RPG Magic Item: The Morph Sword
A morph sword is a magical weapon crafted by an antique school of fencing masters who prided themselves on their mastery of every single variety of sword known to man. Once they had mastered the various native blades of their homeland-which debating military historians have variously attested to be modern-day Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Syria, Spain, India, Mexico, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, and/or (oddly enough) the Bronx-exponents of this school made a morbid game of traveling to exotic foreign lands, barging into local martial arts schools, inflicting violence on the grey and unsuspecting masters in residence, and returning home weighed down with sharpened souvenirs of their maraudery. A clique of popular students at the school in question, who dabbled in the fashionable alchemies of the time, began to forge/commission/steal (again, depends whom you ask) swords which, at a subtle mental or neural impulse from the swordsman, reshape themselves into any conceivable construction of hilt and blade, from shin guntō to macahuitl, with the fluidity of vinegar running down the slopes of a salad. The most elaborate examples of this bloodthirsty artifice, either through their own awesome construction or their wielders' smug sense of superiority, indistinguishably mimic named weapons of great fame: the Green Destiny, Durandal, Dhū l-Fiqār, and their ilk.
Depending on what game you happen to be enjoying at the time, a morph sword may have elaborately detailed tables of alphanumeric statistics spanning the full range of different swords (but only swords!) the sourcebooks lovingly detail, or it may be, y'know, wetwork omnisword quicksilver. Universally, the morph sword's functional benefit is to afford its wielder's player the obnoxious freedom to choose at each individual step of action resolution the properties of whichever sword of the morph sword's particular power level (mundane, superior, Artifact ••••, whatever) its inevitably statistically overeducated player wishes. Position with a zweihander and wound with a chainsword? If you can find the stats, an it harm one, do as thou wilt.
Collectors estimate individual morph swords' values over a wide and appropriately unpredictable range. Their originators cannot be reached for comment, as the entire school accepted a challenge from an obscure academy of Hawai'ian martial artists, who showed up at the mêlée with cheap wooden longspears and slaughtered the morph swordsmen to a man at range with little effort.
Depending on what game you happen to be enjoying at the time, a morph sword may have elaborately detailed tables of alphanumeric statistics spanning the full range of different swords (but only swords!) the sourcebooks lovingly detail, or it may be, y'know, wetwork omnisword quicksilver. Universally, the morph sword's functional benefit is to afford its wielder's player the obnoxious freedom to choose at each individual step of action resolution the properties of whichever sword of the morph sword's particular power level (mundane, superior, Artifact ••••, whatever) its inevitably statistically overeducated player wishes. Position with a zweihander and wound with a chainsword? If you can find the stats, an it harm one, do as thou wilt.
Collectors estimate individual morph swords' values over a wide and appropriately unpredictable range. Their originators cannot be reached for comment, as the entire school accepted a challenge from an obscure academy of Hawai'ian martial artists, who showed up at the mêlée with cheap wooden longspears and slaughtered the morph swordsmen to a man at range with little effort.