Of course that's possible. Just as you start off with a t-shirt you can start with virtually anything. It's in arch/treasures IIRC.

IMO it should be an artifact randomly selected from a list of starter artifacts (so it could be a cloak, gauntlets, etc.). Although I'm not sure if the TL system allows us to have one treasure, no more no less, selected from a list.

EDIT: According to MT it is (but what does he know? ). See this post. This'll be a good opportunity to help you learn more about TL's.

Yeah, they only work once by default. Just stick a treasurelist string on there and they'll disappear upon application, leaving a random item (or possibly multiple items) in their wake.

Not if you know how to write and call treasurelists.

BTW I think you'd do better here to give the item as a quest reward rather than a plain starting item.

Say for Fanrir's final quest (ATM IIRC it is just cash). That should achieve your aim and give an added incentive to players to actually do the quests.

Won't we get dozens of one-off alts stockpiling items for their main?

And they should probably be low-value, auto-ego items to prevent alt abuse.

I like this idea, I think if  everyone gets it free with a new character and  the item is only useful for a level 5-7 character and not crazily overpowered than why would any one stock pile them? Any  lvl 5-7 character would have one, and its not like they would have a great impact that people would want to buy and sell them...
I know that if they are random people will want to get 1 of each kind...but again if they are nice from the perspective of a  level 1 new character who only has the shirt on their back and a sword when starting off and the items only give a small benefit to a lvl 5-7,but are not really that good then I say anyone crazy enough to start making alts just to try to get a complete set of these things so that their main char would have an advantage for 3 levels more power to them...If we go with cuts idea of making them a choice and ego item can't we build in a feature that if you have one kind ego bound to you can't have any of the other items?
I'm not in favor of the idea of a quest...I think getting a higher level item free as you start is much more an immediate incentive to work towards it, quests can be frustrating a bit at low levels,and then to complete the quest only to find that you need to level before you can enjoy the reward of your quest? Adding insult to injury imo..Also once a quest is "solved" it becomes easy (unless it is very long- which defeats the purpose of this item) and you have the same problem of some people making alts just to do the quest multiple times...