Unique Item Rarity (5e Variant Rule)

Unique Item Rarity

An item with the Legendary rarity is cool and all, but what if we need to go deeper? Some items simply aren't capable of being Artifacts, maybe they're single use, maybe they're not completely broken, but some things are just simply unique. That's where this comes in! An item with the Unique rarity is considered rarer then Legendary on the rarity scale. You should only ever find 1 of it on any given world, or at least they should be so rare and difficult to track down they might as well be completely unique. Note that items of the Unique rarity are not necessarily unique completely, it a big wide omniverse after all. However, finding a Unique rarity item should be almost as dangerous and arduous as finding an Artifact. Whether it's a Permanent Potion, other epic single-use item, or something that just NEEDS to be ridiculously rare, you can stamp it with Unique now. (For context, Legendary items show up on loot tables and the like if those are used in your campaign, but Unique items would never be randomly found in this manner, even by chance, and therefore must be sought out). A Unique rarity item would have a value of 100,000 gp or higher, making Legendary items have a value of 50,001 gp to 99,999 gp.

With the variant rule in the DMG that allows the creation of magical items, creating a Unique rarity item would require 100,000 GP and a level of at least 20 (Which is the highest level without additional homebrew rules, but homebrewing a higher level cap should not change the level requirement here).

If creating an item with the Unique rarity on this wiki, it is recommended to put the following code as the first line in its description, since Unique rarity isn't accounted for when making the wiki's pages (Because it's homebrew).

If you want your item to show up on the list below, add [Category:Unique] to it as code at the bottom (Adding one more set of brackets).

Finally, as a recent development, the rules for magic item creation in the DMG (Chapter 9, Pg 284, "Creating a Magic Item"), include a table for magic item bonuses by rarity, capping out at +4 for Legendary items. A Unique rarity item following the same rules should have no more than a +5 bonus (Conveniently in line with the max bonus from 3.5e). It's recommended to give such an item no additional properties that are any more than for flavor. One example of a +5 item, the Obsidian Dagger can be found below. +5 is a really high bonus, and its inclusion in gameplay can make hitting even powerful creatures rather trivial, so be wary of that. In general, items tend to improve the creatures wielding them over being inherently better to use. As a result, no +4 items with any interesting magical properties exist in canon, with other Legendary items capping out at +3. By this logic, we can ascertain that a +4 item with other properties could be Unique rarity in nature, assuming it's not an Artifact.

Unique Magic Items

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