Skilled artificers, blacksmiths, and other magic weapon makers sometimes add specific enhancements to magical weapons to increase their power (and, thus, their value).
With careful craftsmanship, less-powerful enhancements can be layered on top of another enchantment, creating items with multiple properties. For instance, a Returning Dagger of Disruption could be thrown at an enemy
Wizard, then used again quickly to stop an escaping bandit in melee. Some properties require the user to form a stronger psychic bond with the item to use them; these cannot be stacked with each other, except on special order from legendary, hard-to-find smiths with plenty of time and money to dedicate to them.
Weaponcraft Traditions
Through the ages, different cultures have developed unique ways to enhance their weapons through their own particular smithing practices.
Dwarves
Dwarven secrets of metallurgy channel magic through carefully guarded alloy formulas, mixing steel with rare metals like vanadium and titanium rarely found outside
Erdelan. These metals are then shaped with a level of precision impossible for all but the sharpest non-dwarven eyes to measure into weapons optimized for specialized combat maneuvers. Occasionally,
Dwarven smiths also imbue them with properties of the dwarven affinity elements of stone, star, and storm.
Elves
In the old
Elven traditions, magic is best imbued in an item via the innate magic of gemstones, shaped and set with extreme precision in order to bring out their most potent properties. The forms of these weapons are shaped around their stones in naturalistic, organic ways that are as artistic as they are effective in battle.
Gnomes
Gnomish magical weapons often feature many oddly-shaped and extraneous pieces, both as adornment and within the often-hollow weapons—on close inspection, they sometimes seem haphazardly tacked on or tenuously held together, but the weapons are as resilient as any. The finest gnomish weapons resemble a fanciful machine imagined by a child, and seem to be held together only by the power of imagination.
Humans
The finest human-made advancements in weaponcraft have often been made not by royal armies, but by roaming bands of warriors that have innovated on the fly to defend their homelands and protect themselves. They make do with less-magical materials in favor of whatever is lightweight, easily shaped, and readily available in their territory, making up for the power by enchanting the weapons over ley lines to strengthen the magic's hold. The resulting weapons are optimized to keep both their enchantments and their wielders effective as long as possible.
The weapons of the
Orokhim have been rigorously tested by each clan's craftsmen and war mages, in service of the eons-long arms race between the children of
Prometheus and the children of
Gruumsh. They are carefully balanced for maximally efficient use of their considerable weight, and enchantments are often duplicated and overlapped by casters from different disciplines to ensure their longevity—one weapon might pass through the hands of war mages, landsingers, orators, and arcane craftsmen before it is considered finished.
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