I shared “This made me smile” on my Mastodon account for this quote, from PTFO, though I smiled as much from The Hobbit screen cap as from the quote:

When Gandalf & Thorin’s Company overcame the stone trolls, they found in their lair two great elven blades: Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver & Glamdring the Foe-Hammer. I don’t know if they’re +1 or +2, but I do know I’d much rather have something called ‘The Foe-Hammer’ than a +2 longsword. On top of the names, they have a history (like everything in Tolkien). Glamdring was wielded by Turgon, the elven King of Gondolin, during the First Age.

To my surprise, it led to a lively discussion. I’ve shared the posts here, as I wanted to preserve this conversation somewhere more permanent. (Different Mastodon users have different retention policies on their posts. For instance, I’ve set my posts to autodelete after a few months unless they were shared a certain number of times.)

Judeau wrote: 

I would be inclined to choose Foe Hammer because it sounds much more fearsome but knowing that it’s a sword (named hammer) and not some large mace or warhammer would make me hesitate. It’s either a trick or a curse would be my train of thought. 😊

Nazo wrote:

In D&D rules there legitimately are times where a unique weapon can be +1 or whatever and be normally far better than a +2 or whatever generic weapon.

But the moment you run into something magical with a skin too tough to damage with a +1 weapon you may regret if you sold the +2 weapon. (I can’t recall immediately off the top of my head what requires +2. +1 covers a lot of magical entities with special skin.)

Thrythlind wrote:

As a corollary to this, the One Ring ttrpg encourages setting out two-three treasures for each player ahead of time and assembling an index of treasures which the GM can seed into hoards or as rewards from local leaders as the campaign progresses. As to weapons and armor, most players will acquire these as rewards when their valor rises allowing them to craft a personal weapon that grows in power alongside them.

Argonel wrote:

When playing Angband, successor to Moria, successor to Rouge, cousin of Nethack, Glamdring is a broadsword that is blessed, provides slow digestion, resistance to fire and light damage, improves searching and increases light radius. It also slays orcs, demons and evil creatures doing extra damage to them as well as being branded with fire doing additional fire damage. Orcrist is similar except cold and dark and dragons instead of demons.

Joshua A.C. Newman wrote:

Elements of evocative fantasy have qualities, where D&D flattens everything to quantities, usually one-dimensional ones. D&D is not good for fantasy.

Nanard Grognard wrote:

Wanna a cool magic weapon or whatever magic stuff? Each +1/magic perk is a name or title. Goblin Cleaver is 1 or 2 names, so +1 or +2. Your potion of healing is a light health potion, the potion of Great Healing is better and the Fazzam’s Mighty Healing potion raises the dead! Story? Find it to unlock powers, this Firebranded Stone-crusher solar sword is just a surprisingly sturdy sword until you unlock its powers by renaming it after rediscovering its history.

Want really rare magic items? There’s no enchanting, but anybody can spend XP on an object to give it a name. You can rename an enchanted object with XP discount, by the way.

Games People Play wrote:

Thing is:

1) Tolkien was a linguist who had all the time in the world to name his stuff.

2) Treasure in dnd used to be procedurally generated.

3) Neither Gygax nor Arneson were linguists as to make proper “self-important fantasy names generator” tables.

4) Chances are, most DMs weren’t linguist themselves either.

5) Most players of prior editions were rather interested in knowing -what their new magic swag does-, since it’s a game, and in games, we’d rather interact based on clear, mutually agreed-upon rules, and not merely on a DMs’ say so, same DM who is adviced by the books as, and I quote: “Whenever a rule has two or more interpretations, always go for the one more detrimental to your players”

Not every DM is gifted with a florid prose, and it’s not ok to shame them for that inadequacy.

张殿李 wrote:

I always wonder if “magical” swords didn’t enter folklore by means of things like this: Sword of Goujian – Wikipedia.

See also: Stonetop Arcana Provide the Best System of Magic Items

Photo credit: Rankin/Bass for The Hobbit (1977). PTFO caption: “Pictured: A human wizard and a dwarf fighter upgrade their main-hand weapons.”