great idea however I would suggest a new artifact for all races. (lets face it we have another 40 coming, might as well add those in)

I'd actually dislike this quite a bit (if implemented for all races. might be nice for humans, for instance). While (excepting mist elf, which is a real stinker if you aren't a caster-build), the current racial gifts are mostly balanced to be usable by everyone, it still majorly sucks to get them on any class with actual good crowning gifts. Which is fine: right now, you can play a different race and not have to worry about a racial crowning gift getting in the way. It's quite nice that way.

But those are just my subjective feelings on the matter..

I think races shouldn't get special crowning gifts basically just because. It adds very little to racial variety: You only get crowned once, and even then it would be only a 1 in 7 chance to get that artifact. If your goal is to make races feel more distinct, this is about the least effective way to go about it.

You freely admit, though, that you don't have a reason to give Humans Preserver except that Humans are kinda teh suck and that might help. Dark elves are associated with spiders, not serpents. So I have to agree with Carter; if there were more racial crowning gifts, they should have a similar connection to their respective race as that of Hammerhead to the Dwarves.

Personally, I'd rather see a racial artifact as a guaranteed artifact for each race, somewhere in the game. That includes the ones that are currently possible crowning gifts.

That is, there should be a quest available to each race, with an artifact obtained at the end of that quest. That way, for instance, you naturally learn the story behind the item, and it adds to the actual variation between races in terms of the game itself.

Not really loving this idea so much, but I'd suggest tweaking crowning gifts to make it so every class has 6 different artifacts. Randomicity is the spice of Adom life.

Aielyn is on the money here, that would actually be a pretty great addition

I dislike that as it would mean people building characters around a known guaranteed artifact they're ensured to get. Means less variety, more predictable, etc.

Feels massively superior to diluting otherwise perfect crowning gift lists though. The predictability factor is not as much of an item if you place it late enough in the game (case in point being needle/sting). Perhaps a quest that only crowned champions could attempt?

I don't like it either. It would imply adding 12 quests to the game that would be mutually exclusive, you would only be able to do one of them, and it wouldn't even be an in-game decision because the quest that you are allowed to do would be fixed from the beginning of the game (and everyone would do it if the artifact is good).

I'd much rather have quests accessible to each char... either compatible with each other or mutually exclusive, but in the latter case, involving interesting decisions and not just "since I'm a gray elf, I'll do the elven forest quest to obtain the elven bow of elvish elvenhood".

I also dislike the various variants proposed. No win here.