EFAG Test: A Magic Carpet

This blog post is one of an ongoing series of articles to put the Elegant Fantasy Artifact Generator of Nine Tongue Tales to a test. In this one, I will use it to create a Magic Carpet. After all, this is what the dice and the table dictated as the next item.

Material: Precious Bone
Color Detail: Black
Who made it?: Underground civilization
How?: Performed a blasphemous ritual to empower it.
What for?: As a gifted for a beloved
Powers: Healing; Indestructible

*takes a DEEP breath* Sooo…. a carpet made of precious bones, created by an underground civilization with the help of blasphemous rituals, to create an indestructible artifact of healing….okay. One step after the other. A carpet made of bone. This would have to be akin to wood bead seat covers. But instead of wood beads it will be made of… vertebrae. The bones that our spine is made of. So much for the bone part… but what makes this bones precious? Hm. Perhaps the “who” gives me answers to this. The artifact was made by an underground race. I am a fan of the Veins of the Earth, so I will use one of the races found therein. The Knotsmen will be the maker of this artifact, and the bones will be precious because they actually PAY for them (there is spell in their arsenal called the Boneown… it is never explained WHY they want to own the bones of somebody else, so I make up my own, non-canonic uses for those). The Knotsmen practice strange and morbid magic, and are in league with some foreboding occult power. All of this shall be enough to qualify for “blasphemous rites”. It is a gift for a “beloved”. Well, the Knotsmen do not really “love” anybody… they sold their own unborn children in some obscure bargain long before the were even received. So, they have GOOD reason to keep them alive. Thereby, this carpet will have been a gift from father to son.

The Spinecarpet (LotFP-compatible stats) was made by a Knotsmen Bailiff as a gift to a son of his (a “Father” or “Weeping Knight”; see Veins of the Earth p.74 ff.) The carpet is made of vertebrae taken from those that “owned” the Bailiff one thing or another. They were blacked in a fire during an unholy ritual that imbued the item with magic. After that, the wiry black hair of the Bailiff´s wife has been cut and woven into strings so that the vertebrae could be lined up and knotted into a kind of carpet. Anybody who spends six hours lying on this carpet (a most uncomfortable affair, as the carpet is not comfortable to lie on and actually a pain to any knotsman) will heal twice as much as her or she would usually do. But the Spinecarpet is also cursed: the Bailiff who made it will know where to find the person that rests on it (no matter who it is). If the location is known to the Bailiff in person, he knows exactly where the user is. If it is not, he will know the direction, relative distance and have a general idea and what the place is like. This way, the Bailiff wants to keep track of his son. As the item is cursed, the owner will prefer to use it over using any different item, so he or she will always want to rest on it when wounded. Resting on it makes sleep next to impossible, thereby the character will suffer from a (-1) penalty to all rolls on the next day. While the curse may be dispelled, the Spinecarpet cannot be broken.

So much for the carpet. Next stop: a BIG jewel.