Enfeebling Echo

Description

These staves are sometimes carved with aged and tired faces, or crafted to resemble crooked and withered limbs. The power of the enfeebling echo is to lay an impression or suggestion of great age and physical debilitation on those against whom they are used. Over time a wielder who relies heavily on a staff such as this sometimes begins to develop physical symptoms of great age - liver spots on the hand, graying hair, wrinkles, and even in some extreme cases fragile bones and declining vision and hearing. These marks rarely disappear when the wielder stops relying on the staff, and in some places the implement is called an enervating promise, foreshadowing as it does the weakness that many associate with old age. Those with lineage rarely experience any such physical effects from an enfeebling echo, however.

In Dawn, Highguard and Holberg the staff is often carved with the head of a snarling wolf, and called a hungering wolf as a consequence. Magicians from the eastern nations of the Empire maintain that the staff itself feeds on the life and energy of both wielder and target, drinking their strength in the same way that a dark tree greedily drinks water through it's roots. In Dawn in particular, with its emphasis on glory, a staff that can drain someone of their most heroic traits enjoys a particularly dark reputation - as do its wielders. A seemingly young magician marked with signs of great age appears as the villain in any number of folktales from this part of the Empire.

Rules

• Form: Staff.
• Effect: Once per day when you cast the weakness spell you can do so without spending any mana.
• Materials: Crafting an enfeebling echo requires seven measures of beggar's lye and seven measures of green iron. It takes one month to make one of these items.