A muscular man can be seen dragging a cart down the road leading to Jastrey. His appearance is one of recent battle. Several grave wounds are apparent upon his chest and arms, and his clothes are in tatters. Only the emblem about his neck, a circle of eight swords made of silver, seems to have escaped harm. The look on his face is one of grim determination as he trudges wearily toward Jastrey, one step at a time, dragging the cart behind him.

During the downtime, Nick and I have been revisiting some rules for possible revision. During that process, it became apparent to us that the item system needed reining in. In that light, we're now instituting the following changes to item use.

Performance Requirements for Consumables

Single-use and charged items now have performance requirements. We discussed this one at length awhile ago and delayed the final decision at the time. We've finally opted for the added realism and marshallability that this option offers.

The specifics vary between item types, but it generally works like this: Each consumable requires its user to either speak a verbal or perform a three-count prior to using it. Potions will be, "Drinking 1, drinking 2, drinking 3," for example (or "Pouring 1, pouring 2, pouring 3" when used on another character). If you're interrupted, the action fails but the item is not expended.

Charge Cap

Charged items are now limited to 10 charges per enchantment slot. Since the beginning, there's been an idea floating around that there ought to be a reasonable limit on the number of charges a charged item can store. I argued against it until now on the basis that the expense was a significant enough limiting factor, but I've since been convinced that expense alone isn't enough.

Here's how it works. Each charged action occupies an enchantment slot, as normal, but you can only have up to 10 charges of that action. Any more than that and the charged action occupies additional enchantment slots on a 1-for-10 basis. Thus, you could have a superior quality emblem with 30 charges of one action, but it would not be able to be enchanted further until at least 10 were burned off.

Worn Item Locations

Characters are now limited in the number of magic items they can wear at one time. If you've read about body slots in D&D, this one should be familiar to you. Basically, you can only benefit from one item in a particular location on your body at one time. For example, you can't benefit from three magic belts at once. If you do so, all of the items in that location cease to function until you've removed the extras.

The locations we've decided to go with are Head, Neck, Shoulders/Back, Torso, Left Arm, Right Arm, Waist, and Feet (note that I left out Legs; magic pants are just silly). These locations should be obvious in most cases, but I'll be adding them to worn item tags along with the planned revamp of the online item system, so you should see them listed starting next season.

I'll be working on adding these as official entries to the rulebook in the near future after we've worked out the details. In the mean time, I'm curious to hear what people think.