Tips on creating (or examples of) favorite homebrew items

Blades in the Dark
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Howdy all! I’m wondering if anyone has any homebrew items they particularly love and/or have tips on how to design great items for Blades? I’m still getting used to how different items are in this game vs games I’ve played before (D&D, Shatterzone).

Here are some items my players like:

Blockquote Powder Bolts: These are blunt crossbow bolts / arrows with a glass cylinder head one can fill with a small dose of a powdered substance (usually a poison). Upon impact, the glass head shatters and disperses its contents 2 ft in all directions.

Devil’s Brew: Gain two stress boxes until end of next downtime. Each additional dose consumed within a 24-hour period is extremely dangerous, requiring a fortune roll to avoid Level 3 harm “Catatonic.”

The Devil’s brew is much more dangerous than it seems. The extra stress boxes means the players MUST spend downtime actions on reducing more stress than they might normally, otherwise they will trauma out when the boxes disappear and they are over-stressed.

The Meelo “puffer” dart gun: A small, single-shot dart gun that can be easily concealed in one’s sleeve and fired by flexing one’s wrist a particular way. It is powered by a small compressed air cylinder. The range of the weapon is only a few paces and it can’t penetrate armor or even exceptionally thick clothing (such as heavy winter gear). Cannot be reloaded during combat (requires disassembly).

Here is my repository of items from the books and my own homebrew items.

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Pillow Gas (III, Alchemical): A green gas which slows your fall, avoiding harm from it complectly, and lingers in the place of use. Highly sensitive to heat. Consumable, Drawback: 4-clock, “Explosion from Heat” (fill 3 ticks)

This Item has quite interesting history. It was invented on the fly durring a score: the PCs triggered a blood tornado in a room with high ceiling, and were caught high up. When they stopped the arcane tornado, they had to find solution to the upcomming harm from the fall - and this is how the Pillow Gas came to be. Its drawbacks were added to it to negate its highly powerful functions when the crew wanted to acquire a permanent supply of the gas.

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Cool! @OpenAbyss, can you elaborate on the 3 pre-filled ticks on the “explosion from heat” clock? It sounds like this makes the players one non-6 roll away from the GM blowing them up - but I am guessing I am reading that wrong.

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You are not getting it wrong, but the next roll doesn’t have to trigger the clock - the clock name is supposed to limit the GM a bit. The Gas is meant to be very dangerous, sinse its explosion can be useful by itself, and avoiding “fall damage” is very powerful. Additinally, the alchemical is described as extremely explosive.

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