[Necromancy] Weapon - Soulfire Tether

This flaming whip is an ingenious weapon invented by the spiritcasters: sorcerers who draw their magic from their own life essence. The process involved in its creation - the extraction and refinement of a soul - is buried and lost to blackened history.

---

Soulfire Tether
Weapon (whip), rare (requires attunement)

You have a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with this magic weapon, which deals fire damage instead of its normal damage.

When you use this weapon to hit a creature that isn't Undead or a Construct, you can expend one of your unused hit dice to deal extra fire damage to it. The extra damage equals one roll of that hit die.

--

Very Rare Variant: Soul Tether. The very rare variant of the whip has this property. As an action, you can link your soul to a willing creature within 10 feet of you, forming an ethereal translucent tether that connects you to the target. The tether lasts for 10 minutes or until you are ever more than 60 feet from the target. Once you use this property, you can't use it again until the next dusk. The tether grants the following effects for the duration:

• Any damage dealt to you or the tethered creature is halved, and the tethered counterpart takes the remaining damage.
• When you would expend a hit die to deal extra damage with this whip, you can expend one of the tethered creature's unused hit die instead.

Legendary Variant. The legendary variant of this whip has these improvements. The bonus to attack and damage rolls increases to +2. It also has the Soul Tether property; when you form a tether, spells that affect only you or the tethered creature also affects the tethered counterpart.

---

DESIGN COMMENTARY

In this world, the spiritcasters are mages who channel the soul and work primarily with materials that invite or rebuke ethereal Undead (like ghosts). This is mechanically represented as expenditure of hit dice. It's a little strange to grade because there's still a net equal cost to using some of the features, but I equated that to items that grant extra spell options.

The very rare variant includes a once-per-day form of warding bond that amps up the other property. There's some cool uses like tethering to your Barbarian to share damage and increase the hit die spent damage. The shared spell property, though potentially a downside when facing enemy casters, works like a 10-minute Twin Spell that would have been too powerful for Very Rare alone.