76. A stone table in the midst of the wilderness which is, nevertheless, always filled with a fresh meal whenever travelers come across it.
77. Carved into a natural rock face is an elaborately decorated arch. When first seen it appears to be merely decorative, with the supposed “doorway” leading into solid, unfinished rock. If the arch is approached by sentients, however, it will suddenly burst into life with a scintillating array of light. Anyone entering this magical portal will disappear for several seconds before being returned to the very spot from which they left.
78. A small, leather-bound book filled with prophecies. All of them will be found to be true, but the last of them is dated just a few weeks ago.
79. The mounted head of a deer, its impossibly massive horns possessed of a thousand and one points.
80. A hollow glass sphere of surprising proportions – nearly three meters across. If it is broken those nearby will catch the barest scent of alien perfumes, hinting at strange lands belonging to the ancient time when the sphere was first forged and air trapped within it.
81. A sword of truly mammoth proportions. Resting within a chamber more than thirty meters long, the sword stretches from one end to the other. Whatever creature was meant to wield this mighty weapon would truly stagger the imagination of a dragon.
82. Poison drips – steadily and continuously – from the tip of a stalagmite which stands alone within a natural cavern deep beneath the surface of the earth.
83. Within a wooden box carved with pastoral scenes lies a leather purse, and within the purse are a handful of seeds. If these seeds are planted, they will take root and grow into plants of unnatural shape, hue, and life unlike anything seen upon this world, and operating by utterly alien principles.
84. A scabbard stained the dark color of rust. Any blade which is placed within the scabbard will emerge covered in a sheen of blood.
85. Within a house the PCs find an incredibly detailed doll’s house – a seemingly perfect representation of the very house in which they stand. In fact, upon closer inspection they will find the very room in which they stand, inhabited by a number of dolls equal to their own number, who are, in turn, examining a miniature doll house. This miniature doll house, in turn, is a perfect duplicate in its own right – complete with smaller dolls examining an even smaller house. If the investigation continues beyond a certain point (most likely requiring the use of some variety of magic), it will be shown that the iterative pattern begins to break down – things begin to be subtly altered with each subsequent doll house the PCs reveal. Eventually, these changes will begin to assume a horrifying aspect – made all the more horrible as it is discovered that these iterations are being wrought upon the world of the PCs.
86. A cursed fishing pole made of blackened ash. It will never catch a fish – although, if one attempts to use it unbaited, they will succeed in catching skeleton fish.
87. A bouquet of cut roses which will successively bloom and wilt over the course of a few moments.
88. A disc of gold upon a chain of similar material. It appears, in almost all respects, to be a talisman of pure good – but, in fact, it is a fake. At the DM’s discretion its creators may have enchanted it as a periapt of health or amulet of health in order to perpetrate their hoax more effectively.
89. A tablet of pure gold, inscribed with the core rites and beliefs of a venerable religion. Careful study of this tablet, however, will reveal subtle – but important – differences between these ancient practices and the current practices of the religion in question.
90. An age-worn ivory figurine, which, nonetheless, bears an uncanny resemblance to a young woman the characters have just met.
91. A tiny diorama made of oak and silver, depicting a prophecy of the last days of the world in vivid detail.
92. A diamond of incredible beauty which slowly shifts its color from the purest white to canary to blue to black and back again.
93. An ancient mummy which was given full burial rites and laid within a stately sarcophagus. Arranged on five pedestals around the sarcophagus are the canopic jars in which the mummy’s vital organs were placed. Although the mummy is not of the undead, opening these jars will reveal that its organs continue to function: The heart beats, the lungs fill with air and empty again, and so forth.
94. A quiver of golden arrows. They are devoid of supernatural properties, but despite their unusual composition will perform as normal arrows would.
95. A leaf from the great tree Yggdrasil.
96. A set of wooden wind chimes which plays a different tune depending upon the direction of the wind which disturbs it.
97. A charm of twisted black obsidian. Touching the charm unleashes strange, ghostly visions from a strange and alien world – utterly different in every particular, but eerily similar to our own world in its broad scope and form.
98. The neverburning torch. A jet black torch, with an inscription in gold upon its side: “Only in your hour of darkest need will I light.” All attempts – magical or otherwise – to light the torch will fail, but if the character carrying the torch ever finds himself upon the brink of death, the neverburning torch will flare to life.
99. In the face of a mountain, an ancient stone stairway has been cut. Each step has been meticulously carved with stunningly detailed mosaics, but upon reaching the top of the stairs a climber finds nothing but a sheer wall of stone – as if the stair’s makers had been stopped before their work could be completed.
100. A set of pan pipes carved from the bones of a unicorn. When played, they do not make the slightest sound.
101. A cache of ancient coins left from the elder days of the world and made by a civilization utterly alien to the values of today: They are carved from bloodstone, moonstone, and jacinth – with unknown faces and unreadable runes decorating their surface.
Lists of curious items such as this one always fill me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I have been a long-time advocate of a sense of wonder in D&D. Magic should not be mundane and commonplace. On the other hand, I also strongly support the idea that PCs should be able to (in theory) create any magical items or effects they encounter. As a PC I quickly grew extremely tired of magical dungeons that shepherded you from one encounter to the next by way of meaningless gateways.
The key to the problem is the lack of meaning, and that problem also crops up with lists such as this. I like this list as a source of inspiration for a GM, but to be anything more than that it ought to provide some context. Curios such as these don’t need to be random. They could be used to introduce the setting’s mythos over the course of the PCs’ adventures.
This series is great. Evocative, open-ended, adaptable, applicable to a wide range of tastes. Glad I found this blog!
I started to have mixed feelings, too – but I think only because I couldn’t possibly use them all. I’m not sure PCs should be able to recreate every magic they encounter. If one of them is eleventy bajillion level, then perhaps. But I think the bloody scabbard (#84) could remain a mystery.
I see your point about context, and while this list is pure awesome I can see making context or hints to be unnecessary. Why?
Because overuse of anything in game can cheapen it. I’m likely to use these sparingly. Further, how many times have I sweated brain blood to make an item focus of a possible adventure, or possessed of an ocean depths of history and meaning — only to have my characters ignore it!
Item 78 (leather book of prophesies) certainly sounds like something I’d make a history for – and if I include pc names or those of family and friends then players ignore it at their peril.
However, unless they suddenly go running off to find a sage, I know they’ll either just keep the bleeding scabbard as something fun (and probably taste or try to analyze the blood) or sell it to a collector.
Even if they run to the sage in the shop next door, she can simply tell them they need to perform a service (long adventure) or undertake an arduous journey to her sage buddy Bill who knows about such thinks. And now I can start working hard on context and history.
I’d say three things here.
(1) I think fantasy can be more interesting if there are some mysteries which are never solved. If my players decide they really want to find out where those coins of bloodstone, moonstone, and jacinth came from then there’s a good chance I’ll start working out the details. But I also won’t feel any particular compulsion that an explanation must be proffered or forthcoming.
The real world isn’t tidy. And fantasy has even less of an excuse. 🙂
(2) If someone said, “I want to create a scabbard that coats every blade you put into it with blood.” It wouldn’t be too hard to figure out a reasonable set of rules for that. (Cast permanency + prestidigitation. Done.) And that holds true even for the major effects: You want to create a nested series of degrading pocket dimensions linked to a Matryoshka dollhouse? That can be done.
(3) With that being said, some stuff is just the nature of a world of fantasy, IMO. Sometimes the world is just weird. For example, the stalagmite eternally dripping poison. No one made that. It just exists. Like a mountain.
OTOH, if you’ve got the right spells or magic items, you can make mountains. And you can also make stalagmites that eternally drip poison.
Re (1): Absolutely. What I want to avoid when including little tidbits unrelated to the current adventure is that the players might say, “Oh. That’s random.” and forget about it a moment later. What I want is the moments when they bring back those random items without my prompting, creating linkages that I hadn’t even considered. With some players, you can probably get away with doing no thinking at all, because they already have the things-can-be-related mindset. Other players may need a little prompting at first.
An example: The players are clearing out a clan of goblins that have taken over an abandoned castle. Most of the old artwork is looted or destroyed, but one tapestry remains untouched. (It’s magically warded against damage.) This tapestry depicts a classic St George vs Dragon scene. Since they can’t take it down, the PCs move on. If the players remember the tapestry, I can introduce a dragon at a later date and leave an invisible plot hook. The players *can* go looking for St George’s sword, but I don’t have to say anything.
Re (2) & (3): What I’m concerned about here is not whether an item can theoretically be made by a sufficiently high level wizard (or god, or whatever). I want all of the magic involved in a particular adventure to have some in-game explanation for how it got there. Do I tell the players? No! But the explanation is there for me in case something comes up. It’s much like designing a kobold city’s traps so that they only trigger for 50 Lbs or more. To some groups it may not matter, but when the fighter asks the wizard to shrink him so that he can chase kobolds without setting off their traps, this is behavior I want to reward. I don’t want to have to tell those players “Sorry. The not-present kobold wizard cast a spell on all of the traps so they don’t trigger on kobolds.”
The way this generally works in practice is that I envision a sort of “power window” around the PCs’ level. Anything outside that window on the bottom is hand-waved. Anything outside that window on the top is a Big Deal. If I were to trivialize encounters with objects or characters above the power window, I think it would reduce the sense of agency that the players have in the world.
“(Cast permanency + prestidigitation. Done.)”
This is exactly why I have a great preference for ambiguity over detailed spell descriptions that actually weaken the game. Reading through spells, one finds far too many that are just variations on a theme.
There ought to be a great many more spells like Prestidigitation whose limits are set by the imagination of the players. For instance, what is the reason the spell Animate Rope exists? Why is it not Animate Object, or for that matter, why is it not covered under Mage Hand?
Along those lines, what about spells that scale, rather than ranks of the same spell or the same spell with a twist added (just so you have to learn more spells). Locate Object -> Locate Creature -> Locate Person. Why not just Locate or even Scry with level-based benefits worked in? Mage Hand should give an increasing benefit to how much weight you can move telekinetically. Or how about being able to take Tiny Hut at level 1, but have room for only INT mod + level creatures, and improve in building material over time (canvas -> wood -> stone etc.)
Simple changes like these would reduce the bloat of spells, while simultaneously giving casters more interesting choices at low level.
I find it ironic that someone scratched their head over defining rules for Animate Rope but couldn’t be bothered to do something obvious like make a scaling formula for Cure Wounds. It’s spell clutter, and it insults our intelligence.
I would like to see more open-ended spells like Prestidigitation that require my imagination to work instead of details that lead me blindfold through the world by the hand.
I should extend my above comment to all items and curiosities, lest I derail the thread.