hiya! Yeah i know its discouraged to homebrew when you are DMing for the first time but I am impatient lol

I want to create a magic crystal kind of item. The world is like a desert; water is extremely limited and valuable. The players will eventually meet a group of people dedicated to an ice goddess of some sort(I'm still fleshing everything out) who want them to help them find shards of a special crystal. This crystal was maybe a gift from the goddess? maybe one of her tears? not sure yet! But it creates ice! Extremely powerful, even small shards can create a good amount! In fact, it's what's secretly powering the city Oasis's famous fountain along with shards being owned by a few other corrupt figures around the world.

Is finding the shards too lame a plot device? they'll be doing other stuff ofc this is more like a little something to go in the background that will become more important as more pieces are found. If my players do find all of them and give them to this group it will cause an ice age unknown to the party. ofc that depends on the party actually wanting to co-operate with them, I don't plan on rail roading them 

So mostly what I'm asking is

Is finding parts of a crystal too lame

how can I rlly flesh out this important item 

and how can I maybe hint at an iceage being the goal of this group without giving away that they do not have good intention, and making the players feel like they are on their side?

idk if replying bumps a form up on here but here's to hoping,,,,

This isn’t really a “homebrew” thing. Even if they are crystals that can magically create ice, that still isn’t really homebrewing anything specifically. Maybe a little, depending on what exactly you intend, like if each individual crystal can be weaponized or something. But otherwise, that’s just DMing.

And no, I don’t think it’s lame unless you execute it poorly. Background plots like that, “B plots” and “C plots” as I call them, are a good idea. They help add continuity to an story when the main adventures are a series of unrelated things. They give the players a sense that the world is larger than whatever they are doing at any given moment. And they give a DM something to use to get things moving whenever the current main plot starts to stall.

To be honest, inwould bring this up in the Dungeon Masters Only forum, it’ll likely get better feedback there. Then, when you have things better figured out, and you know what you want those crystals to do, then you come back to the Homebrew forum and we can help you build them.

Cryogenic necromancers who freeze the dead and have a frozen cave stocked full of corpsicles they can thaw on demand and cast Animate Dead on to create ice zombies.

an elf who was driven mad with requests for "more realistic" dolls until they started trapping souls in them for that realistic crying and laughing effect.