Looking for feedback: Crucible of Mutation

I'm working on a homebrew magic item called the Crucible of Mutation. It allows players to create new life, but not without consequence.

The intention is that this item be the end goal of a significant quest (taking it away from an unscrupulous user or discovering it deep in an abandoned place where it was rumoured to be last seen), and then would be a significant driver of adventure thereafter.

The item is on homebrewery here (I haven't done the artwork yet)

I would be grateful for any feedback to help me improve it.

in example - or 15hp worth of a character’s blood. needs to induce necrotic damage to avoid quick abuse. I'd actually remove that option completely because a level 5 character losing 15 hp is nothing, heal spell or potion and poof no problem. you could add in a blood sacrifice of say a creature 2CR higher or a group of people / monsters to get the right amount of power but they have to actually die in the process.

Yeah that's a good point. I started the design with it being spell slots/points driven only. But then I was thinking that martial types get left out of everything, and I wanted this to be a whole party item, so I added in the hp feature.

The simple fix would be change the exchange rate: 2hp to 1 spell point. Not sure what the benefit of it being necrotic damage though?

Another idea that springs to mind is to have to make a save versus a condition like poisoned. Which ups the stakes if the created creature ends up hostile - starting the combat in the poisoned condition.

I'd prefer not to have a blood sacrifice to enable the item because the intention is that it can be used in a purely "good" way, it's just tempting to use for evil purposes.

Thanks for the feedback.

Also note that most healing recovers more than 2 hp per level and this gives a paladin and others with inate healing an easy fix.

A simple way to force multiple days or multiple donors is to add a level of exhaustion as the minimum contribution for both spells and any other means.

Another variant would be that focusing grants the knowledge to enact a simple ritual whereby players can use any of the folloing, spell slots, unused recovery HD (where the equivalent slepp level = HD size/2), wildshape(use the forms HD as recovery HD), or any other ability that allows recovery of HP. This would level the playing field a bit (except for rogues realy). At the end of the ritual all participants loose their intended sacrifice and gain a level of exhaustion.
i would suggest that you have a 2nd term for activating the item.
Ex: Essence & Charges
+ Absorbing boddies grants it the required essence points.
+ Donating spells/life force grants it charges
+ the item requires 10 charges per essence point to be used.Suggested revision
Each time new life is created and any one of the four outcome roles give a failure, as per their respective tables, the leading contributor character’s mutator skill may improve. The mutators skill can only improve if the total essence value for the creation is greater than the minimum to progress for the character’s current mutator skill, as set out in the mutator skill progress table. Each improvement raises the mutator skill by 1d4.

Thanks Psybermagi.

Wild shape and HD

I think the wild shape is really interesting as it means that life creation is much easier for druids, being full spellcasters plus getting their wild shapes to add in. Which of course is thematically consistent with druids being about life.

I'm not sure on HD. I want characters to have to deal with a hostile creation at less than full capability, and sacrificing HD doesn't do that (unless the Healing Surge optional rule from DMG p266 is used).

My plan is to tweak the spell point and hit point cost, but make it so the spell points have to be provided over an hour-long ritual, not over several days.

2nd term for activating the item

I'm not 100% what you're getting at here, but I think the aim is to make the wording about activating the item clearer? My tweaked wording is below:To create new life using the crucible, you conduct a ritual that takes an hour, during which you must pour magical or life energy into the crucible. The amount of magical energy required is measured in spell points (see below), and is equal to the total essence value multiplied by X.

The spell points can be from spell slots of any level, from any number of casters. Life energy is from characters draining their own blood, or that of their wildshape forms, into the crucible. Each hitpoint worth of blood provides Y spell points worth of energy. All characters that provide either spell energy or life energy are referred to as contributing characters.

The creation process is limited by the highest character level of all the contributing characters, according to the Total Essence Value per Character level table below. Attempts by a character of insufficient level will fail, and all of the essence within the crucible will be lost.

There must be two or more creatures worth of essence in the crucible or crucible will not accept magical energy for the creation process.

Once the ritual has started, it is not possible to absorb bodies using the crucible until the ritual has concluded.

Mutator skill improvement wording
Your wording is much clearer, thank you. The only tweak I'll make is that I will change from "leading contributor" to "each contributor". My reasoning for this is that I don't want the item to be hogged by a single characters. If all characters are involved each time, then the character with the best mutator skill should switch around.