Time on Your Side: Hourglass of History Lost to Time
Hourglass icon, Raminus, 6 June 2008 (UTC),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Hourglass of History Lost to Time
Uncommon wondrous item
Crafting Components: Sleepy sand from the eye of a sphinx
This antique and intricately crafted hourglass has 1 charge. After spending 1 hour focused on the hourglass watching the sand fall, a creature can use an action and expend the charge to cast legend lore at its lowest level with no material components.
At dawn, if the hourglass has 0 charges roll 1d6. On a result of 5 or 6, the hourglass regains its spent charge; on a 4 or lower it does not. If the hourglass does not regain its charge, a new attempt is made each dawn until it does.
Alternatively, if a creature uses the hourglass to cast the spell with its normal material components, the hourglass automatically regains its spent charge at dawn.
At the Narrator’s discretion, if the hourglass has 0 charges for 3 consecutive days, it loses all its magical properties and becomes a mundane hourglass.
LEGEND LORE
5th-level (divination; arcane, communication, knowledge, time)
Classes: Bard, cleric, wizard
Casting Time: 10 Minutes
Range: Self
Target: An object, creature, or location you name or describe
Components: V S M (250 gold of incense consumed by the spell and 4 blank, exquisitely bound books worth at least 50 gold each)
Duration: Instantaneous
You learn significant information about the target. This could range from the most up-to-date research, lore forgotten in old tales, or even previously unknown information. The spell gives you additional, more detailed information if you already have some knowledge of the target. The spell will not return any information for items not of legendary renown.
The knowledge you gain is always true, but may be obscured by metaphor, poetic language, or verse. If you use the spell for a cursed tome, for instance, you may gain knowledge of the dire words spoken by its creator as they brought it into the world.
Author’s Note: After my players secured an hourglass originally intended to be nonmagical in nature, I created this item as a small reward for their roleplaying and puzzle-solving during the adventure Til Undeath Do Us Part. In the end it served as a nice way for me to introduce additional lore about the world of Somna, the Cursed Lands (my home campaign setting).
This website includes material taken from the A5E System Reference Document (A5ESRD) by EN Publishing and available at A5ESRD.com, based on Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, available at www.levelup5e.com. The A5ESRD is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
