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Custom Loot in ICRPG: How Insanity Creates Story

Have you ever accidentally destroyed the universe?

My players might, should they mishandle their latest Kingly Gift from one of the Kings of Norburg, the Bloodstone. They just completed the Doomvault, a dungeon set under the city where the goal is to stop an ancient elder god from completing a ritual and one thing leads to another... a typical Friday night. The point is, they saved three kings and the city, so they'll get some awesome stuff, right? So I designed three amazing items of wonder that take days to recharge. One alters time. One is a powerful war totem providing armor and Hearts. And the third is the notorious Bloodstone, an item with the apparent potential to end all existence.

The Bloodstone

Item. EQUIPPED. Once every 3D12 days, all allies CLOSE may charge the Bloodstone with their HP up to a max one Heart of charges. Each charge used DOUBLES your Effort for one turn, 1D4 Room cooldown.

The Death of Everything

When first creating this item, I was thinking players would use 1-2 charges to DOUBLE, maybe 4X their Effort maximum at any time. Then it hit me: what would happen if they were fighting say, an Elder God (again), and just to make sure they killed it (because they couldn't even touch the Ogdru) decided to use all ten charges at once? I discovered that, as written, it wouldn't be a simple 10X Effort. No... I had made an exponentially powerful weapon of mass destruction. 

Warning: math ahead.

I crunched the numbers. 2 to the tenth power is 1024. They would be doing 1024X Effort. Now I don't know about you, but at that point I'm pretty sure they killed the bad guy.  

But I wanted to see how much damage they did to the world and possibly, Space and Time.

I decided, in the name of science, to use our fighter, the Hillman Blade as our example. The mage would have been even sillier as she has Pyroblast, so I figured this would be a low-ball for my two-woman crew.

Without getting into the details as to how or why, the blade is dual wielding shortswords made from the Dwarven Anvil and further modified with Loot. If she strikes a single target with both blades, she has a base attack of 2D6+16.

If Agnes, the Twin Blade were to panic and activate the full power of the Bloodstone for a single strike, her attack would be a staggering roll of 2048D6+16,384. I used rolz.org to expedite the damage calculation.

23,500 Effort. But we're just getting warmed up. Let's talk extremes here. Let's say she has a Hero Coin and picked up a Berzerker Ring. the new roll is 2048D6+1024D12+19,456. Odin forbid she rolls a Nat 20 on the success, cause this gets even worse: 2048D6+2048D12+22,528.

Normal strike with Hero Coin: 33,200 Effort.
Critical Hit + Hero Coin: 43,000 Effort.

With a single strike of her blades, she does 4,300 Hearts of damage. The toughest monster I've seen has maybe 5? That's like, the monster, building, city, continent, possibly the entire world of Alfheim and beyond.

Stand back, because we're bringing Magic into this.

Pyroblast does Double Effort on up to 3 Targets. I read and adjudicate that as three bolts of Double Effort that can be aimed where she wants. So... three bolts of double effort on a single target. Her effort bonus is much lower, a mere +4. But she has the new Spell Book, so on a roll of 8 she can roll effort again. I'd have to actually program an algorithm for that with these numbers, so we'll just go straight to the extreme and assume she: 
  1. Rolled a Nat 20
  2. Used a Hero Coin
  3. Has a Berzerker Ring
  4. Rolled at least one 8 on Effort
This results in a basic calculation of 1024(3(3D8+16)+2D12+6) or more simply, 9,216D8+2,048D12+22,528.

This broke rolz.org. Apparently, they can only calculate a maximum of 10,000 dice in a single roll. So I did a rough napkin calculation using dice averages, considering that one of the three D8's has to be an 8. 

90,000 Effort. 

I have become Death, destroyer of Worlds, of Space, and of Time.

Conclusion

Honestly, the group doesn't meet again until late May and they haven't gotten this reward yet. I'm still debating if I'm going to change this item or not. I probably will, because even using as few as 4 charges at once is enough to effectively level a city. 

However... WORLDS may have convinced me to keep it as-is. Why?

Ghost Mountain. The odd world outside of Space and Time between Reality and what's Beyond, where souls go, the Devil is real and the struggle for control of the Mountain is constant. How to use Ghost Mountain in your game outside of the setting itself is a topic for another post, but if our heroes were to destroy all of space and time, I'd just have them wake up in the deserts of Ghost Mountain with the goal of stopping the mountain from tumbling through the void they created and restart the universe with the Devil's "base code."

My point is that this item is ridiculous to the extreme and possibly the only instance of a truly "overpowered" item I have seen in this game. And I am seriously considering keeping it because it could provide the basis and structure for the most intense, crazy, high-stakes and FUN game I could have at my table. And isn't that any GM's dream?

Happy gaming!
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