Touchstone

[Charlatan]

Just got the book Sandstorm, which is for D&D in desert waste settings (possible usage in a Dark Sun d20 or for The Amber Wastes). I came across a section on the Feat 'Touchstone', and a listing of Touchstone Sites for its use.

Bascially, what the feat does is give you a mystical connection to a site charged with magic energy, and allow you to gain a magical benefit from that connection. You can aquire the feat multiple times to get more powers, or simply visit a new site and scribble over your old powers to gain new ones. Each site has both minor and major powers available to tap. You can get minor powers from simply having a chunk of the place in question, and better powers by actually going there yourself. The more powerful effects have only limited uses, so you have to go back and preform a speficic ritual, unique to each site, to recharge them.

This feat, and a bunch of planar sites for it first appeared in THe Planar Handbook to my knowledge, though I don't have that book myself. THe concept really caught my interest, and I immediaty thought about the possiblilty of characters who main goals was to journey the world exploring plaves of in order to aquire supernatural powers from them. Of course, you only get so many Feats while leveling up, so you'd have to be picky... maybe Fighter could pull it off, using just his bonus feats to improve his fighting skills and using his normal feats for magic powers. The requirements don't mention spellcasting abilities, technically you only need a piece of the site worth at least 250 gp, expend 10 xp, and spend a day meditating to get the minor benefits, though that's the quickest, cheapest method... I admit I could be mis-reading it, and it does look like it's geared towards spellcasters partaking of it. Even the minor benefits can be pretty damn good, depending on the danger/power levels of the particular site ("I get to cure serious wounds once a day for how long? The rest of my life, unless I switch to a different site?" [again, assuming that I'm not misreading this, it states that the High-End Powers have charges, but not that the minor ones do]).

But know think about how this could be used in Ravenloft, with peole trying to tap into the mystic energy of, oh, say, 5th rank sinkholes of evil. Sure, Madness and Powers Checks galore, but you just KNOW that some people are going to try it...

It parts of this sound like the schemes of a powergamer, it's not meant to, I thinking of this as much as a way for characters to want to travel and explore as much as gain nifty abilities.