Magic Items and Relics¶

Reference document for Adventures Beyond the Mists.

This page covers magic items: what they are in this game, how a hero comes to hold one, and the Legend system that decides how much wonder a single character can carry. It assumes the found-relic rules in Weapons and Armor, Named Weapons, and the Lives system in core-rules, Part Twelve.

What Magic Items Are Here¶

Magic in this world is uncanny, not convenient. A relic is a made thing that should not exist: a blade that drinks the light, a horn heard by the dead, a ring that cannot be lied to. Items lean more utilitarian than the game's casting does, a bag that never fills, a lantern that never gutters, but even the plain ones carry a strangeness. The register is Arthurian. A magic item is an object with a name and a story, not a stat with a plus sign.

Two things a magic item never does, no matter how mighty. It never changes a Character's Hit Range, which comes from Class alone and from nothing else. And it never adds a die to the Pool, which grows only along a Class's Level ladder. Those two axes are what the progression schedule controls, and gear stays off both of them on purpose. A relic earns its place through a property, a keyword, or a fiction, never through a bonus to hit or an extra die. This is why there is no plus-one sword in the game and never will be.

What a relic can do instead lives in Weapons and Armor, Named Weapons: it carries a signature property, in one of three shapes. It can hand its wielder a read they spend from the dice already banked (loose a pillar of fire on a Triple). It can lend its hits a keyword (a spear that strikes as Rend 2, Inevitable, biting past the wall of Retainers). Or it can hold an uncanny, always-on property (a wound that will not close between fights). Utility items work outside combat entirely, most often as a flat +1d6 on a narrow category of Check, or as pure fiction with no roll at all.

Relics are found, not made. No smith forges one to order, and no coin buys one off a shelf. This is canon, not a market decision: true items in the lands beyond the Mists are discovered, won, or granted, and the ones that matter choose their bearers as often as their bearers choose them.

Legend: What Your Story Can Carry¶

A hero cannot bear unlimited wonder. The Mists bind to a Character only what their story has earned, and that measure is called Legend.

Your Legend equals your Level. A Character of Level 5 has a Legend of 5. It rises as you rise, and it never falls except by a curse or a disgrace grave enough for the GM to name. A few Classes carry a different measure of Legend; those exceptions live on their own Class pages.

Every relic carries a Legend rating of its own, a measure of its weight in the world. A charm is Legend 1. A weapon of renown is Legend 3. An artifact out of the old songs is Legend 5 or more. Trivial trinkets and pure utility gear, the bag that never fills, are Legend 0 and sit outside the system entirely; they cost nothing to carry and never crowd out a real relic.

You may Bind relics whose Legend totals no more than your own. A Legend 5 Character might Bind a Legend 3 blade and a Legend 2 ring, and no more. To Bind a relic is to make it truly yours: its signature property wakes, and the relic becomes unlosable. Stolen, it finds your hand again. Dropped in a flooded ford, it washes up where you next make camp. A Bound relic returns to its bearer through the Mists, because a legend does not lose its sword to a common thief.

This is the whole cost, and it is a real one. When your Legend is full, a new relic means giving up an old one.

You are Legend 6, carrying a Legend 3 sword your father left you and a Legend 2 ring. In the barrow you find the Horn of Sarn, Legend 3. To Bind it you must first unbind two points of what you hold. The ring is easy. The sword is not. That choice is the point.

Relics Beyond Your Legend¶

A relic whose Legend exceeds what you can hold is not yours to command. You may carry it, but you cannot Bind it, so its power sleeps. An unbound relic is fine steel and nothing more, an ordinary sword that happens to have a name.

And it does not stay. What your Legend cannot hold, the Mists reclaim. By your next downtime an unbound relic is gone, stolen on the road, shattered in the fight, lost down the stream, back into the world's keeping until a worthier hand finds it. A generous GM may let a Character hold an unbound relic longer as a house rule, the same way the death-lowers-Bond rule is optional, but the rule as written is that surplus wonder slips away.

Artifacts¶

The greatest relics keep two faces. An artifact carries a floor form that works for anyone who can lift it, and a true form that only wakes when a hero of sufficient Legend Binds it in full.

Excalibur is a Legend 8 blade. In a common hand it is still a fine sword and something more, working as a Legend 3 weapon, enough that lesser heroes have carried it and won. But its true form, the whole of what the songs promise, opens only for the one whose Legend can hold all eight. Many may draw the sword. One may wake it.

An artifact is the exception that does not wash away. Its floor form means it is never fully inert, and its story keeps it in the world until someone claims it. Losing one is a scene the table plays out, not a line struck off a sheet at downtime.¶

How Heroes Gain Them¶

Relics enter play through the world, in roughly this order of how often you should use each.

Found. The reward at the heart of a place: a barrow, a drowned chapel, a giant's hoard. The default.
Won. Taken from its bearer in a fair fight or a duel. Very much the register of the setting; the blade passes to the hand that earns it, not looted from a corpse-pile.
Loaned. Granted by a Guild and held only in favor, the way a Guardian Tabard is worn. The item is authority, not property, and can be revoked, damaged, or stolen. Loaned items sit outside Legend; their leash is the revocation, not your capacity.
Owed. A boon or a debt from someone powerful, promised now and delivered later. A relic can be a favor waiting to be called in.
Bound to a place or a condition. A relic tied to a Wellspring or a sworn ground, obtained only by resolving whatever holds it there, which folds the item and the adventure into one.

There are no magic shops and no crafting to order. A hero cannot turn coin into power directly. Coin buys retinue, influence, downtime, and standing, and the relics stay rare, named, and earned.

What Crosses the Mists¶

Wealth and items return from the Mists to the Known World, where death is final. This makes a relic worth more the moment it is carried home, and it gives the sixth death its quiet capstone. When the Mists return a hero to the Known World for the last time, the relics they were worthy to Bind go with them. Your Legend, the wonders your story earned, is the thing you carry out of the Mists for good.

How Legend behaves once a hero is home, where there is no Level ladder and death does not reset, is left for the full core book. In the first release it does not come up.

Awarding Magic Items¶

Hand them out rarely and mean it. A single named relic reshapes a hero more than a pile of ordinary gear, and the Legend cap means a party cannot hoard anyway, so you can afford to make each one an event. One relic every few sessions is generous. Tie the good ones to a place, a foe, or a promise, so acquiring the item and playing the story are the same act.

For the first release, three items are plenty to teach the whole idea: a Guardian Tabard loaned to the party by one lord, a weapon of renown held by the other lord and bound to his Wellspring, so that taking it may be part of what dissolves the Wellspring, and a single consumable draught as loot. That is enough for a table to feel Legend work without a catalogue.

Designer's note

Legend is a capacity, not a currency. A Character never spends it, earns it, or trades power for it; it only gates how much bound wonder a hero can hold at once. That is the whole reason relics can be permanent and meaningful without reopening the problem the Level restructure closed, where buying raw power with Advancement Points made power a dominant purchase that crowded out Bond, Guild, and relationships. Nothing here competes for Advancement Points, and leveling grants capacity to use what you find, never the loot itself.

The anti-hoarding pressure lives in the cost curve, not the capacity number. Legend equals Level is generous on its own, but with meaningful relics priced at 3 or more and charms at 0, a mid-Level hero holds two or three relics and every new one forces a real sacrifice. Keep 1-cost items to trivial charms and the Christmas-tree problem never appears.

Binding doubles as the answer to an old question: a permanent item that can be casually stolen would punish the player who invested in it. Making Bound relics unlosable, returning through the Mists, resolves that in fiction rather than with a rule about theft, and it reads as pure Arthur.

One naming note: the game uses Legendary as a Difficulty rung (5 Successes) and Legend as this capacity. The two share a root but sit in different contexts and parts of speech, judged an acceptable overlap for the thematic fit. The older, sharper overlap is gone: as of 2026-08-09 combat Hit Range and Check competence share one tier ladder (Untrained, Trained, Skilled, Elite, Renowned), so the top roller tier is Renowned, not Legendary.

Scope: this is forward-looking past the v1 release. The v1 pregens arrive with their relics already Bound, so a table can play without touching the economy; Legend matters the moment those Characters carry into ongoing play.

Changelog

2026-08-09: Removed "quickstart" framing in line with the project scope reframe; the first release is a lean, playable slice of the full game, not a quickstart.
2026-08-09: Unified the combat Hit Range and Check competence tiers into a single ladder (Untrained, Trained, Skilled, Elite, Renowned). Renamed Rabble to Untrained, Veteran to Skilled, Expert to Elite, and the combat Legendary tier to Renowned; the Legendary Difficulty rung is unchanged.
2026-08-06: New page. Introduced the Legend relic-capacity system (capacity equals Level, binding makes relics unlosable, artifact floor and true forms, unbound relics reclaimed at downtime) and the reader-facing magic-item framework, building on the found-relic rules in weapons.md, Named Weapons.