“101 Curious Items”, of all the things I’ve written, may be the one I have found most useful on a personal level. I refer back to it constantly, using it to fill in bits of detail and flavor whenever I start running dry during dungeon prep. (Or just when I feel a particular complex is a little too “normal” and utilitarian.) Even if I don’t use one of the items from the list directly, I’ve found it to be a great source for inspiration. For example, the “Items of Interest” in the bloodwight nests of The Complex of Zombies drew heavily from this article.
The article was originally submitted to Dragon. It was rejected due to a lack of mechanical content and because some of the items included magical effects that weren’t statted up like “proper” magic items. A few months later, the article became one of about a dozen that I sold to Campaign Magazine. Unlike most of the stuff I wrote for Campaign, this one made it into print and I actually got paid for it before the magazine went out of business. It was published in the June 2002 issue.
Curious Items 1-25
Curious Items 26-50
Curious Items 51-75
Curious Items 76-101
I love including these kinds of little details and oddities. As another example from The Complex of Zombies, there is the manuscript entitled Observations of Alchemical Reductions and the Deductions Thereof by Master Alchemist Tirnet Kal. A Craft (alchemy) or Knowledge (arcana) check (DC 22) reveals that it was once a well-known alchemical text, but that the last copy of it was thought lost several centuries ago.
These little sparks of creativity tend to light up the game world for the players. And you can never tell when little sparks will light surprisingly bright conflagrations. I’ve seen a PC define their entire personality around something I thought of a magical knick-knack. On another occasion, the PCs took some items similar to the ones in this article and launched a bidding war between several powerful factions. The connections they made during that bidding war have had all kinds of strange, long-term consequences for the campaign.
You can see some similar thoughts being explored in “Putting the ‘Magic’ in Magic Items”.
A fun little exercise to try at home: The next time you’re getting ready to run an adventure, take three of the items from this list and drop them in. Maybe just leave them lying randomly about (or stuffed into someone’s pocket). Maybe twist the item to the setting. Maybe twist the setting to the item. Whatever works. Then wait and see what happens when your players stumble across the curiosity.
When I saw this list, I went “oooooh!” And, immediately once the last part of the list was posted, I added most of them in various places in my Open Game Table megadungeon.
Some got added to a random table of what the party might happen to find wandering around ill-defined surface ruins. All the books and parchments got incorporated into the various libraries scattered around (I always have a little trouble coming up with interesting books on the fly). Some went to sprucing up the somewhat sparse existing rooms of the dungeon complex itself. The rest got added to my lists of things to add and/or consider when I actually start mapping out the areas of the dungeon furthest from any entrances (which I’ve been holding off on because the more I DM an OGT, the more competent I get, so the longer I wait before I start mapping a section, the more competent I’ll be when I do it, and the better the result will be).
I don’t suppose you ever happen to have written a list of things like this, but focusing more specifically on static landmarks? That’s perhaps the biggest area my creativity has failed. The natural course of the OGT has helped alleviate this lack (“Hey, look, there’s the mouldering corpse of the huge centipede we killed last week, I know where we are now!”), but my dungeon is less lively before the players get to it than it could be.
This is all good, stuff, Justin! Thanks for sharing it 😀
Allan.
Thanks for the post, good stuff. I agree it is a terrific way to spark other ideas. Going through I immediately thought of unrelated items to drop in my next adventure. I sometimes have short lists of ideas and things like this – but it is great to have a catalyst of another person’s idea to take you in a new direction.
Well done
It is really interesting how the pendulum has swung, in terms of strictly quantified mechanics, from the older editions to the modern editions of D&D. I’m not exactly sure why that is, although I’d love to read an essay from The Alexandrian on it (hint, hint).
In the Redbox D&D game that I play in (http://redvan.wikidot.com/), we have several magic items with ill-defined powers, or powers that have been defined during play. For example, a ring of regeneration that only works as long as you wear it–we think if you take it off, all the wounds that it has healed open up again. But we’re not sure, since the owner isn’t about to test that theory. And we have no idea what happens if you die with it on (and the DM has said that he hasn’t figured that out either).
We also have a magical medallion that deflects magical spells. So far we know it will protect the wearer from 10 hit points of damage from a spell, but beyond that we’re not sure what happens. Will it protect from a Charm spell? Does it literally deflect spells onto someone else? We don’t know.
That sort of ambiguity isn’t typical for 3e or 4e D&D. I’m not even sure if you could do it effectively, or if it would grind the game to a halt the first time you had to figure out how an item interacted with some of the more complex rules.
Another game I play from time to time is Burning Wheel, which uses a die pool system and has very well developed rules for “helping”. This makes it a lot easier to wing it with magic items or other in-game advantages or disads. You’ve got a medallion that protects against spells? Give your pool an extra die or two for that roll to escape the Charm.
One of the things that D&D ought to do better is helping. The general purpose “+2 aid another” from 3e is cumbersome for the amount of benefit, and the +2 circumstance bonus is quickly irrelevant once characters get to mid-level play.
Again, I’d love to hear your take on this, given your intimate knowledge of 3e/d20 and game design skills.
“It is really interesting how the pendulum has swung, in terms of strictly quantified mechanics, from the older editions to the modern editions of D&D. I’m not exactly sure why that is, although I’d love to read an essay from The Alexandrian on it (hint, hint).”
Indeed. I find the realism fetish to be quite vexing at times, and contrary to the whole point of the game in some instances. I once had a DM that made healing potions work as an effect over time. From that day forward, I eliminated all effects over time from my game. (Ability score damage ftw.) Sure, they’re “more realistic” but they’re also PITA and distracting from more important and more interesting things that are happening in the moment.
Sometimes the fetish is even self-contradictory in its scope. People want exacting parameters on that spell, but the resource that fuels it is merely a matter of suspension of disbelief.
“For example, a ring of regeneration that only works as long as you wear it–we think if you take it off, all the wounds that it has healed open up again.”
I see this as being akin to a ring of invisibility that, if removed, would display everything you’ve done while invisible like a hologram moving in fast forward beside you. (Quite embarrassing if you spent the day dancing naked around the rest of your party, mocking them.)
I think the solution to effectively determining how an ambiguous item would work is just to apply the simplest explanation. For example, the simplest explanation for your ring of regeneration is, if you remove it, nothing happens. It works just like a cleric casting a low level cure spell on you over and over. Clerical healing never reverses itself after casting, so why would the ring’s magic?
On the other hand, if you want to have the PC have such a weakness, there’s nothing wrong with that. I do think it’s a significantly different ring at that point, however. More like a ring of cursed healing. And it essentially turns the PC into a kind of living lich.
On the “aid another” bonus, I haved played with the idea of using the appropriate stat mod rather than the +2, to give a more significant and scaling bonus. Haven’t tried it yet though.
Beautiful. Lots of little story starters here.
@Malimar: “I don’t suppose you ever happen to have written a list of things like this, but focusing more specifically on static landmarks?”
It’s interesting you would say that. I actually started writing an article like that as a sequel to this one. It was going to be called “Wonders of the World”. But what I found was that the level of specificity required for landmarks made the article significantly less useful.
Something I just recently discovered* in the AD&D1 Dungeon Master’s Guide might help for dungeon-specific stuff. Appendix H: Tricks contains a list of dungeon “Features” and a list of “Attributes”. Combining the two, you get stuff like “polymorphing altar”, “secret door that talks”, “poison room”, “flesh to stone fire”, “symbiotic pool”, “teleporting vegetation”, and the like.
Quickly brainstorming from that randomly selected list:
– An altar that slowly morphs between the holy symbol of a Lawful God and the holy symbol of a Chaotic God.
– A secret door that has been unopened for so long that it’s gotten desperate and will call out to people who pass nearby; unfortunately, it doesn’t actually know the trigger for opening itself (and it usually forgets to tell people that it’s trapped).
– A room of kaleidoscopic colors, which are actually highly toxic mineral deposits.
– A blue flame that doesn’t burn, but will petrify anyone exposed to it.
– A pool which, if you drink from it, will share its communal thoughts with you (drawn from all those who have drunk from it). This will offer some useful information about the complex. But, unfortunately, the symbiotic water will rewire your anatomy; you’ll no longer be able to drink any liquid which isn’t taken from this pool (painfully vomiting up anything else that you drink).
– A wizened oak tree with a distinctive carving in its bark which inexplicably grows in the darkened recesses of the dungeon. Every so often it teleports to the surface; then teleports back down. (The heart of an elf has been magically grafted to its heartwood; the elf’s spirit is searching for his long lost love.)
* I’ve owned this book for 20+ years, and I still find new stuff every time I flip through it.
Another “list” might be for unusual food and / or plants.
After seeing some french villagers at the atlantic coast harvest an algae – one of those which grow into 5-6m long forests – during low tide I came up with the following “D&D version”. The algae has unusual “minor lifegiving properties” which is used for:
– food: the villagers are kept healthy due to this plant, but it is not enough to cause an addiction (see below) due to the limited amount eaten (as salad)
– smoking: no idea yet what the exact effect for this is or if there is an effect at all
– fertilizer: the unuseable parts get chopped up and distributed to support the limited agricultural production of the village (it is nestled between the sea and a swamp)
– papyrus: +1 caster level for “life” spells (necromancy)
– bandages: generally good effects to prevent any infections after cutting wounds
– “anti-aging”: The wife of a necromancer who knows about these special properties – none of the villagers really has scientific knowledge, but they have figured out the beneficial effects for medical purposes – has gotten a full dress made from this algae to keep her youthful beauty. Needless to say it is addictive and has turned her into a “talking zombie with a beauty problem”.
So the “story” of the algae lives from the players not knowing the details and downsides at first. It looks like an all-purpose and very beneficial plant, but luckily it is available only in one hidden village.
I have enjoyed a lot reading the list.
It reminded me the objects described in “The SCP Foundation”, which I recommend for anyone interested in modern fantasy settings.