Emotion Blades
These particular items look more or less like short swords with a metal hilt and a glass blade. Mind you, the metal is actually concentrated willpower and the glass is crystallized emotion, but that’s what happens when you bring an item back from the Deep Dreaming. They’re stable in our plane of existence and don’t set off metal detectors or show up on X-Ray scanners, which is really the important thing. As is the fact that, while an Emotion Blade can be destroyed, the means to do so typically does not exist in our home dimension.
An Emotion Blade is… only kind of a weapon. I mean, you can use the hilt to hit somebody, sure; it can bash with the best of them, with ‘them’ being defined as ‘one-handed short-swords.’ But the real value of an Emotion Blade lies in what getting hit by the ‘blade’ itself does. Essentially, each Emotion Blade embodies one particular emotional state. If you hit somebody who is not currently in that emotional state, he immediately enters that state for the next fifteen minutes. If you hit somebody who is in that state, he leaves that state for the same amount of time. And yes, you can see-saw a person’s emotional state indefinitely with one of these things.
As you can see, Emotion Blades have a very situational sort of value. A Blade of Anger can start a fight or end it; a Blade of Happiness can make either dreams or nightmares come true; a Blade of Greed can spark great injustice or justice; and so on, and so on, and so on. A wielder of any of these blades can be a saint or monster, as the mood takes him; it is probably fortunate that no Emotion Blade has ever shown any signs of sentience. And when it comes to items from the Deep Dreaming, believe me: that’s ALWAYS something that you have to check for.
An Emotion Blade sounds like something the Social Justice Warriors would wield. Most of them would stab themselves.
I would imagine that these items are sufficiently rare (even in game worlds that might have them) that if somebody was using it for self-harm, somebody else would come by and relieve that person of the artifact.
Fortunately, Gamers are all mysogynistic nerd-boys a SJW wouldn’t be caught dead playing with. 😉 Maybe we want to keep certain stereotypes for a bit……