Magic Item NFTs with ItemLore

Through ItemLore, DnD players can upload stories featuring Magic Items to the permaweb, and display these stories alongside those items forever, building provenance across games and through the ages.

Comment 3

Inspiration

I've played DnD since I was young, and "homebrew" magic items have always been my favorite part of the experience, especially when a quirky or "cursed" item drives the narrative of a game in fascinating ways. Players tend to become very attached to the imaginary objects their character owns, and it struck me as fascinating that NFTs allowed this "imaginary ownership" to be taken a step further.

What it does

In addition to offering artists and DnD item designers a store to mint and share original work, the ItemLore functionality allows Dungeon Masters and players to tell the stories of how these items contributed to the stories told in their games. As items get passed from person to person, the stories build and build.

How we built it

Very, very slowly... The ItemLore functionality seemed simple when I began, but making it work required learning git repo management, javascript and typescript, react, arweave gql, and so much more. I couldn't have made much progress at all without the extremely supportive discord communities of metaplex, arweave, and arconnect. Folks are so patient and generous, it's phenomenal.

Challenges we ran into

Too, too many! But to name one in particular, I discovered quite quickly upon recruiting artists and item designers from the DnD community that many folks are deeply skeptical of blockchain, and of NFTs in particular. This helped me realize that to win over this community I'd have to bring real innovation in functionality - simply putting Magic Items on chain wasn't going to win over anyone. Also - Metaplex got slower and slower as more folks joined Solana. The site can be verrry slow at the moment, but give it time and it will load. There's a fix for this coming down the pipeline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I've managed to build out an ecosystem that brings creativity not just to NFT artists, but to NFT owners as well. The extremely ambitious and distant promise of a platform like Loot is that users can participate in building the value of the ecosystem itself. Our Magic Items ItemLore functionality offers this today, within a gaming platform that already has a massive and creative following.

What's next for Magic Item NFTs with ItemLore

We'll use the any attention and prizes we earn through the Ignition Hackathon to secure collaborations with more artists and item designers, and to fund giving away prints of items to DnD players. I'm a high school teacher by day, and many of my students play DnD regularly. I'm looking forward to kick-starting my students' sense of entrepreneurship and creatively by giving them access to this platform, and providing them with funds enough to create and trade items, and submit ItemLore of their own.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates