I haven't decided if I want to be involved in a reboot but I figured I'd throw in something on the Relics. Use it, adapt it, just use a piece of it or nothing at all. I just figured it could be useful in spinning out some ideas.
In my own world one of the "origins" available to characters is access to "Relics". In this world they are referred to as "Legacies" mainly because the relics themselves become legendary. One who carried the venom gauntlet of Kore would no longer by Marek of Alboss. They would likely be forever know as the new wielder of the Venom Gauntlet whatever that gauntlet was called. Some are passed down through family lines even becoming part of a house's coat-of-arms, some of them have gone missing for generations only to pop up once more while some of them seem to always find their way into the hands of peasant heroes or malignant villains. There were even a subset of heraldic tradition that studied the Legacies, how and where they popped up, what they were capable of and who they were bound to.
Generally, in my world all things possessed an "Animus", or spirit that is separate from a soul. A rock's animus was quite simple. A dog, for example, would have an animus but not a soul. This is also how undead shells possessed the knowledge of a person even after the soul of the corpse had gone on to the afterlife. A Legacy was an object that possessed a particularly powerful animus that brought it to a new level of being beyond regular objects of their type.
One way in which a legacy could be created was by the power of raw belief. In the same manner as when you hand two identical objects to a person and expound upon how light in mass one was compared to the other he would come to believe it. Only in this case, because the person believed it, it would become a bit lighter. Get enough people to believe in it and the object could become greatly reduced in apparent weight. For example, the first such blades in ancient times were said to possess the spirit of your ancestor and became something sacred and doted upon. That sword, over the many years, would become more powerful based on the beliefs of the family. Such blades would become lighter, swifter, sharper and more resistant to damage over time and could very well grant the wielder with skills that belonged to the legend of the original ancestor.
Raw devotion and masterful expertise could work as well, as great expertise is often earned through sacrifice. A great smith with access to rare materials could use his devotion to craft a truly masterwork object. Further, wizards and priests could well artificially increase the power of an animus or imbue it with a shard of elemental energy culled from other planes or whatnot.
