Dumb Ideas from me 1 . Make all Equipment choose their masters as in every equipment has spirit after all its a fantasy world 2 . Make a specific place only where they can bind it and these areas are created by god/higher beings 3 . Same as idea 2 but instead you need a binding stone or something ( It's fantasy its all up to us ) and for binding these special magical stones how about using brain matter or any bodily flesh or something Novel idea but how about using urine ( or you know what make it an R-18 novel so they can bind it through............... ) You can also use something like will imprint or soul imprint
Maybe by doing kinky stuff, affinity, consanguinity, magical genetic engineering or by consignment to bind items
This shows really good promise. Forgot the name route. Still debating if I'll go there since I'm already inundated with so many rules and restrictions in my fantasy world. First of all, these stones are not legendary. At all. Second, there's a reason why the stone's need binding and it plays into the world building. I just can't explain it here because I'm still ironing it out.
Well, not exactly binding, more of fitting. Something like with Harry Potter wands. They have wands that fits them perfectly, others don't work well or don't work at all. Though this means that the stone has to be calibrated/designed/modified to fit the user. Another idea is imprinting. When a person uses a magic stone, the stone retains some of the person's magic. When another person uses the stone, the old user's magic would conflict with new user's magic. Either this results to the new users unable to use the stone because the old user's magic rejects them, or the stone becomes unusable . . . depends on what you want. Another idea is to essentially use lock and key. The user has to use a key to use the stone. There various ways for this. Others even have ideas like bio-metrics. Though it could be other kind of keys as well, like a ring, that acts as the key, that is magically glued to the finger so it can't be removed easily. Or you could make the stone a biological part of the body of the user. Something like a unicorn's horn in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Others couldn't use it because the stones are like hands or feet of the user. It is part of them. You might actually have to do some surgery to be able to use the stone, and even then, the body might reject it.
You could alway go down the route of synthetic mana gems, were you use the users mana signature in the creation process. This should make the gem 100% compatible to them and others will show some incompatibility. It's not a straight bind, where you only have 1 user.
For my novel, I have something similar not for items but for mana crystals. It isn't that the mana crystal in itself is bound to them but more like each person fills up the mana crystal with their mana which is based on their elemental affinity. Now the mana inside the crystal is based on the person's mana pattern, so only they can use it. Well, it isn't like others can't use iit, more like they would hurt themselves trying. Think of it like electronics that requires a certain amount of voltage. The mana a body gives off will be of a certain voltage. If you charge a mana crystal, it'll have the same voltage as the one who charged it. Now when the mana crystal energy is released, if the conductor is not of the same voltage, you either get a power surge or a brownout. Aka, it'll fry their mind (of course most people would stop using the mana crystal before it gets to that point). And of course once a magical crystal is tainted by someone's mana, only they could use it.
That's actually a good way of explaining it. In my story, they don't have mana but your idea can be plausible based on how the characters in my novel manipulate the elements. Thanks for sharing.