Making Useless Weapons Useful in Spirits of Eden Campaign Setting

The Spirits of Eden Campaign Setting is based heavily on mythology and wuxia, in addition to standard fantasy and even some sci-fantasy. There’s a lot of things in the setting that, for lack of a better word, are a bit “ridiculous”. Part of the reason is, as I’ve said before, I feel this is a setting that really “gets” what some of the greater joys of D&D 4e are. It’s not about realism, it’s about making the ridiculous work and become not only believable in the imagination, but cool and fun to imagine. Spirits of Eden, through its lore and how it is set up is very enabling of certain concepts.

The most perfect example is how the Martial power source works in Eden. I’ve made the example before that a Fighter in Eden can sweep its sword at you with such sheer strength and power that you catch fire. It’s not just his grit and power that’s setting you on fire – it’s the essence of his aura that’s really doing that stretch – but to the Fighter, he just smashed you so hard you caught fire. To a lot of people this is ridiculous, but I don’t think it’s any more than Hanuman throwing around mountains in the Hindu epics or some of the improbable weapon physics displayed in Japanese and Chinese war stories.

Via setting flavor and abstract mechanics, you can really enable a lot of cool things. One of my pet goals with Eden’s character options was the enabling of “useless” weapons to become powerful through resource investment. One such “useless” weapon is the Sling. You would really never use the Sling, because even the Rogue, the only person who really benefits from it, has the Hand Crossbow, which is infinitely better supported with feats, weapon enhancements and powers than the Sling is.

So I made a few feats to try to make the Sling a bit worthier. They’re still in testing, through preliminarily added to the General Feats section, as usual.

Heavy Rock Thrower
Prerequisite(s): Str 11, Dex 13, proficient with the Sling.
Benefit: You treat the Sling as one size category larger.

Speeding Sling
Prerequisite(s): Dex 15, proficient with the Sling.
Benefit: You treat the Sling as a +3 proficiency weapon. You treat the Sling as Crossbow in addition to a Sling.

Versatile Sling
Prerequisite(s): Str 11, Dex 15, proficient with the Sling.
Benefit: You treat the Sling as a Flail in addition to a Sling, and can make melee attacks with it, or make ranged attacks against adjacent targets with a Sling without provoking opportunity attacks.

Stone Between The Eyes
Prerequisite(s): Dex 13, proficient with the Sling
Benefit: Once per encounter when you make an encounter or daily attack power with a Sling that would inflict the dazed or immobilized condition or give a penalty to defenses, the target is blinded until the end of your next turn in addition.

Grazing Stone
Prerequisite(s): Dex 13, proficient with the Sling, 11th level.
Benefit: Whenever you miss with an attack made with a sling, you can deal your dexterity modifier as damage to a creature within 3 squares of the target.

Stone To The Skull
Prerequisite(s): Str 13, Dex 19, proficient with the Sling, 21sh level.
Benefit: Whenever you score a critical hit with a Sling, the target takes ongoing 5 damage and is blinded (save ends both).

The Sling still probably isn’t munchkin-worthy regardless of what I’m willing to do with it (as I’ve said before I tend to want to stay away from boosting At-Will powers, or making Weapon-based feats that eat your multiclass, both of which are popular forms of boosting weaker things that I personally don’t like), I like the idea of exploring things like this and trying to make them a bit more worthy, and not just for the Rogue. Just for anyone that might like using a Sling for their character.