Named Items

One oft-requested ability would allow player smiths to "inscribe" their creations or otherwise name items that they create. Obviously uniquely-named items have a lot of appeal in a fantasy world like UO's because of such weapons and items in other fantasy settings -- "Glamdring" in Middle Earth, "Drynwyn" in Prydain.

Currently in UO, the only uniquely-named items are rewards from quests, which makes them rare (and therefore valuable) but perhaps too rare. Allowing smiths to use arbitrary names will no doubt result in plenty of k3wl or racist names, however, so that doesn't seem like an ideal solution.

What might be better would be to have nifty weapon names applied automatically if the (GM) smith makes the weapon under special conditions. So, say, a smith who forges a weapon at precisely midnight UO time might find himself with "Nightblade" instead of "a longsword"; a weapon forged at UO sunrise might be named "Dawn's Edge". This effect could be randomized and limited -- perhaps it wouldn't work every time, and a limit of one weapon per real-life week would be created with this flag, for example. It would be easy to provide a small database of such names so that a longsword and a viking sword could be given different names, as well as providing sensible names for maces (obviously "edge" and "blade" make no sense for those).

Other similar names might be things related to fire/flame for the first weapon crafted after the death of an ancient wyrm on the shard (a viking sword named "Soul of the Dragon"), something related to death/darkness associated with the death of a named daemon ("Baal's Fang"), that sort of thing. Rumor has it that the development team is thinking of applying names to more NPC monsters (i.e. not just ratmen/lizmen/orcs), which would provide another bonus for this effect since dragon names could then be used ("Soul of Smaug") instead of a generic dragon-based name like the example above.

It might also make sense for these weapons to do extra damage, even if only to certain targets (i.e. "Nightblade" is good against wisps, "Dawn's Edge" has a bonus against liches, "Baal's Fang" is especially powerful versus daemons, that sort of thing). However, experience has shown that people really go for the "cool" name, regardless of whether it's actually any better functionally (read: maker's marks; but this also applies to Seer-granted items).

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