Magical Items

Magical items such as staffs, rings, amulets, and wands are all used by mages to enchance innate spellcasting abilities and to regulate and store magic, making them invaluable to most spellcasters. However, due to the variability to magic across the Eighth Realm, all magical items may be more or less useful depending on how versatile they are and the level of magic in the region. Much of this goes back to their creation, as people in regions with different magical potential tend to use these magical items for different things.

• Magcial Items in High Magic Zones:
• Due to the latent magical potential in these regions, magical items are much more useful to regulate or focus one's magical abilities rather than enhance them, but they do still have a place in enhancing magical ability for advanced, complex, or wide-ranging spells. With plentiful magic in these regions, rings and amulets become less important for powerful mages, but are very helpful to the average person, meaning they are both popular and common. In contrast, staffs and wands are seen as more of a status symbol for powerful wizards, who really don't need them to cast spells in these regions.
• Magical Items in Medium Magic Zones:
• As magic begins to wane towards its average level, staffs and wands become much more important. Powerful spells such as "Heaven's Fire", which rains fire from the sky in a limited area become impossible for the average mage to cast without using a magical item to boost their magical potential, as these spells will simply drain their magical potential faster than they can replenish it. This means that staffs used in medium magic zones must balance magical power regulation with enhancement abilities, and staffs from these regions are often seen as the most versatile when in the hands of a powerful wizard.
• Magical Items in Low Magic Zones:
• Since magic is in such limited supply in Low Magic Zones, even staffs and wands become difficult to use to cast major spells, requiring built-in abilities to draw magic from a much wider pool to make up for the thinness of the magic. These spells often have little to no ability to regulate magic, making them highly dangerous and even deadly to use in high magic zones, but are heavily tuned and use complex spells in their creation in order to scrape more magic from the environment. In these zones, magical amulets and relics which can store magical potential become extremely valuable as they can provide pools of magic to supplement a mage's natural abilities and shoot off a few powerful spells before they run out. However, they can take a very long time to replenish, meaning they must be used sparingly.
• Magical Items in Mixed Magic Zones:
• Being in a region where there is highly variable levels of magic can be very dangerous for spellcasters, and lends itself to more exotic designs for all magical items. On a region-wide scale (such as for Ærellion or Yehv) this can be overcome by carrying magical items specialized for different levels of magic or that are versatile but weaker, like one would do when traveling to a different continent. However, on a micro scale, there are many parts of the Eighth Realm where magical flow in a very small area can be of nonstandard form. These small pockets of mixed magical levels can mean that a mage must change how they pull magic from one cast to the next (usually mages have to feel out the magical flow in a region over a couple weaker casts, with little risk) which presents unique danger. To deal with this, there are some specialized wands and staffs which can pull magic up to a certain point and then automatically dissipate the remainder, while having integrated magic storage to pull from if there is not enough drawn by the user. The burgeoning field of artificery has been interested in making these specialized staffs less difficult and expensive to use.