Alright, so I decided I wanted to get into these Vox Machina Vestiges for my D&D campaign. You hear about ’em, right? Super powerful magic items, supposed to grow with the players. Sounded pretty cool, a good way to make my players feel special.
So, my “practice,” if you wanna call it that, started with trying to figure out what these things actually do and how they work. Easy peasy, I thought. Just look ’em up online.
Man, was I wrong. It’s like a rabbit hole. You find one wiki, it says one thing. Then you hop over to some forum, and a bunch of guys are arguing about whether that first wiki is even right. Someone will post stats, and then someone else pops up saying, “No, no, those are the old stats before it awakened twice!” Awakened? How does that even happen consistently?
I swear, I spent a whole weekend just trying to get a clear picture of one or two of these things. Take the Deathwalker’s Ward. One source says you gotta do some epic act of defiance against death. Okay, cool. Another says it’s more about protecting others. Then I found a Reddit thread where a DM just decided it upgraded when the player rolled a nat 20 on a death save. Which one is it? It’s like everyone’s got their own secret recipe.
And don’t even get me started on trying to find “official” versions versus what people have tweaked for their own games. It’s a total mess. Some versions you find are clearly from early days, maybe less powerful. Others are like, god-tier items that would break my game in half. It felt like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are from different boxes.
It reminded me of this one time I was looking for an old recipe my grandma used to make. Everyone in the family remembered it differently. Aunt Carol said it had cinnamon, Uncle Bob swore it was nutmeg, and my cousin just said, “Oh, Grandma just threw stuff in until it looked right.” That’s what researching Vestiges felt like. A lot of “it just feels right” and not a lot of concrete, easy-to-use info for a busy DM.
I even thought, “Okay, I’ll watch the show, see how they did it.” Yeah, good luck with that unless you’ve got a spare hundred hours. And even then, it’s entertainment, not a game manual. What works for a streamed show with professional actors doesn’t always translate directly to my kitchen table with my buddies.
So, after all that “practice,” what did I do? I basically threw my hands up. I took the names, the general cool ideas behind a few of them, and then I just… made up the stats and awakening conditions myself. Stuff that made sense for my game and my players. It was way less headache.
My players? They absolutely love their “Vestiges.” They think these items are super lore-accurate and all that. Little do they know their awesome magic gear is mostly just my cobbled-together notes based on a dozen conflicting forum posts and a healthy dose of “eh, this sounds cool.” Sometimes, you just gotta make it work, you know?
