Essence Crafting: A Way to Repurpose Magic Items for Your D&D Party

In my last D&D campaign, we ended up discarding a ton of magic items. Inspired by the Enchanting skill on World of Warcraft, I made this system for players to recycle unwanted magic items and create ones they do want.

Essence

Magic Essence is a weightless, shimmering, plasma-like substance that resonates when magical incantations are spoken near it.

There are four potencies of Essence, each of which is identifiable by a specific color:

• ⚪ Base (Common) Essence
• 🟢 Uncommon Essence
• 🔵 Rare Essence
• 🟣 Epic (Very Rare) Essence
• 🟠 Legendary Essence

A creature who is proficient in Arcana is called an arcanist. As a Magic Action, an arcanist can move an Essence up to 5 feet, store it inside an essence crystal for later use, or withdraw a stored Essence from an essence crystal.

Essence crystals cost 1 gp each and can each hold 1 Essence.

Melding

An arcanist can spend 1 minute to magically meld 3 Essences of the same potency together to form 1 Essence of the next level of potency:

🟢🟢🟢 → 🔵

Imbuing

The primary use for magic Essence is imbuing it into items to give them permanent magical properties. An arcanist can create a permanent magic item by inscribing tiny instructional glyphs (readable with the Identify spell) onto a masterwork item, then imbuing it with a magic Essence.

The more powerful the Essence, the more complex and magnificent of runic instructions the magic item can follow.

The scribing and imbuing process requires 8 hours of work per day and takes an amount of days that depends on the potency of the Essence imbued:

• ⚪ 5 days
• 🟢 10 days
• 🔵 50 days
• 🟣 125 days
• 🟠 250 days

An item can be used halfway through the process, but such a magic item is unstable and has unpredictable quirks that make it dangerous and bothersome to use.

Once the process is complete, the arcanist seals the item and the Essence together. At this point, the magic item follows its runic instructions and can share magical energy with a creature that attunes to it.

Disenchanting

Once Essence is fully imbued into a magic item, the only way to extract it is for an arcanist to disenchant the item encasing it. 

An arcanist can spend 1 hour to disenchant a magic item. Some potency in the Essence is lost, and the item is disintegrated during the process. A disenchanted magic item yields 2 Essences of the potency one level lower than it was created with:

🟣 → 🔵🔵

Disenchanting a Common magic item yields no Essence.

Legendary items take 24 hours to disenchant instead of 1.

Cursed magic items only yield 1 Essence instead of 2, and the process bestows a curse on the arcanist until a Remove Curse spell is used to dispel it.

Click here for a single-page printable version of this system.