In it's original appearance, Kamigawa was meant to evoke the folklore and stylizations of historical Japan, focusing on a few less-than-stellar tropes such as ninja, samurai, and spirits. While it achieved some success, Kamigawa remained untouched for many years. However, in early 2022, we took another trip to the plane, where lore-wise several thousands of years had passed. Many of the unfortunate orientalist tropes of the plane were replaced with a new, cyberpunk aesthetic, meant to evoke other media like Blade Runner, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, while retaining many of the plane's Japanese roots. While it wasn't perfect, it was much more successful than the first visit, and many of the actual game's themes and mechanics knocked it out of the park.
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Today's magic items all come from the modern-day cyberpunk version of Kamigawa, and as you can see, includes everything from katanas to hoverbikes. Since there's so much variety here, I thought it might be fun to do an item-by-item breakdown of the design process for each one.
The ancestral katana was one of two items in last month's poll that actually received votes, and I can see why. For better or worse, katanas are the signature item of Japanese-adjacent media, and their role in Japanese history has inspired story after story. The actual card is a pretty basic equipment that grants a small boost to the creature that has it equipped, and becomes cheaper to equip if you put it on a samurai or warrior that happens to be attacking alone. I liked this part of the card much more than anything else about it, and used it as inspiration for the weapons "quick attunement" ability, as well as the extra d4 damage it grants if you go after an enemy solo.
The second card to actually get votes was the blade of the oni, which also happens to feature a new mechanic called Reconfigure, which allows you to turn an equipment into a creature and vice-versa. D&D has a long history of sentient magic items, which appeared very early in the game's history; but the equipment equipment creatures of Neon Dynasty give off vibes that are less "intelligent object" and more "lab-created creature in the shape of a weapon." For the most part, they seem to have been designed to function both as living creatures and weapons, which is a fun and appropriately cyberpunk concept. In keeping with that spirit of that, rather than simply make an intelligent item, I gave the blade of the oni its own stat block, though it isn't very tough on its own. But this also opens up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to actually introducing the item to your players– there's the obvious option of including it in a treasure hoard, or giving it to a big-bad to wield, but just imagine the look on a party's faces when the weapon they were so eager to take for themselves gets up and starts to skitter away. I'd definitely think twice about whether I want to be keeping that thing at my side all hours of the day.
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The next two items didn't actually win the poll, but when it came time to do these conversions, I decided I didn't want to stop with just two swords. There's a whole world of interesting magic items to be found in the Kamigawa setting, and I was eager to bring at least a couple more of them to life.
The first item I settled on was the dragonspark reactor, a pretty simple card compared to some of the others in this set. When it or another artifact enters play under your control, you put a charge counter on it; at any point, you can pay 4 mana and sacrifice it to deal damage equal to the charge counters you have on it to a player and a creature. While it isn't much, it is flavorful, and I could already see a perfect D&D design for the card from the moment I laid eyes on it. And honestly it didn't change much from original idea to execution, except for some deliberation on how to implement a system for powering the item with more charges. It's still maybe a little unwieldy, but it gets the point across, and I'm not sure there's a better way to phrase it.
Of course, when I started doing these conversions, I knew I wanted to make at least one new vehicle for D&D too. It's unfortunate that there aren't many in the game already, beyond ships, spelljammers, and the few made for the Descent Into Avernus campaign, but I guess that's the nature of a game whose standard setting is a fantasy pastiche of medieval Europe. But once again we have a new setting that proves fantasy and technology can coexist perfectly well, and you can't have a proper Akira homage without some sort of motorcycle for your character to drive. And if that motorcycle can be a hoverbike, well, all the better. The stats for the hoverbike use the same format as the machines in the aforementioned Descent campaign, because after some light research, I think they're probably just the best (existing) way to handle powered vehicles. I maybe could have design my own system, but that would take a lot more effort than I was willing to put in for a single week's release.
All in all, the new Kamigawa seems like it could be a good fit for a D&D setting, even in spite of (or because of?) the setting's focus on technology. There's some quote floating around on the internet about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and while I'm not quite sure how true that is, I think it's close enough when you're talking about a world where floating motorcycle, mech suits, and robots are all powered by hand-waved magic anyway.
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