. But worse. They're partially based on Celtic legends of the Unseelie.

Give the player control of both and reward them for good RP.

It and it's brother kill the universe at the end, and allow for a new world to be made, with no gods or magic to ruin it. Our world.
Then Stormbringer kills Elric, making it the most powerful object in the world.

Stormbringer is OP, nerf pls.

It's basically Satan. Moon Satan.

You're joking, but I think in one of the books one character mentions that the sword is ancient and one name for it from a forgotten land was "Say-tunn."

So, yeah. That sword is de debbil.

Make the sword the PC and the carrier an ally/henchman NPC type and roleplay it?

The sword has the agenda and maybe the NPC doesn't care for it, so you need to keep pushing/tricking him into situations.

Maybe do both as PC's if you have two that are able to do it without being twats.

Really carefully. If you make them roll saves or kill their family that's BS. In fact, anything that results in save or mind control is kind of bullshit.

It's no joke. Stormbringer is the fundamental source of evil in the new world.

And also flies up to live on the moon.

On the moon?

It's been many years since I read the Elric books but my memories were that Stormbringer just took human(oid) form and flew away cackling, not to THA MOOOOOOOOOOONAH. and there was no one there to offer him fresh fruit, either.

It's simple you reward the player for behaviour that the sword (or whatever weapon or thing it is) wants.
It want's to kill people?
The player gets a bonus of some kind for killing, exp/temporary buffs/immunity or resistance to other mind controlling effects/give the actual player candy what have you.

My DM threw me a bone and gave me a magic halberd called Burgundy Bane and the motherfucker actively compelled my character, a man at arms, to pick fights with nobility so it could slake its thirst for highborn blood.

I looked up what relation halberds have to Burgundy and apparently one cut this duke's head in half and literally destroyed his duchy in doing so.

So I had to keep the halberd locked away whenever we started getting missions from the king.

You would be right. Crona has been confirmed as a girl.