Ideas for Materia for my campaign

[gaghiel42]

So, in light of the new magic item creation rules, I've decided that I'm gonna use a 'materia' system for my new Fantasy Craft game.  I'm sitting here at work, sans book, and need some ideas for some cool basic materia with themes.

For instance:

Earth: I'm thinking something that would give a bonus to skill checks (like athletics) and perhaps Trip attempts or something.  Other ideas with an earth based theme are what I'm looking for.

Air: Something perhaps that increases base speed or has a combat ability.  As with above I'm just kinda brainstorming ideas for power combos for thematic purpose.

Fire: same
Magma: same

Life: I'm leaning towards something with a bonus to healing/magical healing/etc

What kinda stuff would you guys recommend?

[Crafty_Alex]

Well, you can (easily) go 1 of 2 ways:

1) Treat material like an essence or charm, to be added to an item after the fact.

2) Treat lesser materia as a series of upgrades which can be added as normal, and greater matiera as charm/essences.

This gives you big results, but may be too limited for you (you can always toss the Flexible Magic Items and Greater Magic Items quality on your campaign to allow some changing-up). If you need to add "slots" you can simply use the number of damage saves the item gets as a practical upper limit of the number of materia it can take (these often correspond to size, or at least take it into account). Finally, if you want characters to be able to drop them in/remove them from weapons and items as freely as you can in some FF games, I'd reduce the time to Build and Repair checks to 1/2 the normal time (and maybe allow those checks to be made outside of Downtime).

[gaghiel42]

What I was planning at least was instead of giving the party 'magical' weapons, I would instead give them weapons with certain numbers of materia slots.  I definitely like the idea for using the damage save.

Each Materia would be able to have both an Essence and a Charm with a theme of some type or another.  Some are going to be more powerful than others of course.  And the players will be able to mix and match for a variety of effect.

That way people aren't carrying a ton of weapons around with them to get the most versatility.  Of course, armor and accessories can also accept materia depending on what they need it for.

The fun part, is coming up with paired sets of magical abilities to give them flavor.