Enhanced Items

The ability to plunder enhanced items from the hoards of conquered pirates, or discover them in long-lost Sith tombs is an experience players expect. Such items grant capabilities a character could rarely have otherwise, or they complement their owner's capabilities in wondrous ways.

Rarity

Each enhanced item has a rarity: standard, premium, prototype, advanced, legendary, or artifact. Standard enhanced items are the most plentiful. Consequently, higher rarity items are more scarce. The game assumes that the secrets of creating the most powerful items arose centuries ago and were then gradually lost as a result of wars or mishaps. Even premium items can't be easily created. Thus, many enhanced items are unique and well-preserved relics.

Rarity provides a rough measure of an item's power relative to other enhanced items. Each rarity corresponds to a character level, as shown below in the Enhanced Item Rarity and Identification table. A character doesn't typically find a prototype enhanced item, for instance, until 5th-level or later. That said, rarity shouldn't get in the way of your campaign's story. If you want the darksaber to fall into the hands of 1st-level character, so be it. No doubt a great story will arise from that event.

Enhanced Item Rarity and Identification

If your campaign allows for trade in enhanced items, rarity can also help you set prices for them. As the GM, you determine the value of an individual enhanced item based on its rarity. Suggested values are provided in the Enhanced Item Rarity table. The value of a consumable, such as a medpac or stimpac, is typically half the value of a permanent item of the same rarity.

Identifying Enhanced Items

Some enhanced items have properties not readily distinguishable to the naked eye. Identifying such an item requires use of the analyze or telemetry power, or inspection with the appropriate tools.

If a player is proficient in the appropriate type of tools, as shown in the Tools by Item table on page ___, they can make a check with the tools to identify the properties of an enhanced item over the course of a short rest. To use this benefit, they must have the tools, and the enhanced item must be within reach. The DC is found above in the Enhanced Item Rarity and Identification table.

Variant: Simpler Identification

If you prefer enhanced items to be more readily identifiable, you can allow characters to identify enhanced items through experimentation. Over the course of a short rest, a character can focus on one enhanced item while being in physical contact with it. At the end of the short rest, the character learns the item's properties, as well as how to use them.

Attunement

Some enhanced items require a creature to form a bond with them before their enhanced properties can be used. This bond is called attunement, and certain items have a prerequisite for it. If the prerequisite is a class, a creature must be a member of that class to attune to the item.

Without becoming attuned to an item that requires attunement, a creature gains only its unenhanced benefits. For example, an enhanced heavy shield that requires attunement provides the benefits of a normal heavy shield to a creature not attuned to it, but none of its enhanced properties.

Attuning to an item requires a creature to spend an uninterrupted short rest focused on only that item while being in physical contact with it. This focus can take the form of weapon practice, meditation, or some other appropriate activity. At the end of the short rest, the creature gains an intuitive understanding of how to activate any enhanced properties of the item, including any necessary command words.

An item can be attuned to only one creature at a time, and a creature can be attuned to a maximum number of items equal to their proficiency bonus; any attempt to attune to an additional item fails. Standard, premium, and prototype items cost one attunement slot, while advanced, legendary and artifact cost two.

A creature's attunement to an item ends if the creature no longer satisfies the prerequisites for attunement, if the item has been more than 100 feet away for at least 24 hours, if the creature dies, or if another creature attunes to the item. A creature can also voluntarily end attunement by spending another short rest with the item, unless the item is cursed.

Variant: Simpler Attunement

If you prefer a simpler method, you can instead allow your characters to have a total of three attunement slots. If you do so, enhanced items should only take one attunement slot, regardless of rarity.

Cursed Items

Some enhanced items bear curses that bedevil their users, sometimes long after a user has stopped using an item. An enhanced item's description specifies whether the item is cursed. Most methods of identifying items, such as the analyze tech power, fail to reveal such a curse, although lore might hint at it. A curse should be a surprise to the item's user when the curse's effects are revealed.

Attunement to a cursed item can't be ended voluntarily unless the curse is broken first.