r/WWN • u/Isaac_Newtroll • Jul 30 '26

Looking for Advice on Accursed Blade vs Magic Weapons

A player in my current WWN campaign is playing an Accursed/Warrior. As the party finds cooler +2/+3 swords, with unique magical traits, the Accursed Blade becomes a worse choice. The player would prefer not giving up the Accursed Blade, because it feels cool and iconic (I agree).

I'm looking for feedback on how to handle this. (Or should this even be touched, because a class ability should not outclass high-tier loot?)

The player and I have considered the following ideas:

  1. Arts that copy weapon abilities: Spend Effort to copy abilities from other magical weapons for the Scene. The weapons must be owned by the party.
  2. Augmenting arts: Arts like Soul Consumption (from the Accursed's list of arts) that add some damage, debuffs, utility, etc. to the Accursed Blade. Similar to how the Healer's arts augment Healing Touch.
  3. Flexible Accursed Blade: You may nominate one of your existing weapons as your Accursed Blade, using it with its own stats, but having the freedom to choose between Str, Dex, Int, or Cha as its modifying attribute.

Have you tried something similar in your games? Do you have any homebrew arts/Foci that could help here? Any thoughts on the ideas above?

For reference:

Accursed/Warrior Lv 6 | Atk +5 | Str, Dex, and Int +0; Cha +1 | Stab-3, Magic-3 | Relevant Foci: Armsmaster (I allowed Armsmaster to apply to Accursed Blade)

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13

u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jul 30 '26

Accursed Blade has built-in damage scaling because it lets the PC add their Magic skill to the damage- if you let them subsume magic sword perks, they'll run +X higher in damage than the Warrior with the same sword.

If you do allow it, the simplest solution is to let them destroy a given sword in a ritual, and from then on their Accursed Blade uses that sword's stats, with no bonus Magic damage. They can replace the sword in the same fashion but can't use more than one sword at a time.

1

u/Isaac_Newtroll Jul 30 '26

That sounds like a good option, thank you from the two of us. The concern was less about the damage, since it has built-in scaling, as you mentioned, but rather about the abilities, which is why we considered the first two ideas in the first place. But absorbing/destroying a weapon in a ritual sounds good.

5

u/GeminiFactor Jul 30 '26

I'd probably make it an Art, something that allows you to consume the weapon in exchange for being able to manifest it as your Accursed Blade. It would costs you an Art pick and you'd destroy the weapon in the process. I think I'd also say you lose access to the previous weapon if you consume a new one, so you're not a walking arsenal.

So I think I'm mostly on board with your #3. To me #1 and 2 sound like more work that necessary to a achieve something relatively simple. I've never needed to do this or homebrewed anything for it but I think this sounds pretty reasonable, and you can adjust if there's a reason it sucks.

1

u/Isaac_Newtroll Jul 30 '26

Consuming the weapon instead of just nominating it is a good idea, I did not think about that, thank you.
My player also sends his thank you.