Every Dungeons & Dragons campaign eventually becomes about a sword in some way, right? Maybe it’s a cursed blade nobody should have touched. Maybe it’s a holy relic capable of killing a god. Maybe it’s just a flaming longsword your Fighter refuses to part with 40 sessions later. D&D has always understood one fundamental truth of fantasy: swords are cool.
So for Cool Sword Day, we’re looking at the coolest swords in D&D 5e, from infamous artifacts like Blackrazor and the Sword of Kas to newer legends like the Sword of Zariel. To be clear, we’re not talking about the very best. We are talking about the absolute coolest swords you can wield in D&D.
10
Flame Tongue / Frost Brand
The starter-level of coolness when it comes to D&D swords, Flame Tongue and Frost Brand are features that can be applied to any type of sword, infusing it with fire or ice. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that they’re quite different in terms of mechanics.
With the Flame Tongue, you can cause it to erupt in flames with a bonus action, dealing an extra 2d6 fire damage every time it hits. It also sheds a considerable amount of light. The Frost Brand deals an additional 1d6 cold damage, but also makes you resistant to fire damage. It can also extinguish non-magical flames in the vicinity and shed a tiny bit of light nearby. For early-level adventurers, these cool elemental swords are an intriguing upgrade on your typical weapons.
9
Nine Lives Stealer
Imagine a sword that has a very slim chance of triggering instant death when it connects with an enemy, but that feature doesn’t last forever. That’s the Nine Lives Stealer in a nutshell.
While the Nine Lives Stealer moniker and abilities can technically apply to any kind of weapon, the default image is of a sword with a bunch of screaming skulls adorning the hilt and handle (probably nine of them). It grants the wielder +1 to attack and damage rolls made with the weapon, but the really cool feature is “Life Stealing.” When you roll a 20 on your attack roll and the target has less than 100 hit points remaining, it must pass a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or have the sword tear its very life force out of its body. A Nine Lives Stealer has 1d8+1 charges of this feature (so, ideally, nine), and it loses this property once those charges have been spent.
8
Holy Avenger
This cool sword is tailor-made for Paladins and exclusive to the class, so if you’re optimizing your build, there really isn’t a better option out there. It offers a buff of +3 to attack and damage rolls and deals an additional 2d10 radiant damage whenever it hits a fiend or an undead. That secondary effect is pretty situational and depends on your campaign, but it’s a Paladin’s sworn duty to smite all fiends and undead, so it fits. When drawn, the Holy Avenger also creates an aura with a 10-foot radius around its wielder that helps protect the entire party, granting advantage on all saving throws related to spells and magical effects. At level 17, the aura’s radius increases to 30 feet.
Advantage on saving throws is huge in terms of protection, even if that starting radius is pretty small. All Paladins get Aura of Protection at level 6, but that simply adds the Paladin’s Charisma modifier to all saving throws. These buffs stack, along with whatever unique Aura the Paladin picks up at level 7 via their subclass. If you’re in a campaign loaded with fiends and undead and are lucky enough to have a Paladin with a Holy Avenger at your side, then it’s going to feel like they’re the Doomguy smashing through skulls with reckless abandon.
7
The Sunsword
Did you know that D&D has lightsabers? A Sun Blade appears to be simply a longsword hilt, but its wielder can cause a blade of “pure radiance” to spring into being. The light it emits is technically classified as sunlight, and instead of slashing, it deals radiant damage with a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls — and it deals an extra 1d8 radiant damage to undead.
Curse of Strahd has one particularly important Sun Blade called the Sunsword. It’s a rather uninspired name for the coolest version of a cool sword: the villainous vampire lord Strahd von Zarovich once had a brother named Sergei. Strahd forged a pact with the Dark Powers to kill Sergei and steal his bride, becoming a vampire in the process. Later, Strahd employed a wizard to destroy Sergei’s sword: a thin crystal sword as strong as steel with a platinum hilt and guard. The blade was destroyed, but the sentient hilt lived on after being stolen by the wizard’s apprentice and became a Sun Blade.
This Sunsword appears in a random location determined by a Tarokka Deck at the start of a campaign, but in every iteration, it longs to destroy Strahd out of vengeance.
6
Moonblade
In true D&D style, the Sun Blade and Moonblade are radically different, rather than opposite sides of the same coin. A Moonblade is a legendary longsword passed down through an elven noble house. The sword itself serves a single master until their death, then it lies dormant until it chooses a new worthy heir. For each master a Moonblade serves, it gains an additional rune etched into the blade. The first grants a +1 to attack and damage rolls. Each other adds an additional property as determined by a d100 table.
These can boost the Moonblade’s bonus up to +3 for attack and damage rolls, making it a formidable weapon for any elf. But with the right rolls, it can double as a Defender and/or Vorpal Sword, store spells inside of it, deal bonus damage, score a critical hit on 19 in addition to 20, and a handful of other features. For any elf with a martial class, there’s no better weapon than one that has served their family line for thousands of years.
5
Blackrazor
Blackrazor is a talking greatsword with an imperious tone that exists for one purpose and one purpose alone: to devour souls. And it will literally fight its wielder should they not feed it for longer than three days. Blackrazor is, in many ways, the antithesis of the Holy Avenger. It’s far more powerful, but it has risky drawbacks.
Every time you defeat a creature with it, Blackrazor devours the soul, and the wielder gains temporary HP equal to the creature’s hit point maximum for the next 24 hours. While the extra HP lasts, the wielder has advantage on attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks. That’s in addition to the +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls. Attacking any undead with this weapon, however, heals the target and deals 1d10 necrotic damage to its wielder.
Mechanically, Blackrazor is pitch-perfect for Barbarians that care only for reckless bloodshed. Considering all of the details in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for the sword’s personality, Dungeon Masters can use that to tell a lot of interesting stories about the conflict between this sword and its wielder. What’s cooler than that?
4
Vorpal Sword
An homage to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem, the Vorpal Sword is a legendary greatsword, longsword, or scimitar with +3 to attack and damage rolls. The weapon ignores resistances to slashing damage, but its most deadly feature is deceptively simple: if you roll a critical with a d20, you cut off one of the target’s heads, and that target dies if it can’t survive without the lost head. (The language is convoluted here because you just might come up against a many-headed hydra, right?)
Rolling a natural 20 is epic every single time it happens, but can you imagine beheading a boss very early in a battle with a Vorpal Sword by a stroke of luck? That literally happened in one of my table’s adventures. Granted, it was a multi-phase boss battle, so we just went on to the next phase, but it remains one of the coolest moments of D&D I’ve ever experienced. Just wait until you hear that blade go “snicker-snack!”
3
Blade of Avernus
Speaking of Vorpal Swords, the endgame of Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus presents us with a totally unique version worthy of its own slot on this list of cool swords. The fallen angel Zariel seeks to rule over all of Avernus. If she is successful in destroying her original angelic sword, then she uses Adamantine and/or a talon from the dragon Tiamat to forge the Blade of Avernus as a symbol of her dominion. The whole enterprise is clearly meant to evoke Sauron forging the One Ring, complete with fire and foreboding, and the note that it can only be destroyed by casting it into the forge that created it — or the River Styx.
The sword allows its wielder to command devils outright and teleport groups of beings to a designated sanctuary at will. It has all the properties of a Vorpal Sword. It also gets three random beneficial properties (two minor and one major), along with one major detrimental property. These can mean a lot of different things. The sword’s mere presence might render the magic in all nearby potions inert, but also grant immunity to disease, proficiency in one skill, and the ability to regain 1d6 hit points at the start of every turn. Did we mention that wielding it also makes you the ruler of hell?
2
Sword of Zariel
The Sword of Zariel isn’t just a powerful weapon. It’s the entire emotional core of Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. Before Zariel became the archdevil ruler of Avernus, she was an angel who led a doomed charge into the Nine Hells. Her celestial greatsword remained behind as a symbol of the person she once was — and potentially the key to redeeming her.
Any creature that attunes to the sword undergoes a dramatic transformation. Their alignment shifts to lawful good while attuned, spectral golden wings erupt from their back, and their Strength score becomes 20 while their Charisma score becomes 24. The sword itself deals radiant damage instead of slashing damage, emits sunlight in a massive radius, and can even allow its wielder to fly. Oh, and it’s sentient, naturally.
Most cool swords in D&D make you stronger. The Sword of Zariel changes who you are entirely. In a campaign all about corruption and damnation, that makes it one of the most fascinating weapons in all of 5e.
1
Sword of Kas
Some swords are legendary because they save kingdoms. The Sword of Kas is legendary because it helped betray one of the most infamous villains in D&D history. Kas was once the trusted lieutenant of the lich Vecna — yes, the OG Vecna that inspired the name of the Stranger Things villain. Vecna’s paranoia eventually drove Kas to turn against his master with this sentient, impossibly evil blade.
The Sword of Kas is basically what happens when somebody asks, “What if a Vorpal Sword was fueled entirely by hatred?” It grants a +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls, deals extra cold damage, and allows its wielder to carve through spells and magical effects with frightening ease. It also actively despises Vecna, granting additional powers specifically when confronting the Whispered One and his servants.
Like Blackrazor, the Sword of Kas is cursed and manipulative. It constantly pushes its wielder toward violence and domination, slowly corrupting them over time. Which, frankly, only makes it cooler.
