[Radiance] Weapon - Noblelight Runners

When properly charged and enchanted, these types of boots are meant to last for the full duration of a labyrinthron game. Knock-offs or decommissioned boots often find their way to Ellumara's Dark Market and into the hands of thieves and adventurers.

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Noblelight Runners
Wondrous item, rare

While you wear these boots, they shed dim light in a 5-foot radius. Its light is noblelight, the illumination of the Phosphora lumenguild.

Noblelight Surge. These boots have 5 charges and regain all expended charges daily at dawn. While you wear these boots, you can use an action or a bonus action to expend 1 charge and immediately move up to 30 feet. While moving this way, you are subjected to the following effects:

• You ignore difficult terrain.
• You can only move in straight lines. You must move at least 10 feet before you can change direction during this movement.
• You must attempt to move the full 30 feet, running into obstacles if required. If you run into an obstacle, you stop moving and take 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet of movement you haven't spent, rounded down. If the obstacle is a creature, it also takes this bludgeoning damage.
• During this movement, you produce an afterimage that leaves behind a 5-foot-tall, 1-inch wide solid translucent wall of light along your path of travel. The wall sheds dim light out to 10 feet. This wall lasts for up to 1 minute and requires concentration (as if you were concentrating on a spell). Whenever you produce a new wall, it is added to any existing walls you are concentrating on and you concentrate on them collectively. Each 5-foot square panel of wall can be destroyed (AC 15; 10 hp; immunity to poison, psychic, and radiant damage).

If a creature wearing Noblelight Runners (including you) touches, runs into, or makes a successful melee attack against a wall of light created by a pair of Noblelight Runners, that creature takes 2d8 force damage. Any walls of light that creature had created with its boots immediately disintegrate.

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Very Rare Variant. The very rare version of this item has these changes. It has 7 charges instead of 5. Additionally, when a creature ends its movement in a space within 5 feet of you, you can use your reaction to expend 1 charge and move up to 20 feet. While moving this way, you are subjected to the effects described in the Noblelight Surge property.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

The Phosphora lumenguild is the guild of noblelight or plasmalyte, the "neon" or "noble gas" production of light. Their aesthetics are rooted in TRON, the coolest kind of light (which I now realize I unfortunately probably can't use again for Cosmos III - Technomancy out of need for originality)

These boots are clearly styled after the TRON lightcycle. Boots tend to not require attunement, so much of the work was limiting their use in a way that doesn't render them useless. At minimum, they allow for bonus action "Dashing" (assuming an average of 30 feet of movement.

The extra Dash caveats are mostly flavor playing a lightcycle game. The straight lines and 10-foot corner turns are one way to make it harder to produce tight enclosures with the wall. The requirement for moving all 30 feet forces creatures to run into other walls if necessary. Upon hitting a wall, it's game over and your walls disappear! The flavor text refers to a possible use for these boots in minigames (in which they don't have charge limits).

There's no uncommon variant because these walls sort of reproduce the effects of certain enclosure spells (wall of stone), and Rare is the lowest rarity for 5th-level spells. If the conditions are perfect, the boots essentially let you cast that spell (sort of) twice. The Very Rare variant upgrades the boots' utility, allowing you to perform additional maneuvers if another character wearing these boots were to come along, allowing you to possibly force them to crash.

Visually, the boots are simply black boots with light lines carefully placed to emphasize their contours and silhouette. The lines in the front and back of the boots help them stand out against the shadow. To make the black material more interesting, I added some material characteristics to it (like the stitch/breathable fabric you see in shoes).