CURSED ARTIFACT - a DRAW STEEL Ancestry

Puppeteer the dead. Manipulate the living. Choose who is worthy.

Cursed Artifacts can take many forms. A spear that thirsts for blood, a book of celestial secrets, a silver necklace that squeezes tightly around the throat… All of these could harbor a disembodied intelligence. Many artifacts also avoid the issue of uncooperative wielders by animating and controlling corpses to serve as their bodies. A suitably clever artifact may lead their wielder into perilous situations, so that before long they conveniently find themselves held by a dead body to take over.

CURSED ARTIFACT is a sentient magic item ancestry for DRAW STEEL developed as part of Jams of the Timescape Volume II. Have you ever been watching Lord of the Rings and thought "gosh, I wish I could play as the Ring." Or maybe you've been reading the Stormlight Archive and thought "Nightblood is so relatable, I wish I could eat souls!" Well, now there's an ancestry for you!

My goal with this ancestry was to make it possible (and fun!) for another member of your party to wield or wear you into battle.

You can get the basic version for FREE, which includes everything you need to use this ancestry. If you pay $2 or more, you get the FULL version of the PDF with all the following!

• Printer friendly versions
• Extended "On Cursed Artifacts" fiction
• 5 cursed item illustrations
• An example artifact character (Nocturne, the cool sword on the cover!)
• Random roll tables for artifact generation, compound names, and single word names.
• 20 potentially campaign-spanning methods of destroying a Cursed Artifact
• A fully statted out Cursed Artifact Retainer

All the art, writing and layout in this PDF was created by me, Archifex. Absolutely no AI was used in the creation of this project.

CURSED ARTIFACT is an independent product published under the DRAW STEEL Creator License and is not affiliated with MCDM Productions, LLC. DRAW STEEL © 2024 MCDM Productions, LLC.