Spinning my wheels but musing about magic items

The reality is, when I'm not actively running a game, I get too caught up in thinking about gaming. Maybe it's my life in academia that leads to such thinking (though I suspect it's the other way around), but sometimes I think too damned much. I know that when I was reading ENWorld a lot, I was thinking about rules and balance and design. Now that I'm reading more old-school blogs, I think about sandboxes and dungeons, whether that should apply to me or not.

So I feel more in mental balance. Now my work life, school life, and financial life are all out of whack, but that's another issue altogether....

Right now, I feel like I have a lot of world material and rule material. Now I need to start thinking about Play Stuff -- scenarios, plot hooks, NPCs, magic items, that kind of thing. At least as much fun as I can squeeze between other commitments....

My current thought is to think about magic. To be honest, I don't want a lot of swords +1 and plate mail +1 sorts of magic items. I think the weird feel I want for Athanor calls for bigger thinking . I want to work it so that most magic items are actually high technology that is misunderstood as magic. Other items will actually be magical, powerful, unpredictable, and either very dangerous or of limited usefulness. And very rare. There might be a magic sword that has as its main power being the only thing that can be used to kill a terrible monster, or a magic staff that has massive power, but contains the sentience of an alien sorcerer who will possess and corrupt a user over time. That's the kind of stuff that I'm thinking about.

Putting that to "paper" though, may take a little longer...