As belabored many times before, my time to work on Earth Delta is limited. Even so, I find a few minutes here and there, and one of the things that needs serious beefing up is the tech item lists. (I am, basically, writing my own full-length Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Adventurer’s Vault, a task which is as Sisyphean as it is quixotic and I wonder what tomorrow’s word on my calendar will be.) I managed to get a few waist items done (hence the title of this post — see what I did there? Aren’t I just so clever?). In one of those rare moments of inspiration (“You should have thought of that six months ago, moron!”) it occurred to me that a new type of waist item that fits the Earth Delta milieu (thank you, Earnest Gary Gygax, for you have done more for my vocabulary than all the pedantic pedagogues in the world) would be the holster. (It also occurred to me that I could write a Western RPG called “Holsters And Holsteins”, but I’m going to let that idea drop for a while…)

So I present to you the first holster item for Earth Delta. As usual, this is a first pass/unedited draft. Even so, it went through a lot of changes as I tried to balance “is this a sensible power given the special effects” with “is this a useful power” and “would a player want this in place of a different waist slot item”. As it is, I’m highly tempted to drop the charging property and give it to another holster that would have other, charging-related, powers.

Mag Holster Level 9+

From hip to hand in the blink of an eye…

The mag holster resembles a small chrome disk, with a number of blinking lights and small controls. When a gun is placed next to it, the gun is held fast until the user wants it.

This holster can hold any one-handed tech gun.

Property: If you attach a full UPC to the weapon stored in this holster during a short or extended rest, the first shot from the weapon does not drain a charge from the UPC. This increases to 2 shots with the level 19 version.

Property: You can sheathe a one-handed gun as a free action, fastening it to the mag holster. You can then later retrieve it normally as a minor action.

Property: Anyone attempting a Thievery check to remove the gun from the holster suffers a -4 penalty to their roll.

Power(Encounter): When you draw a gun from this holster for the first time in an encounter, if the next action you take is an attack action using that gun, you gain a +1 item bonus to the first attack roll you make. This increases to a +2 item bonus for the 14th level holster. If using the 19th level holster, all targets of the attack grant combat advantage to you.