Star Blessed

The Sleeping Avenger

A silvery hilt, shaped as angelic wings, clings to a sharp blade of long-forgotten craft. In its immaculate steel are engraved five crystals, faded, like distant stars.

+1 Longsword: You have a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with Star Blessed.

Hidden Potential: Star Blessed has five grey and faded crystals embedded in its blade. Whenever you roll a 20 on an attack roll, two of the faded crystals light up and start shining. Whenever you roll a 1 on an attack roll, one lit up crystal turns off, becoming grey and dull. Shining crystals can only be turned off by rolling a 1 on an attack roll or if Star Blessed is attuned to a creature other than you, in which case all crystals go back to being grey and faded.
If after an attack all of the five crystals are shining, Star Blessed unlocks its true potential and becomes a Sentient Holy Avenger.

An Epic Moment

Star Blessed is a sleeping sentient weapon with a character arc of its own. It could be waiting to find a new wielder and save the world once again, or maybe unlock its true potential alongside an adventurer that is growing on their own.

This magic item gives a little personal side-quest to a character and I recommend giving it out pretty early in a campaign. You must be willing to have the sword unlock its powers pretty soon though! It takes an average of 60-70 attack rolls to activate the weapon, that’s about 10 encounters with multiattack. But anyone who has played the game knows that probability doesn’t really matter at the table. When giving this weapon out to a player you’re trusting the dice to come out at the right moment, as they often do, and fill the wielder’s player with empowerment! Sure maybe your paladin is gonna crit three times in a row against a bunch of unimportant kobolds, but an epic awakening shouldn’t be scripted.

You’re not giving them an upgraded version of the weapon as a kind gift, their character’s perseverance (or lucky streak) and the intangible will of the sword is creating the moment!

Maybe the lowly kobolds aren’t gonna be happy about the upgrade, but be sure that the player is gonna be. They’ve been waiting for this moment for a couple of sessions at worst, for a long time at best! As the sword becomes brighter you can describe how the personality of the artifact is seeping through, giving the wielder sensations, changing in weight or even through visions and dreams!

In my own game, the player whose character found Star Blessed didn’t really find her place in the party until, in a dark room underneath the earth, Star Blessed unlocked its potential and carried the party through horrible hordes of undead inhabiting these gloomy crypts. 

Tip: Obviously the attacks that trigger the effect should only be the ones in genuine combat. Dissuade your more rule-breaking players from cheating the system with random attacks at allies or inanimate objects early on. The sword wants to come alive, it’s not the act of a perfect strike that awakes it, it’s the glory against terrible odds that does!

Hooks

A dormant artifact like Star Blessed probably has a long lost history, it may have saved the world once, or failed to. Here are some ways you can integrate this magic item in your game:

Variations

This concept is bigger than a single holy sword. What if the weapon isn’t a sword, but a greataxe or a bow? Or what if the entity inside the weapon hasn’t a good intent? Maybe it was turned off for a reason. Try making the unlocking moment still a reward for the player, even the most evil devil can be grateful to its soon-to-be warlock.

If you want the arc of the weapon to take longer, maybe giving the weapon out from the start of the campaign, you can increase the number of crystals (or ‘parts’) to be activated. 7 or 9 is good, an even number is more frustrating and a bigger number could never come to fruition in a campaign. Make sure the character, not only the player, knows how many ‘parts’ must be activated, that anticipation is the key!

Remember to have a vague idea of what the entity in the artifact really is, you don’t have to have stats for it right away, but remember to foreshadow and have it try to communicate with the character near its reactivation. Also a +3 weapon should be the minimum but be sure to give it a cool secret ability, maybe tied to rolling a 20, like a Vorpal Sword does!

Here are some other weapons with the same idea in mind, try rolling some d6s to get inspired :