30 Day Challenge, Day 25 - Favorite Magic Item

Here I am, enjoying a day off indoors, as my part of the world is gifted with freezing rain. I'm taking the opportunity to go ahead and do my Challenge post for the day, this one dealing with magic items.

My favorite magic item, an artifact really, comes from the brain of my friend Paul, and was retrieved by my character, Nastrond, during the Arcane College/Gnomad campaign (You can start here, if interested. Just click The Arcane College tag to continue on).

The item in question appears to be a simple leather bracer with brass fittings along the outer portion that house a small hourglass, like is used as egg timers. The hourglass can be removed and refilled, as needed, though ordinary sand just sits in the glass and has no special effect.

When filled with the Sands of Time, however, the bracer has a number of abilities, not all of which I think I discovered during the campaign. First off, at the most basic, the bracer could activate Haste, as the spell with a 10th level caster. In addition, the bracer could grant +10 to initiative to anyone within close range, and could be used to make someone reroll their last attack or save roll. Each use expended some of the Sands of Time within the hourglass.

The most powerful thing the bracer could do, however, is an ability much like a Time Stop spell, except with as long a duration as I was willing to spend charges from the Sands of Time.

Now, it's no mystery as to where the inspiration for this item came from. A certain Prince of Persia game had been out a while and was pretty popular amongst my friends at the time.

Paul can be very generous with interesting and powerful items that fit into the story of his campaigns, somehow, and this campaign was no different. I loved my "time gauntlet" as I called it, and abused it quite a lot when I had the charges to do so, but right before the campaign dissolved, Nastrond had learned that he had contracted a degenerative disease that was aging him quicker than usual. With the added push of learning he could fuel the gauntlet with his own life-force, this item became a real threat of character death at a time when I was probably going to become more reliant on it.