Equipment (SB)

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For the most part, shamans use the basic equipment presented in the Player's Handbook. While they spend their lives with one foot in a world beyond their own, they mostly ply their trade with the same tools that others of their community use in their daily lives. Most of the objects needed to perform sacrifices and other rituals are gourds or jars, spears or arrows (or another weapon), mats to lay out the sacrifices upon, bowls into which sacrificial meat or objects can be placed, and so on. Because of this, all shamans can move swiftly from locale to locale when needed.
There are, however, a handful of unique items that shamans must possess and protect above all, items that are the cornerstones of their coexistence with the spirits.
==The Badge of Rank==
All shamans carry an item that identifies their status to members of their tribe or culture. (Should anyone else try to fake such an object or steal one to claim to be a shaman, the spirits would be enraged.)
The object may be a staff, necklace, wand, bangle, cloak, or any other item the DM and player can agree upon. They are often made for the new shamans by the elders, usually involving feathers, thongs of hide, bones, stones, shells, teeth, hair, and similar natural materials. By using certain combinations of colored beads and other objects, these badges can be made to carry complex messages (read only by those with the Shamanic Ritual nonweapon proficiency), telling the shaman's name, lineage and year of birth, who trained him or her, and so on. A successful Shamanic Ritual check is required to make a badge.
In some tribes all shamans have similar badges (they all have staves of a certain wood, for example), while in others shamans have widely differing emblems. Players and DMs should decide what a shaman player character's badge of rank looks like.
==The Implements of Sacrifice==
Each shaman also carries two knives, one of bone and one of stone, which must never be used for any mundane purpose. They may only be used for sacred purposes, be it drawing blood from an animal offering, making ritual scars upon the people of the tribe (common at initiation ceremonies), or to create mystical markings in the dirt or on trees around ritual areas. Attempts to sacrifice with any other tool or weapon imposes a -2 penalty upon the Shamanic Ritual check for that sacrifice. If used for any commonplace purpose, (like food preparation or combat), the knives can no longer be considered specialized ritual tools and all rituals the shaman attempts to perform with them will automatically fail.
==Drum, Rattle, and Mask==
The shaman's drum and rattle are used to call the spirits. Their function is to attract the attention of the desired spirits. If either is missing, all shamanic ritual rolls are made at a -1 penalty; if both are missing a -3 penalty is applied.
The drum is usually made from hide stretched over a wooden frame, and the rattle is normally just a gourd filled with pebbles on the end of a stick. More elaborate drums and rattles may be used, made of hollowed boughs, bones, or similar materials. The shamanic drums and rattles must never be made with metal parts, as dictated by tradition born in ancient times.
The masks are, in fact, carefully crafted magical items that serve as focal points for both spirits and shamans. These important treasures are described in "Shamanic Treasures." Shamans wear them during important rituals, and each mask is created specifically to facilitate the relationship between a particular spirit and a specific shaman. It takes weeks to create each mask, which are always elaborately painted and shaped in the visage of the spirit.