This article was originally published in the June 2002 issue of Campaign Magazine.

There’s nothing more delightful for a GM than slipping a cursed magic item to the PCs and watching the hi-jinks which ensue – not to mention the appalled faces of their players when they finally figure out what has happened to them. It’s a way of adding a little humility to the personality of overblown heroes, and reminding even the mightiest that their fall may be just around the corner.

The problem, though, is that the very caution you are attempting to instill eventually makes it increasingly impossible to go back to dip into that well again. Most players, quite wisely, take the course of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”: Once a player has had his PC victimized by a cursed item once, every magic item which enters the campaign from that point forward will be exhaustively identified before it is used (or, in most cases, even touched).

What’s a poor GM to do?

Put the snare where the PCs least expect it, of course – where they will probably never even bother checking for magic in the first place, let alone curses. If they’ve already got their head through the noose before they think to look around, it’ll be too late for them to escape from the trap.

The question then becomes: Where? Finely made arms and armor, of course, are immediately scanned with detect magic and the like (while the poorly made variety are usually just left behind). Wands and staffs, of course, are obvious candidates that will never pull the wool over the players’ eyes. But it’s hit-or-miss whether other types of treasure will be picked up by the PCs at all. Heck, the only thing they’re guaranteed to take out of the dungeon are the gold coins…

Wait a minute.

Here are some examples of wealth which the PCs will wish had never been ill-gotten…

COIN OF FATE

Despite its normal appearance, the presence of a coin of fate cannot long be ignored: These powerful, chaotic items play upon the very laws of probability – randomly making the simplest of goals unachievable, while rendering the impossible possible.

Whenever a character attempts an action requiring a check within 20 feet of a coin of fate, do not resolve the action normally (although you may still wish to go through the motions of normal action resolution for the sake of the players). Instead, roll 1d100 in order to randomly generate a chance of success. Then roll 1d100 again in order to determine success: If the second roll is lower than the first roll, the action is successful. If it is higher, the action is unsuccessful. The greater the difference between the first and second rolls, the more obvious the twisting of probability becomes. (In other words, a narrow margin of difference between the two rolls would have the appearance of normality. On the other hand, a wide margin of difference between the two rolls might result in something completely improbable – for example, a character’s sword flying out of his hand, ricocheting off a tree, and then impaling itself in the back of the ogre he was trying to hit in the first place.)

There is one constant effect which the presence of a coin of fate will have: Any coins flipped within the affected area will always land on their edge.

Caster Level: 7^th
Prerequisites: Craft Wondrous Item, bestow curse
Market Price: 42,000 gp

Continued tomorrow…

My current layout project is taking much longer than I anticipated. (It always does.) I should have some more recycled material posted to cover the next few days and then hopefully it will be done.

For today, I’m going to just briefly reflect on just how powerful and effective re-skinning can be. It’s an important part of the DM’s toolkit. And although it’s often talked about in terms of saving prep time, I think it’s arguably more important that re-skinning can so trivially take something familiar and recast it as something mysterious, enigmatic, and evocative.

Although re-skinning has become something of a hot fad over the past couple of years, I first encountered it way back in 1990 when I read an article in Dragon Magazine that dealt with re-skinning spells. (Magic missiles are great for this: You can describe them as pretty much anything.) I think it was issue #162, which would have been my very first issue, but I won’t swear to it and I’m away from my Dragon collection at the moment.

What brought this particularly to mind today was a recent re-skinning I did in my Ptolus campaign:

The creature rears up, plunging its clawed hand into its own chest. It rips out a gob of flesh and hurls it down the length of the chamber. It strikes the wall and spatters. Small globules of white, turgid flesh writhe and bound up into blasphemous creatures of lumbering, squelching flesh…

That’s an osyluth summoning 2d10 lemures. My players were so distressed by this unfamiliar ability that I actually had difficulty finishing the description due to the outcries emanating from the table.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got for today. More tomorrow. And lots more in the near future. (I hope.)

David and Tellius both requested a compiled PDF version of 101 Curious Items. And so I shall oblige:

(click image for PDF)

Enjoy!

“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.

101 Curious Items – PDF

Go to Part 1

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.

Reflections on “101 Curious Items”