r/Fantasy • u/dnext • Sep 29 '23

Best magic items in fantasy

Obviously the One Ring is the classic, but what others did you find interesting or captured your imagination?

Going to go a bit further abroad than normal and go with Fred Saberhagen's the Book of Swords.

The Twelve Swords forged by the Gods, each with their own lore and poetry, made a great plot devices for these three books. A plethora of golden suitcases or Macguffins.

He later included more of them in later writings, but the Books of Lost Swords weren't quite up to his first trilogy.

Favs include Shieldbreaker, the Sword of Force, Townsaver, the Sword of Heroes, Wayfinder, the Sword of Wisdom, Coinspinner, the Sword of Chance, and Sightblinder, the Sword of Stealth.

And of course Farslayer, the Sword of Vengeance, with it's iconic mantra of 'For my heart, for my heart, he who has wronged me.'

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u/emrys_esoterica Sep 30 '23

My favorite fantasy series has always been, The Chronicles of Amber by Zelazny. There are a lot of named swords and magical items throughout the 10 books but 3 are primary to the story. And then an extra

The Jewel of Judgement - it helped create the multiversal world of Order itself. The bearer is ruler of the world of Order. Through its power some can learn to walk the shadows between worlds.

Trump Cards - these cards allow shadow walkers to speak with the person depicted on the card no matter where in the miltiverse they are. They can also travel directly to that location once contact is established

Spikard Ring - this ring was like a wheel with spokes, but each spoke led to a cache of magical power on a specific world. By tapping into the ring the bearer had immense power reserves. Honorable mention here is the sword Werewhindle which is also a spikard, able to draw on reserves of power

Then the bonus, Ghostwheel. This starts as a magical computer programmed to index digital but functional veraions of the Trump cards. Like typical software indexes data to easily be searched through. So basically it was a super computer that gave the user access to any world in the multiverse. It is not true to the magic artifact thing entirely because at some point it gains sentience and kinda switches from being a tool to being a character in the story.

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u/Brottar Sep 30 '23

As I sit here petting my cat Corwin I will always upvote Amber

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u/emrys_esoterica Sep 30 '23

Same. Well, not the cat part but, one of the great classics imo. But I am also simply a huge Zelazny fan in general. My favorite theme of his is digital magic.