Magic items for Neon Knights

 I'm still around, I promise!  Just busy with other things the past few weeks, rather than game stuff.

In theory I'm supposed to have been working on getting The Grand Expedition ported over to Screentop.gg, but that's going very slowly while I learn their system.  So today I focused instead on Neon Knights, which I haven't touched in a little bit.  Had a pretty good day of it too.  I was specifically focusing on the chapter which would be "magic items" in a traditional fantasy game.  Instead, for NK it's "technomagic," i.e. things that look like '80s sci-fi or cyberpunk but work through a combination of magic and lost technology.  These are all lost treasures of a golden age that ended long before the NK time period, and which cannot be recreated at present.

The biggest category, which is what I wrote up today, is cartridges.  Yes, like in your old video game console, but a different size so you can plug it into the hilt of your sword if you want to.  An item has to have a port for you to plug the cartridge into, but if it does, then the cartridge gives it magical bonuses.  And the same cartridge can be plugged into different kinds of items, with the bonus changing depending on the specific item, but keeping with the theme represented by its title.

Earthdawn has a cool system where significant magic items have "key knowledges," bits of significant information about the item (e.g. who created it, what epic battle it was used in, etc), and if a PC learns one of these facts and invests some xp into it they unlock new powers for that item, or upgrade existing powers.  I'm doing the same thing here with cartridges.  I haven't thought of a good in-game term for it yet ("key knowledge" doesn't feel right, and "unlock" sounds too much like modern software rather than 1980s), but the idea is still there.  And it's not just learning facts either - that might be part of it, but you also have to do some sort of action which affects the magic inside the cartridge.  Here's the example that I wrote for the rulebook:

A cartridge called "Lightning Arc" would initially let you spend a fate point to invoke the Lightning Arc Aspect.  Some possible upgrades, and their requirements, include:

• Three free invokes per day - this requires the cartridge (and the item it is plugged into) to be left in the branches of the iron tree at the peak of Demon’s Worry Mountain
• Another Aspect, called Blinding Flash - this requires the user to speak a particular incantation while holding the cartridge up toward the sun at its highest point
• Once per day, the ability to teleport instantly to any spot the user can see, up to a hundred yards away - this requires the cartridge to be plugged into a specific machine that was used by its creator in the Before times, and which might still be found in the ruins of their factory

So, just like in Earthdawn, upgrading your magic items isn't just a matter of leveling up or spending enough gold, it can be serious adventure fodder itself.

That's where I am for now.  I still need to write something about other technomagic items, and I've got a few ideas for that, but I think that what's left will be less than half of the chapter overall.