Item: Reading Glyphs

Level4
Rarity
Common
Price90 gp
UsageTattooed on the body
PublicationPathfinder Treasure Vault (Remastered)

These tattoos on your knuckles look like strange glyphs in an unknown language. If you press your fingertips to text in any language, these glyphs cycle in appearance through those of various extant languages. Encrypted text causes your glyphs to turn to a recognizable "null" symbol.

Activate 1 (concentrate)

Frequency once per day


Effect You sync the tattoos with the text your fingertips are touching. By running your fingers across the text, you translate it, with glyphs on your knuckles showing the translation in a language you can read. Your tattooed glyphs can't translate encrypted or encoded text, language couched in metaphor, and the like, subject to GM discretion.


Trait Effects

Invested: A character can invest only 10 magical items that have the invested trait. None of the magical effects of the item apply if the character hasn’t invested it, nor can it be activated, though the character still gains any normal benefits from wearing the physical item (like a hat keeping rain off their head).

Magical: Something with the magical trait is imbued with magical energies not tied to a specific tradition of magic. Some items or effects are closely tied to a particular tradition of magic. In these cases, the item has the arcane, divine, occult, or primal trait instead of the magical trait. Any of these traits indicate that the item is magical.

Tattoo: A magical tattoo has the tattoo trait. It's permanently a part of the subject's body, and reduces the number of items that creature can invest per day by 1. Each tattoo has the invested trait to indicate this limitation—a magical tattoo is like an invested item that the tattooed creature has no choice but to invest. If the tattoo loses its magic or is destroyed, it no longer reduces your investiture. Just like a physical magic item, a magical tattoo can be counteracted by spells like _dispel magic_ or _disjunction_. If destroyed, the tattoo fades from the skin. If a creature gets a new magical tattoo when their limit on invested items has already been reduced to zero, the new tattoo's magic fails to take hold, and it becomes a non-magical tattoo instead. However, a tattooist can alter an existing tattoo when they Craft a tattoo, modifying the old one into a different magical tattoo and removing the old effect. Magical tattoos can usually be upgraded into their greater versions by having a tattooist add to or modify the existing tattoo.


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