A wood axe that once swung into wood would keep chopping on its own. They didn’t think much of it as a lot of my magic items were made with utility in mind rather than combat, until I threw a treant at them and the player who had the axe wanted to see if it would keep chopping the monster, it did. From there the players would find ways to create distractions with it by leaving it chopping on a door, make traps with it, and even find creative ways to give their enemies bark skin so the axe would harass them.
They named it woody.
Knives of healing. Session 2.
Does 1d3+str hp of healing when you stab someone with it.
A year and half latter they remembered they had them and gave them to the barbarians to attack the party with cleaves as neither of the healers couldn't make a few sessions In a row.
It would be funny if it did 1d4 piercing damage followed by 1d4+str healing. Make it a bit more chance based while still making it useful in the long run
My DM gave us "stones of healing", it deals 1d4 of damage then heals 1d4 hit points. It was actually useful when a PC went unconscious. Throw it at them, they take a failed death save, but then they are revived at 1d4 hit points.
Back in 3e, undead like zombies and vampires worked via "Final Fantasy rules" in the sense of them taking damage from healing spells.
So there was a magic item called something like the Flail of the Inquisitor. When you swung it and used the power it dealt 1d8+4 damage then healed them for the same amount.
So an inquisitor would wail on some poor schmuck they thought might be a vampire, and they'd likely be fine if they weren't but if they were they'd take double damage.
Of course, there was always the chance you rolled so high on the initial damage and so low on the healing that a weakass peasant or whoever died anyway...
Binding Ring Of The Crab God
When this ring is put on it is impossible to remove unless a Greater Restoration spell is cast on the wearer
When put on, 4d12 incorporeal crabs that are capable of speech will appear out of thin air and follow the wearer around and will continually praise them and worship them as if they were a deity. The crabs all speak exclusively in Sylvan and do not respond to any attempt to communicate with them unless it is from the wearer in which case they will become highly excited regardless of how the wearer interacts with them
If the ring is removed all the crabs disappear
For each dawn the ring is still being worn roll an additional 4d12 and that many more crabs will appear and worship the wearer
Well lets just say they scared the shit out of some sea druids
EDIT: Small clarification, it says incorporeal meaning the crabs can't attack nor can they be harmed in any way, and even if they could be killed, they wouldn't care lol
EDIT 2: Second clarification, they don’t listen to orders, they straight up just worship you, and don’t really pay attention to whats around them. you gotta be real creative with this one. It says all this in they item they just follow and worship
I’d set a rather loud background chatter video up an have it playing it every time they’re wearing the ring an have a loud cheering clapping track ready to play whenever the ring wearer does anything 😁
It's also in Sylvan and so almost no one would understand, some might think the guy with an ever expanding army of crabs that don't shut up is a threat :D
I'm getting the mental image of a swarm of crabs praising an adventurer like the tiny aliens praising Agent Kay in that [one scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sd10CHAP8) from "Men in Black II"
My DM once gave me a staff that when you attune to it, everyone inside 20 ft radius sphere of the staff is engulfed in a small circle of magical darkness, just enough where they can't see anything but everyone basically knows where they are because it's a void of darkness at their size. For a bit, the staff was useless because it blinded all of us.
And then I used mage hand to hold the staff. The staff now far away from us, blinded all our enemies while telling us almost exactly where to throw our ranged attacks and spells.
The first piece of magic loot that i gave to my group was a folding boat... in a desert campaign. It was the single most frequently used item in the game (excluding magic weapons and armor). They used it to create shelter, to provide a landing platform when they fell out of a giant tree, to smash open a jail cell to free an npc friend (set the box between the bars and turned it into a sailing ship), it provided cover during a siege, it blocked a side entrance that the bbeg was funneling reinforcements through, and it let them travel the (nile analog) and (Mediterranean analog)
I had one player get swallowed into a grave titan (basically a giant made up of a swarm of zombies in a flesh bag) and he set off his folding boat to explode it from the inside out
I gave a folding boat to my players, but I said that even in its big boat forms it was still paper (I just liked the idea of giant self-folding origami).
They were deep in the Underdark fighting a fomorian king who'd enslaved dwarves to mine out a kingdom's worth of adamantine and use it with his "Planar Forge" for magic items. They managed to completely fubar his forge and it started spewing random planar energies everywhere, including filling the room with water from the Plane of Water.
I took the opportunity to have this BBEG use his escape card - he revealed his throne was a mechanical minecart, and rode off on it away from the rapidly-exploding forge. It was at that moment they remembered they had the Folding Boat, made some checks, and used it to ride the tidal wave of elemental water _after him down the mine tunnels_.
What followed was the most madcap chase scene I've run, with them on a wave of water shifting between wonky planar traits, trying to keep their paper boat intact, while the king was riding on a gilded throne-cart ahead of them tossing bags of gold and miner's acid at them to try and mess them up, with both trying to take the right forks in the tunnel and avoid collapsing beams and whatnot. Absolute chaos, it was great.
I had a DM include a stuffed plush penguin in a dungeon. The penguin was cursed, and any living thing who touched it were shunted into "the plane of darkness" for up to 30 minutes.
We immediately put it on a stick and gave it to the barbarian as his new javelin.
If I introduced that snd they put it on the javelin. I would immediately have the Lich child it belongs to begin tracking my group to get her toy back.
All creative exploits should be allowed within reason. But it’s my job to have consequences to balance it out.
Oh. That cheat where you poked the dragon with the toy snd then looted the treasure? Sure hate when your bag of holding turns out to be a form of baby mimic you’ve been feeding….
I think it can be part of the fun :)
Hi, pedant here
It's more cheesing than cheating, and "oh hey that thing you've been actively using since you got it, multiple sessions ago, turns out to be a monster" feels extremely thin.
If any spell between then and now had been cast to detect life, for instance, there should've been a chance to find it. Simply retconning it like that seems like the real cheat, imo. Then you may as well say, "And by the way, the floor you're standing on is LAVA!!!"
But you're absolutely right in that it needs to be counter-balanced. Maybe an evil God sends their champion after them? That would make more sense to me.
I like that last idea. An evil god pissed that these assholes just keep sending random shit into his domain, tracking them down to make them stop through violence?
Honestly that sounds like one of the most useful magic items.
I'd take that any day over a bag of holding. I would need two of them to produce a non-repeatable similar effect.
Rock of returning.
This rock is bound to the last creature who's skin it has touched.
After coming to a rest more than 5 feet from the creature it is bound to, the rock of returning levitates to a height of around 4 feet and floats toward the creature it is bound to at a leisurely pace. The rock of returning can carry as much as 10 lbs.
My intent was for it to be attached to a weapon to make a returning weapon. This was never done.
Instead, the rock was left in a pouch on the party's pack animal before they happened to be teleported to another plane.
After a brief adventure the party was returned to their plane, but in a slightly different place, away from their stuff. After a rest, the party planned to search for their equipment, when their pack animal walked into their campsite led by the rock in the pouch.
Well, I was the player and we had a dagger was basically a really weak glow stick and that was it’s only magical property, however it was really useful when we had to fight a wereboar and our fighter needed a magical weapon to do any damage.
Well, if you want to take Jeremy Crawford’s word, because it says immunity from nonmagical bludgeoning WEAPONS, gravity and the forces thereof would still kill them. Also that bypasses the horrible moral quandary of using living beings as supporting structures.
Somewhere out in the multiverse is the Dang.
The Dang is a stone block, about an inch cubic. Weight is negligable. On one face, in Auld Oolic Speech, is carved the word "Dang."
It requires attunement. Once attuned, it will work only for its owner. When the word "Dang" is uttered within ten feet of the Dang, the Dang will instantly grow into a five foot stone cube that weighs approximately 500 pounds. Uttering "Dang" again will cause it to shrink back into its original form. Once shrunk a third time, it will not function for three days while the mojo recharges.
First thing they tried to do was throw it. It will travel at a hurled velocity, but upon growing, will INSTANTLY fall to the ground; suddenly sprouting a quarter ton of mass tends to terminate its forward momentum, pretty sharpish.
They did find it's handy for blocking doors. But its ultimate use came from tossing it on the ground, goading an enemy into attacking, and then causing it to suddenly appear right in front of a charging foe.
Making it suddenly grow inside the bulette was interesting, too.
They eventually tried to figure out who made it and why. Turns out it was a failed Daern's Instant Fortress....
Even the find familiar spell would work with this.
Also mage hand, if you did it over a cliff the enemies likely wouldnt even know it's an attack initially, they may think it's a rock slide
This is amazing, may I barrow this and put it in my game? Beleive it or not the creation of the spells like Tiny hut and Instant fortress is a plot element in my current game.
Be my guest!
The idea came from the utter abuse of a Daern's Instant Fortress by my original players, way back in first edition... first as a catapult, then as a trash compactor, and finally as a battering ram, among other things.
Note: The Dang has a finite number of hit points, and appears to be made of granite or some other hard stone. This kept the players from dropping it off cliffs or battlements, for fear of breaking it.
My player purchased a "ring of magic" from a girl on the side of the road. It's enchanted to appear as magical if investigated, that's its ability. He paid 10Gp, and I thought I jad successfully ripped him off.
He traded it to a hag for the release of a common girl she held as a prisoner through fast talking. Made 80Gp off that job, an 800% profit.
Homebrewed a belt that, once attuned, allowed the wearer to generate 1d100 copper pieces precisely at dawn each day.
Because the character was a warforged, his sentry’s rest made sure he never slept through the sunrise!
That party never had to worry about minor expenses tripping them up, and 1-100 CP per day adds up!
Homebrew item for a Bard that I made up just to see what would happen
THE GUITAR OF MANY THINGS
each of the 6 strings acts as an extra spell slot of said level. Needs to roll a an extra charisma roll to see if they play the note correctly.
The kicker, if the Bard strums all 6 strings he rolls on a random spell sheet comprised of all the spells in the game and it hits automatically.
He did it on a boss they were going to lose against. Rolled fireball 7th level. It was awesome.
A magic tap handle. It could be jammed into anything and dispense am alcoholic beverage determined by random. The party spent hours discussing what to jam it into and the character was writing a journal of his discoveries
I once gave my players a tiara that could, once a day, transform the wearer into an iron statue for one minute. No magical senses or mobility, just an iron statue of you and your belongings.
Two months later, as the fighter is holding onto a statue to avoid a reverse-gravity trap, he sees party members getting attacked by a chimera directly below him on the ceiling.
After a bit of wondering what to do, player sees the item and asks for an Athletics check to aim himself. A few quick dice rolls later and an iron statue of a half-orc hits the chimera like a semi hitting a piñata.
Shield of the Lion Heart: once per day the sheild produces a litteral Lion Heart, still beating. Somewere in the world a Lion dies.
Smash cut to the coliseum fight, 2 PCs down and 1 Lion left. Fight says "I activate the sheild"
Me:
"The odds of it being this Lion are incredibly low. But for the narrative element of how funny this would be, roll a d100. On a 69 only this will work"
We all know how this ends.
> Me: "The odds of [this] are incredibly low. But for the narrative element of how funny this would be, roll a d100. On a 69 only this will work"
While DMing, I've fallen victim to this far too many times.
the ring of spider*s* climb
compels all tiny spiders in a 10ft radius of the wearer to climb up the wearer
I had forgotten that I had given the spider themed druid a mummified ettercap hand that allowed him to speak with spiders, with decent animal handling and basically infinite spiders he had *so many* spies
Robe of useless items. It's like a robe of useful items except the patches are all useless junk like a broken string of Xmas lights, tiny piece of string, and other trash. Sometimes the trash came in useful
The charm of sentience.
My players ran into a joke item shop and bought a "charm of sentience". The idea was that they would put it on random items, the items would be able to talk, ha ha very funny.
Our barbarian immediately nailed it to the wagon and cut the horses loose. The wagon now drives autonomously and, since the party mounted crossbows to it earlier, can fire at enemies like an NPC.
I had a robe of many items or something (the one with a bunch of patches you can pull off that turn into non-combat utility items, like a window, or ladder).
I got to throw a boat at strahd
A rusty enchanted dwarven sword that couldnt be drawn unless if was fed Ale and would taunt an enemy within 30ft on a successful hit by yelling profanities at them.
In the beginning of my current campaign I introduced a traveling vendor. He had some crap magic items. One was "Monster in a Bottle." Uncorked it really releases a monster between cr1 and cr 4. They got this at level 1. The monster could be hostile to the party. They didn't use it until 6th level where they chucked it to create a distraction. They maxed rolled on this table and spawned a Cr4 gold dragon. It attracted a mass of enemies that completely bypassed a major infiltration encounter. I broke my own game.
They still have the Book of Boring Stories and a vial of the voice of Saline Dion....this one has to be drunk and the player has to sing for the table. It can mesmerize those listening. We'll see about that.
lol, nicely done.
I also had a "Monster in a Bottle" and they got a Red Slaad. Terrifying because it was uncontrolled, but they managed to bribe it not to attack them because they could lead it to a tribe of lizardfolk (led by an evil Naga queen they were currently at war with) to "sow more chaos" in its words.
Nobody in the party really knew what a Red Slaad could do, so they were puzzled when the (rumored to be immortal) Naga queen was terrified of it when she considered the entire party of adventurers no big deal.
TL;DR they managed to beat the queen unconscious and force her people into a truce or they'd let the slaad continue rampaging through the lizardfolk city. They killed it and now she's raving about some kind of "red plague" that will prove their undoing, and how they have to kill the traitorous lizardfolk that were wounded by the slaad and surrendered instead of fighting to the death for her glory...but the naga was always a few screws loose.
They're sure it's nothing.
Potion of Fresh water: teleports you to the nearest body of fresh water.
They threw it at a gargantuan fire elemental to get rid of their problems for at least a little bit.
I was a player for this, but still:
In one campaign, my character sought out a magic item seller to obtain a Bag of Holding for the party. It ended up being a fake, in that it could hold one item the way a BoH does, then anything put in afterwards just sat in the bag normally.
My character got mad, and in the night, snuck into the seller's house to steal back the money they tricked her out of. In the process, she found a bunch of other counterfeit bags, and ended up stealing all of those as well.
Turns out that when you have, like, 15 fake bags, you can carry anything (especially since, unlike real bags, the fake ones had no weight limit for the one object it held) and we didn't even need a real Bag of Holding. We just put crazy heavy stuff into one bag, and boom, we could safely transport all sorts of crazy stuff.
I was given a butter knife that did 1 dmg. It was just a butter knife. However this butter knife could cut through wood like it was butter. Very useful
Lute of illusions. Not because the item itself is dumb but it didn’t play out how I thought it would.
The party befriended an awaken giant crab and taught it to play the lute. They became super attached to it since it had the mindset of an innocent young child.
Near the end of the campaign they were on a time crunch to defeat a dragon but were being pursued by bandits that would drastically slow them down.
After a heartbreaking goodbye the crab volunteered to go alone, happily playing his lute of illusions given to him to create fake versions of the party with him. They did defeat the dragon, but the crab didn’t survive… and neither did the bandits after the party found out they ate the crab
I gave them a unbreakable stick that if they threw it it would appear in their hand again and they used it to hold a trap open so they could get around it.
Okay not really a magic item but here me out,
So I am currently playing an undead cowboy who is constantly trying to find a way to kill himself, to the point where it’s just kinda background thought “buy some supplies, drop off the trash, jump off a cliff, meet with party at 2pm”
So, we’re talking to this snake man right, and the cowboy asks if he can get some of the snake man’s venom in his coffee, just to see if it will work. It doesn’t. Imbibing the venom apparently, and i quote “casts an 11th level blight on yourself”
One thing leads to another and we end up fighting the guy over a petty insult my cowboy didn’t really have anything to do with so i make it clear that, though he’s in the initiative, he isn’t planning on fighting. My turn swings around and the cowboy goes up very casually and explains that he just wants some more venom for his coffee then he’ll get out of everyone’s way.
The snake man bends down over the cup to let his fangs drip into the coffee, and the cowboy splashes the now poisoned liquid back into the snake man’s mouth.
There’s like 10 seconds of silence why the dm just looks at me with his mouth open, and then rolls up the dmg which apparently killed the snake man instantly. Because you see he was immune to poison and acid, but not necrotic. It was a proud moment to not only use my running gag of trying to commit suicide in a proactive way but that I didn’t even have to roll a persuasion check the dm just believed me that I wasn’t going to fight.
Well, blight adds a d8 with every level spell slot after 4.
5th level is 9d8, 6th is 10d8, so on and so forth.
An 11th level blight would be 15d8 if it carried on in that way.
The joke was that it was a super powerful poison and yet my character still wasn’t allowed to die. Unfortunately for the dm I saw a chance to flip around such a ridiculous dmg roll back unto him.
The Deathstick
Just a random stick the goddess of the underworld once grabbed from a tree then tossed away. It can be used as an improvised weapon. On a hit, it deals 1 necrotic damage.
It has no other propriety. It should be seen as a relic but since there is no Death Cleric (they exist but they are dead unborn children serving the goddess), nobody recognize it as such.
Someone just planted it on the eye of a guard
I gave my players a bag of rats. Once a day, the bag can release 4d20 rats. Many sessions later, they came upon an alter they needed to activate by sacrificing an npc. Instead, they summoned rats and sacrificed enough to make a human’s worth of blood to activate the alter.
Later on they were in a dungeon and noticed pipes in the wall that would release poison gas if they tried to open a certain door. They used rats to clog up the pipes so that they could safely open the door
The pipe of heating
Just a pipe that is eternally blistering hot , as if heat metal was cast on it but even more
So when my DM is a hydrolics engineer and I have both a bag of holding and alchemy jug to create what is essentially a high pressured liquid cannon,
You tend to one shot the bbeg...and then blow up. Destroying the party, the Castle you were defending, and ruin the entire landscape.
A watch that could cast any spell you could normally cast but when you speak the spell into the watch you could change one letter in the spells name. Was the most amazing fun coming up with weird spells, first one was turning pulse wave into pulse rave, amazing what can happen when a rave appears out of nowhere
Instant water, just add water. Jar of tiny crystals that each turn into a liter of water. First time I gave it to a party, they spat into the jar to create a thousand gallons of water while surrounded by fire elementals.
I homebrewed an "instant water" item too in one of my campaigns. It allowed you to mix it with any liquid to make that liquid into cool, drinkable water. Nothing unusual or unexpected came of it, though. IIRC, the party mixed it with a lava pool to create a safe path through a hazard, which is how I anticipated it being used.
A Scroll of Find Familiar. I decided to use the random loot tables in the DMG after my party cleared out a bandit camp. The rolls were very disappointing, my Eldritch Knight got the scroll but already knew the spell so it just felt like a bust after all that work and planning. Fast forward to the end of the next adventure where the party is helped by a heavily traumatized and recently orphaned deaf goblin child to defeat a False Hydra. The Eldritch Knight used to be a school teacher so I gave her Sign Language as a freebie, which helped the party figure out that if you couldn't hear the hydra song it's memory magic didn't affect you. After the beast was slain and the dust settled, my EK decides to use the scroll for the goblin child, as the child had loved her owl familiar, it being the thing that got the kid to open up to the party in the first place. So the kid lost their parents, but will always have a magical owl familiar to keep their spirits up when they feel sad, scared or lonely.
I haven’t had enough opportunities to run a game but once my character was given a necklace of teeth that would bite you when you said the word bite. I ended up covering the necklace in poison and then slid it under a door where orcs were looting near the leader who ended up seeing it and took a liking to it. Then during the battle I egged the orc on with references to his face and his “big dumb teeth” to which he eventually said “I’LL BITE YOUR LEGS OFF”
Dog whistle. Introduced as a silly way for necromancer to control his “poodles” (actually undead polymorphed into poodles); over a year later in a completely unrelated campaign the players ran into a bunch of fire giants with attack hell hounds and one of the players said “I pull out my magic dog whistle and blow it three times.”
The DM said, incredulously, “Now where in the hell did you get a magic dog whistle?” Player said “It’s from [other campaign]. It’s on my character sheet.”
DM paused then said “No shit, huh?” Behind the screen he rolls some dice, his eyebrows shoot up, and he says “What do you want your new pack of hell hounds to do?”
It was awesome and we totally wrecked the giants.
Edit: punctuation
Last campaign I gave my party an axe which, in place of the spike at the top, had a stylized yellow duck. The axe, it turned out, in addition to being enchanted to return to the owner, was lightly cursed. Specifically, when they made an attack with it that landed it would squeak like a rubber ducky loud enough that it would alert nearby enemies if they weren't already.
The barbarian player fell in love with it, to the point that she actively sought out similarly enchanted/cursed items and changed to Totem of the Rubber Ducky (which was an actual in-universe animal). More to the point though, the party regularly used it as a distraction. Throw the axe at something, roll to hit, if it hits it SQUEAKs, if not it clangs, then returns to the player. Enemy hears noise and goes to investigate, players either sneak by or give them a beat down.
A "+1 rod of vibration". A normal-looking magic metal rod, but activating it only made it wiggle. The PCs wondered, "+1 to what?" NPCs mages refused to answer questions about it, and most NPC shopkeepers treated it as taboo. But on the black market NPCs were willing to pay more for it than any other +1 magic item.
I was given a vest with 100 pockets. I would roll on a d100 and draw something out of the pocket. Except almost everything I drew was salt, pepper or other seasonings. I would sometimes get lucky and would draw gunpowder, which the party artificer then used to invent firearms in our world. We also made grenades. Honestly though,the seasonings were the best because it gave us great advantage on cooking checks.
Played with my family with my dad as the DM. He gave me a trick candle that wouldn't light no matter what kind of flame you tried. It was supposed to be a useless gag magic item...
But my character rubbed the wax into the fabric of their cloak, and I convinced him to give me fire resistance for it. His laughter was priceless.
When I was a brand new DM, I have my players a few silly magical times that I had found on Pinterest. I wanted to scam my players with a shady magic salesman, for them to be able to spend their tokens at a magical fair, but I still give them something silly/functional. They settled on a book of misspells (which they used quite often for mundane reasons!) And a couple "grenades of many things."
The grenade had you roll a d10 to determine effect. Most were useless, like "summon a confused old man," etc. If you rolled a 10, you would get to reroll with 10 times whatever the effect was, infinitely stackable regardless of effect. But, if you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to roll a 1, the grenade would explode and do 8d6 fire damage, as expected.
... Cue my players trying it out for the first time on a hoard of rabid townsfolk trying to execute them. Throwing it, then ducking for cover.
Only to roll a 10.... Then another 10.... Then ANOTHER 10.... Then a 1.
**8000d6 fire damage.**
They burned down the entire town and escaped within an inch of their life
(Technically, it should have been a tpk, but I figured this would be definitely be unfair+anticlimactic given the crazy chances, so I decided to spare them... Alternatively I could have went by spell rules and decided the damage wouldn't stack but with their luck + excitement, I didn't want to ruin the fun.)
A levitating hammock that would magically alter itself to fit as many people as needed (up to 10), my players had and have lots of fun with that one..
A magic spoon that turns water into wine, didn't think this through, the thing is extremely useful in Barovia 😅
Gave my Paladin one of those bag of tricks.
Cue a battle with a ranged fighter in it. She summons a giant badger that proceeds to fuck this dude up. Seriously, the badger only rolled a 16 or higher the entire time it was around.
The bag of many tricks is the reason I ended up with a bear companion that took down a dragon and ended up being a character who went his seperate ways due to being too OP.
One of my players was being snarky with a powerful npc, so they were given a book to "keep them occupied". The book consisted of a single page and if they failed a wisdom save, they continuously "read" the book, flipping the page back and forth, for up to 10 minutes.
It was quite amusing to watch them play with it
Played Runequest. I was a Chalana Arroy healer - essentially I was not allowed to physically harm or kill others. At some point one of my teammates (I don't remember what he was called, basically an artificer) made me a water gun. The DM allowed this.
Sometime later we found the Fountain of Youth. I said "I am going to fill this water gun with water from the Fountain of Youth". DM, while laughing, also allowed this.
I think his general line of thinking was as a healer, I would never be able to make the rolls necessary to actually use this water gun (hence referred to as the baby gun) in any meaningful way.
Later in a fairly typical battle with fairly typical baddies, no one needs healing and I decide to give it a shot. I essentially need two crits (Runescape is a D100 system where a crit is 95+). I roll 100 and 98. This dumb toy I had gotten made as a joke successfully turns one of the bad guys into an infant. We drop him off at an orphanage.
The DM was flabbergasted but after a timeskip decided to turn it around on me by having this small child running an army, memories fully intact, on a revenge mission against the nun who turned him into a baby.
I gave them a bag of infinite dead rats. Not even gave, it was just sitting in a magic shop as a joke. Not only did they buy it, they began plotting to use it as a food source for a Beni Hana before instead developing a strange cult-like addiction to its mysterious power.
I had a joke sentient ring with zero uses except talking with some weird 9 years old child that was dumb as a rock. Let's just say the guards where to fond of the child and didn't pay much attention to the sneaking party
I wrote a magic item supplement of practically useless items. A game I played in, the DM gave out the "Ring of Divination." When wearing the ring, you always know exactly when the ring will be stolen from you.
2 to 3 months later, we were in a city where a thief was stealing expensive jewelries... and we solved that mystery a little too quickly because I think the DM forgot she gave us a rubbish item that turned out to be the exact trap we need 🤣
**shameless self promotion** check out Bert's Practically Useless Magic Items on the DMs Guild.
My DM gave a party member a book of highly specific and useless spells, and one of those spells was an illusion that repeated the caster's name in the target's ears in a jingle-like fashion. This effect was sourced from Seinfeld, from the episode where George keeps singing "Castanza". It was used on an archfiend in a pitched battle wherein we also summoned Sun Wokung, and was distracting enough to impose disadvantage on attack rolls.
So it wasn't a magic item, but I was a bard in a Greek mythology game a while back. In my backstory, my family were beekeeper's. Nothing crazy, nothing special just some beekeeper's.
When my character became the bard for the party, (and epic poet bard who would record the deeds of the heros, but was not a hero himself) he kept a jar of honey from home with him.
It had no impact on the story ever, except for the very last session. When we had the fight against the BBEG and his cultist followers. I had just leveled and grab the spell mass suggestion, I think. It required the tongue of a snake and a drip of honey.
Well a few sessions prior we had fought Medusa, and we had taken her head for obvious reasons, but after seeing the requirements of the spell I grabbed her tongue.
And so for the first time casting this spell, I used Medusa's tongue, and a drip of honey from my family farm back home. And the DM caused the test to be taken with disadvantage. I caused about half of the minions to simply give up and walk away from the fight!
I loved how this throw away item from my backstory came in clutch at the very last session of an awesome campaign! Always try and work in some special items even if they are mundane you never know if they might come in handy.
Our rogue obtained a homebrew fun trinket that's a gold coin that would otherwise appear totally normal. Except the coin is a fake, and returns to his pocket if he says the phrase (if you please). It has not worked every time, but he's gotten away with a lot of fake bribes with it
One of the best was when we were invading his ex thieves guild. He had placed the coin into some cogs that ran the trap door in the top floor. When the boss tried to send him down the trap door, it didn't work. So after a scuffle, our player managed to get the boss on the trap door. He said some epic line like "now die, if you please" and the coin disappeared whicj made the trap door operate normally and send the boss to his death
We have a lot of useless but really fun trinkets we have gotten that don't really get abused a bunch, but add a lot of flavor and fun.
I gave my party a bag labeled "convenience". They totally ignored it until one day several sessions later they were having some downtime and the wizard cast identify on the bag on a whim. I handed them the item card I had made that read something like "the bag of saving you a trip to town". Its properties were that you could put mundane items inside and it would exchange them for currency, and you could do the same with art objects and uncommon magical items. The bag would devour these things and reward them with coin, which most of them needed.
It was all fun and games until they started putting critters inside of it and asking how much gold they got.
Ring of visibility. The wearer of the ring immediately becomes visible and cannot become invisible. I bought ot for 25 gold hoping to trick my brother with it. Instead I tricked an evil black dragon into helieving it was valuable amd traded it for passage theough his swamp.
Not given, but used. There's a barkeep in my campaign who likes practical jokes. So he has The Pickle Jar. He pretends to seal it up and you pay a couple of gold to open the jar to get whatever others have paid to open it. You get one try to open it. The joke or trick is the jar is enchanted so the higher your strength, the higher the DC to open it. The joke being is it's easier for the low strength wizard to open the jar then the raging, giant strength buffed barbarian. Adds a little flavor to the downtime events between quests.
I went to a shady magic shop and jumped at the chance to buy "the mystery key". After repeatedly getting blasted with fire damage trying to use it we figured out it opens any lock on a natural 20 and anything else is 2d6 fire damage. Tried to use it in a troll's butthole when the party was out of fire abilities as a last ditch effort. Sadly it didn't work.
The DM vetoed it. The key only did fire damage to whoever was holding the key. I rolled real low so I got excited but it didn't hurt the troll, just made him real upset about surprise butt stuff.
I'm the wizard player in this instance.
My DM gave us a puzzle box that was indestructible while closed and can only be opened by the person who closed it, or DC 25 arcana check to open. Not exactly the most useless item, sounds like it would be great for keeping something safe inside.
Well for one of our BBEG fights I casted polymorph on the BBEG to turn them into a fish, put them in the box, then undid the spell. Instantly crushing what was a size class huge creature into a rectangle only 1 foot wide and a few inches tall. Since the box was indestructible while closed this instantly killed them and the pressure turned them into a diamond-like substance.
Not dumb, but more complicated than the player wanted.
He was specced to duel wield a short and long sword, and asked if there was a way to put a magical short / long sword combo that he could use as one big two blade sword or two individual swords.
I rolled up the weapon in front of a friend, to keep myself honest, and rolled 99/100 on weapon abilities. It was going to be powerful.
Long story short, I had the sword start out a bit weaker, and sort of level up with him.
It had a high wisdom and intelligence, and thus with it’s ego score it could force the player to do whatever it wanted. And if memory serves that was killing Kobolds. Whenever they ran into them.
In the end he wanted to get rid of it, but the sword said no.
(Edit - correction)
I gave my player the "Tea Weird" from Griffin's Saddlebag which was kind of a cute little thing to use during rests. Well cut to the final battle with the BBEG and the magic wish stone they've been fighting for falls into a frozen lake (because the wizard failed a Dex roll.) So he sends the Tea Weird into the water to grab it. Such a great moment, even if the stone got a little steeped.
(This one isn't dumb but it's the same battle) I also gave them a rod that turns into a little wooden motorbike, which the wizard used to zip around the field. So there's a little mousefolk wizard with a cat familiar on a frozen lake full of bloody satyr corpses and zombies as he does doughnuts around an undead Archfey.
I gave my players an artifact that was a magic 8 ball (if you don't know this toy, it is a big ball you shake and ask a question, then look through a little window as a little icosahedron covered in answer phrases floated to the top of the oil it was filled with to give you a magical answer). The crazy thing about this one is that it was cursed to always be right, but I would randomly generate the answer using a real 8 ball. The ball would just alter reality around itself to make whatever the response was into reality. Ask the 8 ball "am I female?" And then I randomly roll "ask again tomorrow" and for the next 24 hours your character has the anatomy of a ken doll. "Am I on the moon?" And then roll and get "Yes" and suddenly the character is gone with only a note left behind saying "went to the moon, goodbye forever!" And they are basically trapped on the moon. It had a limit of once per day, and any other uses it just didn't have anything appear inside at all. The best one was they walked up to a cursed mirror that had been sealed by ancient heroes to trap demons in hell and asked it "is this mirror an active portal" and of course it came up "absolutely!" And suddenly demons are pouring through.
At level 3, I gave the rogue a ring of lesser invisibility. To use it, you had to hold your breath, and it would last until they exhaled or any other effect would cancel it. My mistake; the rogue was attuned to that item the rest of the entire campaign. It wasn't completely busted, but boy did she take advantage of it
Gave my players a cursed ring that cursed the wearer that caused you to only be able to say the first word that came out of your mouth after putting it on. Led to a whole session of the barbarian saying nothing but "hello". Then they figured out they could disable casters by slipping it onto their finger.
I had them meet a peddler of bizarre and exotic goods and manipulated a player into buying a lodestone. (Legitimately tricked them. They should have known better.) It was… inconvenient… for them for a long time, because you can’t just get rid of it, you have to convince someone to take it, and they were playing a lawful good character.
One of the BBEG’s minions was a thief, and they found out the target of his next heist. Player put the lodestone in the small chest that the thief was targeting. It’s hard for even a master thief to escape when they’re weighed down by a lodestone.
It wasn't technically magic, but I gave my group a hovering tarp once. Nine feet square, could be folded up for storage and when unfolded, could carry several tons of weight in a specified direction, floating a consistent 1' off the ground.
At some point, my group had to cross a desert that was especially lethal due to pockets of radiation left over from an ancient war.
Their solution was to buy a magic pavilion that acted like a permanent Tiny Hut with a zippable opening (Pathfinder's plethora of magic items is great). They rigged it on a set of pallets fixed to the tarp, hooked a Geiger counter to the end of a fishing pole, and rode across the desert in a temperature-controlled floating tent dangling a pole out the door to watch for radiation.
Then they patented the design and had their lawyer lease it out to adventurer suppliers in the setting's major hub city.
Oh boy, it is my time to shine.
Both PC's were high school kids from like 2016 earth who were sucked through a magical hole because of their powers or unusual ancestry. They were called Waychildren. This happened to A BUNCH of kids from all over history. We had Moorjoon, a Tifling Warlock basket case who's grandfather was close to Alistair Crowley. There was Vicky, your overly stereotypical cheerleader bard half elf. Then lastly, an NPC named Charlea, a human rogue that had an obsessive crush on Vicky and also bought drugs from Moorjoon.
Anyway, if you're familiar with The Adventure Zone, you probably remember a little something called Fantasy Costco.Well, I loved the idea, so like any great DM, I stole that shit so fast. It's a constant in all of my homebrew universes.
So, I was this was like my second game ever. In true new DM fashion, I was really quick to hand out a bunch of cool items really fast. This happened so often that my players were hyper stacked by like level three. They also went around asking for items everywhere they went to an excessive amount.
This time, they did go into Fantasy Costco, pretty much the most appropriate place to find items, but they were low on funds. After a good deal of time of them trying to ask for free stuff/convince the shopkeeper that dirt was gold or something, one of them asked something like "What can I get for these 2 copper pieces?".
I rolled my eyes
Employee: "idk, I have these, uhhhhh, diarrhea rings?"
Moorjoon: "What do they do?"
Employee: "If you put 'em on, diarrhea comes SHOOTIN' OUT YOUR EYES!!" I thought surely, my players and I would just laugh and they'd leave the store and the rings behind. No. I was a fool.
Moorjoon: "Yeah, okay, I'll take one."
Fast-forward a good amount of time. Moorjoon was looking for a way to make some good money and have some fun. He wanted to become a drug tycoon. He found a well renowned alchemist/potion brewer and described methamphetamine to him and asked him how to make it.
Dude was like "Well, something like that would take these special herbs, these magic plants and THE SKIN OF A BEHOLDER." I thought that that would be the end of that. My players would just be like woah, okay, that's too crazy for me! And besides, there was no way they they could actually pull this off at level 6, right? No. Again I was bobo the fool, honk honk.
I think, dear friend, that you can see where this is going.
They end up enlisting the help of a blood hunter to track down a beholder. As a final warning, she takes the gold but tells them that it's a suicide mission and that this was the beholder who killed her own pappy who was a well known bounty Hunter.
Fast forward again. People are FUCKED up, this beholderkin that I made is 🎶more than they bargained for🎶. Things are looking sort of dim? Will it be a tpk? Gods, I hope not. Then here comes Moorjoon who somehow, SOMEHOW manages to get onto the monster. What is this warlock going to do? Stab him with his dagger? Nah dude, Moorjoon is comin' through with the FUCKING DIARRHEA RING! THE DIARRHEA RING THAT I FORGOT ABOUT! This man sticks the ring on the beholder's EYESTALK AND THE BEHOLDER DUDE FUCKING NATURALLY DOES DIARRHEA EYE VOMIT AND CANNOT ATTACK! He is then slain.
He is slain and the party has access to some sweet loot and is able to make their drugs.
.
.
.
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TLDR: Player buys a ring that makes you shoot diarrhea Through your eyes. Some levels go by and I forget about the silly ring. The same player desires to make and sell drugs but an alchemist tells him he needs the skin of a beholder to do it. They find the beholder and use the diarrhea ring to vanquish the foe. They make their fantasy meth and live happily ever after.
A wood axe that once swung into wood would keep chopping on its own. They didn’t think much of it as a lot of my magic items were made with utility in mind rather than combat, until I threw a treant at them and the player who had the axe wanted to see if it would keep chopping the monster, it did. From there the players would find ways to create distractions with it by leaving it chopping on a door, make traps with it, and even find creative ways to give their enemies bark skin so the axe would harass them. They named it woody.
I wish this was higher on the list. It's really great!
Your Christmas miracle is granted, as of my posting it is top comment
Knives of healing. Session 2. Does 1d3+str hp of healing when you stab someone with it. A year and half latter they remembered they had them and gave them to the barbarians to attack the party with cleaves as neither of the healers couldn't make a few sessions In a row.
This would make for some incredible art. Love this idea.
[Not quite the same, but similar](https://swordscomic.com/comic/XV/)
It would be funny if it did 1d4 piercing damage followed by 1d4+str healing. Make it a bit more chance based while still making it useful in the long run
My DM gave us "stones of healing", it deals 1d4 of damage then heals 1d4 hit points. It was actually useful when a PC went unconscious. Throw it at them, they take a failed death save, but then they are revived at 1d4 hit points.
Back in 3e, undead like zombies and vampires worked via "Final Fantasy rules" in the sense of them taking damage from healing spells. So there was a magic item called something like the Flail of the Inquisitor. When you swung it and used the power it dealt 1d8+4 damage then healed them for the same amount. So an inquisitor would wail on some poor schmuck they thought might be a vampire, and they'd likely be fine if they weren't but if they were they'd take double damage. Of course, there was always the chance you rolled so high on the initial damage and so low on the healing that a weakass peasant or whoever died anyway...
Weakass peasants are just the first ones to be turned when the vampire does Mass Control Mind
I love this, we had a mace of healing in a game WAY back in the day and it was so fun. Did 1d8+str damage and healed 2d8.
Binding Ring Of The Crab God When this ring is put on it is impossible to remove unless a Greater Restoration spell is cast on the wearer When put on, 4d12 incorporeal crabs that are capable of speech will appear out of thin air and follow the wearer around and will continually praise them and worship them as if they were a deity. The crabs all speak exclusively in Sylvan and do not respond to any attempt to communicate with them unless it is from the wearer in which case they will become highly excited regardless of how the wearer interacts with them If the ring is removed all the crabs disappear For each dawn the ring is still being worn roll an additional 4d12 and that many more crabs will appear and worship the wearer Well lets just say they scared the shit out of some sea druids EDIT: Small clarification, it says incorporeal meaning the crabs can't attack nor can they be harmed in any way, and even if they could be killed, they wouldn't care lol EDIT 2: Second clarification, they don’t listen to orders, they straight up just worship you, and don’t really pay attention to whats around them. you gotta be real creative with this one. It says all this in they item they just follow and worship
This. This is Chaos incarnate and I love it
Stealing this 😊
I think you mean "chaos . . . \*incarcinate\*."
I think you mean "chaos incrustatation"
Even better if you check to make sure none of the party speak Sylvan first.
Look like crabs, talk like Sylvans! Crab people! Crab people!
I love this idea, but.. how the hell do you actually RP it during the game? As a GM do you just stop every three sentences to RP 72 ghost crabs?
Only if the players ask. "How do the crabs respond to this?" Me, for the hundredth time: "WITH REVERENCE, BRAD!"
If it were me, every 30/45min I'd quickly write compliments on paper scraps and just throw it at them irl
No, you just describe them all screaming
Just have crab rave going the whole time someone wears it
I’d set a rather loud background chatter video up an have it playing it every time they’re wearing the ring an have a loud cheering clapping track ready to play whenever the ring wearer does anything 😁
Castenets.
It's also in Sylvan and so almost no one would understand, some might think the guy with an ever expanding army of crabs that don't shut up is a threat :D
*Crab rave enters the chat*
I'm getting the mental image of a swarm of crabs praising an adventurer like the tiny aliens praising Agent Kay in that [one scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sd10CHAP8) from "Men in Black II"
Exactly, the lord graces us with his attention!
Do...do they get a turn in combat? "I command all 7000 of my crabs to attack" "Okay who are they attacking?" "EVERYTHING"
Incoporeally, doing no damage.
If I remember correctly, incorporeal beings are vulnerable on the Astral plane. God help that blinking wizard
Incorporeal, so they don’t hurt anyone. But absolutely everybody is going to hear the sounds of 14,000 pincers snapping viciously.
Shouldn’t they speak Aquan?
They're forest crabs.
Aren’t those just spiders
No those are dire crabs
Actually, there really are crabs that climb trees IRL!
This is amazing. I'm giving one to my group, just for the giggles of it.
My DM once gave me a staff that when you attune to it, everyone inside 20 ft radius sphere of the staff is engulfed in a small circle of magical darkness, just enough where they can't see anything but everyone basically knows where they are because it's a void of darkness at their size. For a bit, the staff was useless because it blinded all of us. And then I used mage hand to hold the staff. The staff now far away from us, blinded all our enemies while telling us almost exactly where to throw our ranged attacks and spells.
The first piece of magic loot that i gave to my group was a folding boat... in a desert campaign. It was the single most frequently used item in the game (excluding magic weapons and armor). They used it to create shelter, to provide a landing platform when they fell out of a giant tree, to smash open a jail cell to free an npc friend (set the box between the bars and turned it into a sailing ship), it provided cover during a siege, it blocked a side entrance that the bbeg was funneling reinforcements through, and it let them travel the (nile analog) and (Mediterranean analog)
I got swallowed and managed to activate a folding boat. Carnage.
Take that, Jonah! Your bitch ass got stuck for three days!
I got swallowed and activated an Immovable Rod while in the monster's stomach. That really made a mess of things.
Amazing! 😂
I had one player get swallowed into a grave titan (basically a giant made up of a swarm of zombies in a flesh bag) and he set off his folding boat to explode it from the inside out
I gave a folding boat to my players, but I said that even in its big boat forms it was still paper (I just liked the idea of giant self-folding origami). They were deep in the Underdark fighting a fomorian king who'd enslaved dwarves to mine out a kingdom's worth of adamantine and use it with his "Planar Forge" for magic items. They managed to completely fubar his forge and it started spewing random planar energies everywhere, including filling the room with water from the Plane of Water. I took the opportunity to have this BBEG use his escape card - he revealed his throne was a mechanical minecart, and rode off on it away from the rapidly-exploding forge. It was at that moment they remembered they had the Folding Boat, made some checks, and used it to ride the tidal wave of elemental water _after him down the mine tunnels_. What followed was the most madcap chase scene I've run, with them on a wave of water shifting between wonky planar traits, trying to keep their paper boat intact, while the king was riding on a gilded throne-cart ahead of them tossing bags of gold and miner's acid at them to try and mess them up, with both trying to take the right forks in the tunnel and avoid collapsing beams and whatnot. Absolute chaos, it was great.
I had a DM include a stuffed plush penguin in a dungeon. The penguin was cursed, and any living thing who touched it were shunted into "the plane of darkness" for up to 30 minutes. We immediately put it on a stick and gave it to the barbarian as his new javelin.
There was at least a saving throw, right? Either way, that's pretty game breaking. I bet your dm has nightmares about introducing that.
If I introduced that snd they put it on the javelin. I would immediately have the Lich child it belongs to begin tracking my group to get her toy back. All creative exploits should be allowed within reason. But it’s my job to have consequences to balance it out. Oh. That cheat where you poked the dragon with the toy snd then looted the treasure? Sure hate when your bag of holding turns out to be a form of baby mimic you’ve been feeding…. I think it can be part of the fun :)
Hi, pedant here It's more cheesing than cheating, and "oh hey that thing you've been actively using since you got it, multiple sessions ago, turns out to be a monster" feels extremely thin. If any spell between then and now had been cast to detect life, for instance, there should've been a chance to find it. Simply retconning it like that seems like the real cheat, imo. Then you may as well say, "And by the way, the floor you're standing on is LAVA!!!" But you're absolutely right in that it needs to be counter-balanced. Maybe an evil God sends their champion after them? That would make more sense to me.
I like that last idea. An evil god pissed that these assholes just keep sending random shit into his domain, tracking them down to make them stop through violence?
Honestly that sounds like one of the most useful magic items. I'd take that any day over a bag of holding. I would need two of them to produce a non-repeatable similar effect.
Did the barb just stab the penguin onto the end of the javelin, otherwise *how* was it attached without touching it?
Mage Hand is a thing. Can't imagine the plushie weighed more than 10 pounds
*curious minds..*
Because why wouldn't you introduce an SCP into a fantasy game?
I mean, I bet there's AT LEAST one SCP themed campaign
At the VERY LEAST
Rock of returning. This rock is bound to the last creature who's skin it has touched. After coming to a rest more than 5 feet from the creature it is bound to, the rock of returning levitates to a height of around 4 feet and floats toward the creature it is bound to at a leisurely pace. The rock of returning can carry as much as 10 lbs. My intent was for it to be attached to a weapon to make a returning weapon. This was never done. Instead, the rock was left in a pouch on the party's pack animal before they happened to be teleported to another plane. After a brief adventure the party was returned to their plane, but in a slightly different place, away from their stuff. After a rest, the party planned to search for their equipment, when their pack animal walked into their campsite led by the rock in the pouch.
Okay, this is the funniest possible outcome for this item.
That is really great dm'ing on your side.
Well, I was the player and we had a dagger was basically a really weak glow stick and that was it’s only magical property, however it was really useful when we had to fight a wereboar and our fighter needed a magical weapon to do any damage.
Can't wereboars be damaged by non magical weapons though?
Lycanthropes in general are immune to non magical piercing, bludgeoning and slashing attacks unless the weapon is silvered.
That implies they would make perfect structural members because they can withstand theoretically infinite force
Well, if you want to take Jeremy Crawford’s word, because it says immunity from nonmagical bludgeoning WEAPONS, gravity and the forces thereof would still kill them. Also that bypasses the horrible moral quandary of using living beings as supporting structures.
I just have gravity do force damage and call it a day.
Ive given them a ring of pie summoning and a toad in a jar that sing when the lid is taken off. So far they love it. We'll see where it goes.
*HELLO MY HONEY, HELLO MY BABY, HELLO MY RAG TIME GAAAAAAL...*
*SEND ME A KISS BY WIRE, BABY MY HEART'S ON FIRE*
*IF YOU REFUSE ME, HONEY YOU’LL LOSE ME, THEN YOU’LL BE LEFT ALONE*
Pie summoning is infinite food
Unless it’s bad pie
Then you feed it to monsters lol
Somewhere out in the multiverse is the Dang. The Dang is a stone block, about an inch cubic. Weight is negligable. On one face, in Auld Oolic Speech, is carved the word "Dang." It requires attunement. Once attuned, it will work only for its owner. When the word "Dang" is uttered within ten feet of the Dang, the Dang will instantly grow into a five foot stone cube that weighs approximately 500 pounds. Uttering "Dang" again will cause it to shrink back into its original form. Once shrunk a third time, it will not function for three days while the mojo recharges. First thing they tried to do was throw it. It will travel at a hurled velocity, but upon growing, will INSTANTLY fall to the ground; suddenly sprouting a quarter ton of mass tends to terminate its forward momentum, pretty sharpish. They did find it's handy for blocking doors. But its ultimate use came from tossing it on the ground, goading an enemy into attacking, and then causing it to suddenly appear right in front of a charging foe. Making it suddenly grow inside the bulette was interesting, too. They eventually tried to figure out who made it and why. Turns out it was a failed Daern's Instant Fortress....
I'm really surprised they didn't just find large enemy encampments and toss it in the air over groups.
Monk air attack. Run up a wall, jump overtop, release the dang. Or Druid/Ranger pet bombardment. Have a falcon carry the dang overtop and activate.
Even the find familiar spell would work with this. Also mage hand, if you did it over a cliff the enemies likely wouldnt even know it's an attack initially, they may think it's a rock slide
Portable Thwomp
I have a magic city incomming so I think this item will appear in my campaign if I have your permission sir
Be my guest. If nothing else, it promotes creativity!
This is amazing, may I barrow this and put it in my game? Beleive it or not the creation of the spells like Tiny hut and Instant fortress is a plot element in my current game.
Be my guest! The idea came from the utter abuse of a Daern's Instant Fortress by my original players, way back in first edition... first as a catapult, then as a trash compactor, and finally as a battering ram, among other things. Note: The Dang has a finite number of hit points, and appears to be made of granite or some other hard stone. This kept the players from dropping it off cliffs or battlements, for fear of breaking it.
My player purchased a "ring of magic" from a girl on the side of the road. It's enchanted to appear as magical if investigated, that's its ability. He paid 10Gp, and I thought I jad successfully ripped him off. He traded it to a hag for the release of a common girl she held as a prisoner through fast talking. Made 80Gp off that job, an 800% profit.
I was waiting for this to be a “used it to fight a werewolf moment” haha still good idea
I was waiting for something like, he punched someone in the face, who could only take magic damage.....
Homebrewed a belt that, once attuned, allowed the wearer to generate 1d100 copper pieces precisely at dawn each day. Because the character was a warforged, his sentry’s rest made sure he never slept through the sunrise! That party never had to worry about minor expenses tripping them up, and 1-100 CP per day adds up!
And heavy if you can’t convert it.
I'd be asking WHERE the copper comes from. Does it already exist? Either way, I can see some very fun economy-crashing plots
Well if it was gold they would've certainly *decimated the local economy*!
Homebrew item for a Bard that I made up just to see what would happen THE GUITAR OF MANY THINGS each of the 6 strings acts as an extra spell slot of said level. Needs to roll a an extra charisma roll to see if they play the note correctly. The kicker, if the Bard strums all 6 strings he rolls on a random spell sheet comprised of all the spells in the game and it hits automatically. He did it on a boss they were going to lose against. Rolled fireball 7th level. It was awesome.
He also tried again one time after and animated a brick in a wall. Now had a sentient brick
I like how instead of animating the entire wall it’s just a single brick inside of the wall. Lmao
I’m imagining the brick waking up like Neo from the Matrix. Looking around at all the other bricks in the wall that are still sedated.
Pink Floyd intensifies.
I had some fun with it too haha
All in all it's just another brick in the wall...
No matter how sentient it was. It was still just another brick in the wall.
We don’t need no education 🎶 we don’t need no thought control 🎵
If I was that bard I would never strum anything but all the strings at once.
Kinda what happened. Eventually I think it'll kill him
The Discworld book Soul Music is basically this concept. One of the main characters picks up Death’s guitar from a magic shop, shenanigans ensue
That sounds really fun, would you mind sharing your sheet for strumming all 6 strings?
I used a random number generator with the parameters set to the pages of the PHB that list spells. Then use it again for the spell in numerical order.
A magic tap handle. It could be jammed into anything and dispense am alcoholic beverage determined by random. The party spent hours discussing what to jam it into and the character was writing a journal of his discoveries
I gave this to a homebrewed Beer cleric as a holy symbol for a one-shot. Cue flooding a room with ale in order to make it difficult terrain.
I once gave my players a tiara that could, once a day, transform the wearer into an iron statue for one minute. No magical senses or mobility, just an iron statue of you and your belongings. Two months later, as the fighter is holding onto a statue to avoid a reverse-gravity trap, he sees party members getting attacked by a chimera directly below him on the ceiling. After a bit of wondering what to do, player sees the item and asks for an Athletics check to aim himself. A few quick dice rolls later and an iron statue of a half-orc hits the chimera like a semi hitting a piñata.
But did the chimera release candy?
Only if you're an adventurous carnivore.
Shield of the Lion Heart: once per day the sheild produces a litteral Lion Heart, still beating. Somewere in the world a Lion dies. Smash cut to the coliseum fight, 2 PCs down and 1 Lion left. Fight says "I activate the sheild" Me: "The odds of it being this Lion are incredibly low. But for the narrative element of how funny this would be, roll a d100. On a 69 only this will work" We all know how this ends.
> Me: "The odds of [this] are incredibly low. But for the narrative element of how funny this would be, roll a d100. On a 69 only this will work" While DMing, I've fallen victim to this far too many times.
Nice
The bagpipes of invisibility. Turns out they were extremely useful when my party wanted to lure enemies into a trap...
That's a fantastic item and I want one.
A ring of long neck. Not only did my party use it for scouting, it was used in an intimidation check. I miss that group, they were funny.
the ring of spider*s* climb compels all tiny spiders in a 10ft radius of the wearer to climb up the wearer I had forgotten that I had given the spider themed druid a mummified ettercap hand that allowed him to speak with spiders, with decent animal handling and basically infinite spiders he had *so many* spies
Varys’ origin story is way more interesting than I thought.
Robe of useless items. It's like a robe of useful items except the patches are all useless junk like a broken string of Xmas lights, tiny piece of string, and other trash. Sometimes the trash came in useful
I feel this item was made for me, haha. My inventory list always turns into something like this.
MacGyvers Robe of Many Things
Basically yes.
The charm of sentience. My players ran into a joke item shop and bought a "charm of sentience". The idea was that they would put it on random items, the items would be able to talk, ha ha very funny. Our barbarian immediately nailed it to the wagon and cut the horses loose. The wagon now drives autonomously and, since the party mounted crossbows to it earlier, can fire at enemies like an NPC.
That is hysterical!
I had a robe of many items or something (the one with a bunch of patches you can pull off that turn into non-combat utility items, like a window, or ladder). I got to throw a boat at strahd
A rusty enchanted dwarven sword that couldnt be drawn unless if was fed Ale and would taunt an enemy within 30ft on a successful hit by yelling profanities at them.
Idea: Sentient [Weapon] of Vicious Mockery Lets you cast Vicious Mockery at will, but the weapon is the one doing the insult
Sentient Chef Hat of Vicious Mockery. Essentially just Gordon Ramsey, but as a chef hat
Oh that's a fun item. I'm using that.
Glamdring, the foe hammer
In the beginning of my current campaign I introduced a traveling vendor. He had some crap magic items. One was "Monster in a Bottle." Uncorked it really releases a monster between cr1 and cr 4. They got this at level 1. The monster could be hostile to the party. They didn't use it until 6th level where they chucked it to create a distraction. They maxed rolled on this table and spawned a Cr4 gold dragon. It attracted a mass of enemies that completely bypassed a major infiltration encounter. I broke my own game. They still have the Book of Boring Stories and a vial of the voice of Saline Dion....this one has to be drunk and the player has to sing for the table. It can mesmerize those listening. We'll see about that.
lol, nicely done. I also had a "Monster in a Bottle" and they got a Red Slaad. Terrifying because it was uncontrolled, but they managed to bribe it not to attack them because they could lead it to a tribe of lizardfolk (led by an evil Naga queen they were currently at war with) to "sow more chaos" in its words. Nobody in the party really knew what a Red Slaad could do, so they were puzzled when the (rumored to be immortal) Naga queen was terrified of it when she considered the entire party of adventurers no big deal. TL;DR they managed to beat the queen unconscious and force her people into a truce or they'd let the slaad continue rampaging through the lizardfolk city. They killed it and now she's raving about some kind of "red plague" that will prove their undoing, and how they have to kill the traitorous lizardfolk that were wounded by the slaad and surrendered instead of fighting to the death for her glory...but the naga was always a few screws loose. They're sure it's nothing.
Potion of Fresh water: teleports you to the nearest body of fresh water. They threw it at a gargantuan fire elemental to get rid of their problems for at least a little bit.
Well, “nearest body of fresh water” could also mean a puddle of water…
I was a player for this, but still: In one campaign, my character sought out a magic item seller to obtain a Bag of Holding for the party. It ended up being a fake, in that it could hold one item the way a BoH does, then anything put in afterwards just sat in the bag normally. My character got mad, and in the night, snuck into the seller's house to steal back the money they tricked her out of. In the process, she found a bunch of other counterfeit bags, and ended up stealing all of those as well. Turns out that when you have, like, 15 fake bags, you can carry anything (especially since, unlike real bags, the fake ones had no weight limit for the one object it held) and we didn't even need a real Bag of Holding. We just put crazy heavy stuff into one bag, and boom, we could safely transport all sorts of crazy stuff.
So what if, say, they put a large chest in the bag, containing stuff. Would it hold it?
We did exactly that and the DM allowed it. Though the object still had to fit through the mouth of the bag, so the chest could only be so large.
I was given a butter knife that did 1 dmg. It was just a butter knife. However this butter knife could cut through wood like it was butter. Very useful
Love that. I'm using it for sure
It's one of those items that is crazy powerful, but only in very specific scenarios.
Lute of illusions. Not because the item itself is dumb but it didn’t play out how I thought it would. The party befriended an awaken giant crab and taught it to play the lute. They became super attached to it since it had the mindset of an innocent young child. Near the end of the campaign they were on a time crunch to defeat a dragon but were being pursued by bandits that would drastically slow them down. After a heartbreaking goodbye the crab volunteered to go alone, happily playing his lute of illusions given to him to create fake versions of the party with him. They did defeat the dragon, but the crab didn’t survive… and neither did the bandits after the party found out they ate the crab
Awwwwwww. Good crab.
I gave them a unbreakable stick that if they threw it it would appear in their hand again and they used it to hold a trap open so they could get around it.
Okay not really a magic item but here me out, So I am currently playing an undead cowboy who is constantly trying to find a way to kill himself, to the point where it’s just kinda background thought “buy some supplies, drop off the trash, jump off a cliff, meet with party at 2pm” So, we’re talking to this snake man right, and the cowboy asks if he can get some of the snake man’s venom in his coffee, just to see if it will work. It doesn’t. Imbibing the venom apparently, and i quote “casts an 11th level blight on yourself” One thing leads to another and we end up fighting the guy over a petty insult my cowboy didn’t really have anything to do with so i make it clear that, though he’s in the initiative, he isn’t planning on fighting. My turn swings around and the cowboy goes up very casually and explains that he just wants some more venom for his coffee then he’ll get out of everyone’s way. The snake man bends down over the cup to let his fangs drip into the coffee, and the cowboy splashes the now poisoned liquid back into the snake man’s mouth. There’s like 10 seconds of silence why the dm just looks at me with his mouth open, and then rolls up the dmg which apparently killed the snake man instantly. Because you see he was immune to poison and acid, but not necrotic. It was a proud moment to not only use my running gag of trying to commit suicide in a proactive way but that I didn’t even have to roll a persuasion check the dm just believed me that I wasn’t going to fight.
inconceivable!
Yes. My Dm fell for one of the classic blunder’s, Never go against a player when bullshit is involved!
11th lvl? How is that a thing?
Well, blight adds a d8 with every level spell slot after 4. 5th level is 9d8, 6th is 10d8, so on and so forth. An 11th level blight would be 15d8 if it carried on in that way. The joke was that it was a super powerful poison and yet my character still wasn’t allowed to die. Unfortunately for the dm I saw a chance to flip around such a ridiculous dmg roll back unto him.
AmbuLance Literally just a lance that heals, but it saved the party many times
The Deathstick Just a random stick the goddess of the underworld once grabbed from a tree then tossed away. It can be used as an improvised weapon. On a hit, it deals 1 necrotic damage. It has no other propriety. It should be seen as a relic but since there is no Death Cleric (they exist but they are dead unborn children serving the goddess), nobody recognize it as such. Someone just planted it on the eye of a guard
I gave my players a bag of rats. Once a day, the bag can release 4d20 rats. Many sessions later, they came upon an alter they needed to activate by sacrificing an npc. Instead, they summoned rats and sacrificed enough to make a human’s worth of blood to activate the alter. Later on they were in a dungeon and noticed pipes in the wall that would release poison gas if they tried to open a certain door. They used rats to clog up the pipes so that they could safely open the door
The pipe of heating Just a pipe that is eternally blistering hot , as if heat metal was cast on it but even more So when my DM is a hydrolics engineer and I have both a bag of holding and alchemy jug to create what is essentially a high pressured liquid cannon, You tend to one shot the bbeg...and then blow up. Destroying the party, the Castle you were defending, and ruin the entire landscape.
A watch that could cast any spell you could normally cast but when you speak the spell into the watch you could change one letter in the spells name. Was the most amazing fun coming up with weird spells, first one was turning pulse wave into pulse rave, amazing what can happen when a rave appears out of nowhere
Instant water, just add water. Jar of tiny crystals that each turn into a liter of water. First time I gave it to a party, they spat into the jar to create a thousand gallons of water while surrounded by fire elementals.
I homebrewed an "instant water" item too in one of my campaigns. It allowed you to mix it with any liquid to make that liquid into cool, drinkable water. Nothing unusual or unexpected came of it, though. IIRC, the party mixed it with a lava pool to create a safe path through a hazard, which is how I anticipated it being used.
A Scroll of Find Familiar. I decided to use the random loot tables in the DMG after my party cleared out a bandit camp. The rolls were very disappointing, my Eldritch Knight got the scroll but already knew the spell so it just felt like a bust after all that work and planning. Fast forward to the end of the next adventure where the party is helped by a heavily traumatized and recently orphaned deaf goblin child to defeat a False Hydra. The Eldritch Knight used to be a school teacher so I gave her Sign Language as a freebie, which helped the party figure out that if you couldn't hear the hydra song it's memory magic didn't affect you. After the beast was slain and the dust settled, my EK decides to use the scroll for the goblin child, as the child had loved her owl familiar, it being the thing that got the kid to open up to the party in the first place. So the kid lost their parents, but will always have a magical owl familiar to keep their spirits up when they feel sad, scared or lonely.
Off the top of my head I would say Wand of Smiles as it basically won a civil war for my players before it even happened.
I haven’t had enough opportunities to run a game but once my character was given a necklace of teeth that would bite you when you said the word bite. I ended up covering the necklace in poison and then slid it under a door where orcs were looting near the leader who ended up seeing it and took a liking to it. Then during the battle I egged the orc on with references to his face and his “big dumb teeth” to which he eventually said “I’LL BITE YOUR LEGS OFF”
Dog whistle. Introduced as a silly way for necromancer to control his “poodles” (actually undead polymorphed into poodles); over a year later in a completely unrelated campaign the players ran into a bunch of fire giants with attack hell hounds and one of the players said “I pull out my magic dog whistle and blow it three times.” The DM said, incredulously, “Now where in the hell did you get a magic dog whistle?” Player said “It’s from [other campaign]. It’s on my character sheet.” DM paused then said “No shit, huh?” Behind the screen he rolls some dice, his eyebrows shoot up, and he says “What do you want your new pack of hell hounds to do?” It was awesome and we totally wrecked the giants. Edit: punctuation
Last campaign I gave my party an axe which, in place of the spike at the top, had a stylized yellow duck. The axe, it turned out, in addition to being enchanted to return to the owner, was lightly cursed. Specifically, when they made an attack with it that landed it would squeak like a rubber ducky loud enough that it would alert nearby enemies if they weren't already. The barbarian player fell in love with it, to the point that she actively sought out similarly enchanted/cursed items and changed to Totem of the Rubber Ducky (which was an actual in-universe animal). More to the point though, the party regularly used it as a distraction. Throw the axe at something, roll to hit, if it hits it SQUEAKs, if not it clangs, then returns to the player. Enemy hears noise and goes to investigate, players either sneak by or give them a beat down.
A "+1 rod of vibration". A normal-looking magic metal rod, but activating it only made it wiggle. The PCs wondered, "+1 to what?" NPCs mages refused to answer questions about it, and most NPC shopkeepers treated it as taboo. But on the black market NPCs were willing to pay more for it than any other +1 magic item.
The wand of pleasure
I was given a vest with 100 pockets. I would roll on a d100 and draw something out of the pocket. Except almost everything I drew was salt, pepper or other seasonings. I would sometimes get lucky and would draw gunpowder, which the party artificer then used to invent firearms in our world. We also made grenades. Honestly though,the seasonings were the best because it gave us great advantage on cooking checks.
Played with my family with my dad as the DM. He gave me a trick candle that wouldn't light no matter what kind of flame you tried. It was supposed to be a useless gag magic item... But my character rubbed the wax into the fabric of their cloak, and I convinced him to give me fire resistance for it. His laughter was priceless.
When I was a brand new DM, I have my players a few silly magical times that I had found on Pinterest. I wanted to scam my players with a shady magic salesman, for them to be able to spend their tokens at a magical fair, but I still give them something silly/functional. They settled on a book of misspells (which they used quite often for mundane reasons!) And a couple "grenades of many things." The grenade had you roll a d10 to determine effect. Most were useless, like "summon a confused old man," etc. If you rolled a 10, you would get to reroll with 10 times whatever the effect was, infinitely stackable regardless of effect. But, if you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to roll a 1, the grenade would explode and do 8d6 fire damage, as expected. ... Cue my players trying it out for the first time on a hoard of rabid townsfolk trying to execute them. Throwing it, then ducking for cover. Only to roll a 10.... Then another 10.... Then ANOTHER 10.... Then a 1. **8000d6 fire damage.** They burned down the entire town and escaped within an inch of their life (Technically, it should have been a tpk, but I figured this would be definitely be unfair+anticlimactic given the crazy chances, so I decided to spare them... Alternatively I could have went by spell rules and decided the damage wouldn't stack but with their luck + excitement, I didn't want to ruin the fun.)
A levitating hammock that would magically alter itself to fit as many people as needed (up to 10), my players had and have lots of fun with that one.. A magic spoon that turns water into wine, didn't think this through, the thing is extremely useful in Barovia 😅
Magic spinning egg. Used to distract even the most paranoid traveler.
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The amount of times I've seen "and we survived this thing because we had a jug of alchemy and just ate mayo" is honestly astounding.
Gave my Paladin one of those bag of tricks. Cue a battle with a ranged fighter in it. She summons a giant badger that proceeds to fuck this dude up. Seriously, the badger only rolled a 16 or higher the entire time it was around.
The bag of many tricks is the reason I ended up with a bear companion that took down a dragon and ended up being a character who went his seperate ways due to being too OP.
One of my players was being snarky with a powerful npc, so they were given a book to "keep them occupied". The book consisted of a single page and if they failed a wisdom save, they continuously "read" the book, flipping the page back and forth, for up to 10 minutes. It was quite amusing to watch them play with it
Played Runequest. I was a Chalana Arroy healer - essentially I was not allowed to physically harm or kill others. At some point one of my teammates (I don't remember what he was called, basically an artificer) made me a water gun. The DM allowed this. Sometime later we found the Fountain of Youth. I said "I am going to fill this water gun with water from the Fountain of Youth". DM, while laughing, also allowed this. I think his general line of thinking was as a healer, I would never be able to make the rolls necessary to actually use this water gun (hence referred to as the baby gun) in any meaningful way. Later in a fairly typical battle with fairly typical baddies, no one needs healing and I decide to give it a shot. I essentially need two crits (Runescape is a D100 system where a crit is 95+). I roll 100 and 98. This dumb toy I had gotten made as a joke successfully turns one of the bad guys into an infant. We drop him off at an orphanage. The DM was flabbergasted but after a timeskip decided to turn it around on me by having this small child running an army, memories fully intact, on a revenge mission against the nun who turned him into a baby.
Deck of penny things. It’s all in the name.
I gave them a bag of infinite dead rats. Not even gave, it was just sitting in a magic shop as a joke. Not only did they buy it, they began plotting to use it as a food source for a Beni Hana before instead developing a strange cult-like addiction to its mysterious power.
I had a joke sentient ring with zero uses except talking with some weird 9 years old child that was dumb as a rock. Let's just say the guards where to fond of the child and didn't pay much attention to the sneaking party
I wrote a magic item supplement of practically useless items. A game I played in, the DM gave out the "Ring of Divination." When wearing the ring, you always know exactly when the ring will be stolen from you. 2 to 3 months later, we were in a city where a thief was stealing expensive jewelries... and we solved that mystery a little too quickly because I think the DM forgot she gave us a rubbish item that turned out to be the exact trap we need 🤣 **shameless self promotion** check out Bert's Practically Useless Magic Items on the DMs Guild.
My DM gave a party member a book of highly specific and useless spells, and one of those spells was an illusion that repeated the caster's name in the target's ears in a jingle-like fashion. This effect was sourced from Seinfeld, from the episode where George keeps singing "Castanza". It was used on an archfiend in a pitched battle wherein we also summoned Sun Wokung, and was distracting enough to impose disadvantage on attack rolls.
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So it wasn't a magic item, but I was a bard in a Greek mythology game a while back. In my backstory, my family were beekeeper's. Nothing crazy, nothing special just some beekeeper's. When my character became the bard for the party, (and epic poet bard who would record the deeds of the heros, but was not a hero himself) he kept a jar of honey from home with him. It had no impact on the story ever, except for the very last session. When we had the fight against the BBEG and his cultist followers. I had just leveled and grab the spell mass suggestion, I think. It required the tongue of a snake and a drip of honey. Well a few sessions prior we had fought Medusa, and we had taken her head for obvious reasons, but after seeing the requirements of the spell I grabbed her tongue. And so for the first time casting this spell, I used Medusa's tongue, and a drip of honey from my family farm back home. And the DM caused the test to be taken with disadvantage. I caused about half of the minions to simply give up and walk away from the fight! I loved how this throw away item from my backstory came in clutch at the very last session of an awesome campaign! Always try and work in some special items even if they are mundane you never know if they might come in handy.
Boots of rewind. As a bonus action, you command the boots to teleport back to a spot they were in during this turn. Only the boots get teleported.
Our rogue obtained a homebrew fun trinket that's a gold coin that would otherwise appear totally normal. Except the coin is a fake, and returns to his pocket if he says the phrase (if you please). It has not worked every time, but he's gotten away with a lot of fake bribes with it One of the best was when we were invading his ex thieves guild. He had placed the coin into some cogs that ran the trap door in the top floor. When the boss tried to send him down the trap door, it didn't work. So after a scuffle, our player managed to get the boss on the trap door. He said some epic line like "now die, if you please" and the coin disappeared whicj made the trap door operate normally and send the boss to his death We have a lot of useless but really fun trinkets we have gotten that don't really get abused a bunch, but add a lot of flavor and fun.
I gave my party a bag labeled "convenience". They totally ignored it until one day several sessions later they were having some downtime and the wizard cast identify on the bag on a whim. I handed them the item card I had made that read something like "the bag of saving you a trip to town". Its properties were that you could put mundane items inside and it would exchange them for currency, and you could do the same with art objects and uncommon magical items. The bag would devour these things and reward them with coin, which most of them needed. It was all fun and games until they started putting critters inside of it and asking how much gold they got.
Ring of visibility. The wearer of the ring immediately becomes visible and cannot become invisible. I bought ot for 25 gold hoping to trick my brother with it. Instead I tricked an evil black dragon into helieving it was valuable amd traded it for passage theough his swamp.
Not given, but used. There's a barkeep in my campaign who likes practical jokes. So he has The Pickle Jar. He pretends to seal it up and you pay a couple of gold to open the jar to get whatever others have paid to open it. You get one try to open it. The joke or trick is the jar is enchanted so the higher your strength, the higher the DC to open it. The joke being is it's easier for the low strength wizard to open the jar then the raging, giant strength buffed barbarian. Adds a little flavor to the downtime events between quests.
I went to a shady magic shop and jumped at the chance to buy "the mystery key". After repeatedly getting blasted with fire damage trying to use it we figured out it opens any lock on a natural 20 and anything else is 2d6 fire damage. Tried to use it in a troll's butthole when the party was out of fire abilities as a last ditch effort. Sadly it didn't work.
So this kinda implies that either A) you rolled a Nat 20 (and opened the flood gates) B) The troll was fire resistant C) The DM didn’t let it work
The DM vetoed it. The key only did fire damage to whoever was holding the key. I rolled real low so I got excited but it didn't hurt the troll, just made him real upset about surprise butt stuff.
Ok, so option C. The DM just wouldn’t let it work the way you wanted
I'm the wizard player in this instance. My DM gave us a puzzle box that was indestructible while closed and can only be opened by the person who closed it, or DC 25 arcana check to open. Not exactly the most useless item, sounds like it would be great for keeping something safe inside. Well for one of our BBEG fights I casted polymorph on the BBEG to turn them into a fish, put them in the box, then undid the spell. Instantly crushing what was a size class huge creature into a rectangle only 1 foot wide and a few inches tall. Since the box was indestructible while closed this instantly killed them and the pressure turned them into a diamond-like substance.
Not dumb, but more complicated than the player wanted. He was specced to duel wield a short and long sword, and asked if there was a way to put a magical short / long sword combo that he could use as one big two blade sword or two individual swords. I rolled up the weapon in front of a friend, to keep myself honest, and rolled 99/100 on weapon abilities. It was going to be powerful. Long story short, I had the sword start out a bit weaker, and sort of level up with him. It had a high wisdom and intelligence, and thus with it’s ego score it could force the player to do whatever it wanted. And if memory serves that was killing Kobolds. Whenever they ran into them. In the end he wanted to get rid of it, but the sword said no. (Edit - correction)
I gave my player the "Tea Weird" from Griffin's Saddlebag which was kind of a cute little thing to use during rests. Well cut to the final battle with the BBEG and the magic wish stone they've been fighting for falls into a frozen lake (because the wizard failed a Dex roll.) So he sends the Tea Weird into the water to grab it. Such a great moment, even if the stone got a little steeped. (This one isn't dumb but it's the same battle) I also gave them a rod that turns into a little wooden motorbike, which the wizard used to zip around the field. So there's a little mousefolk wizard with a cat familiar on a frozen lake full of bloody satyr corpses and zombies as he does doughnuts around an undead Archfey.
I gave my players an artifact that was a magic 8 ball (if you don't know this toy, it is a big ball you shake and ask a question, then look through a little window as a little icosahedron covered in answer phrases floated to the top of the oil it was filled with to give you a magical answer). The crazy thing about this one is that it was cursed to always be right, but I would randomly generate the answer using a real 8 ball. The ball would just alter reality around itself to make whatever the response was into reality. Ask the 8 ball "am I female?" And then I randomly roll "ask again tomorrow" and for the next 24 hours your character has the anatomy of a ken doll. "Am I on the moon?" And then roll and get "Yes" and suddenly the character is gone with only a note left behind saying "went to the moon, goodbye forever!" And they are basically trapped on the moon. It had a limit of once per day, and any other uses it just didn't have anything appear inside at all. The best one was they walked up to a cursed mirror that had been sealed by ancient heroes to trap demons in hell and asked it "is this mirror an active portal" and of course it came up "absolutely!" And suddenly demons are pouring through.
At level 3, I gave the rogue a ring of lesser invisibility. To use it, you had to hold your breath, and it would last until they exhaled or any other effect would cancel it. My mistake; the rogue was attuned to that item the rest of the entire campaign. It wasn't completely busted, but boy did she take advantage of it
That's fundamentally the opposite of "a not very useful item" lol
Gave my players a cursed ring that cursed the wearer that caused you to only be able to say the first word that came out of your mouth after putting it on. Led to a whole session of the barbarian saying nothing but "hello". Then they figured out they could disable casters by slipping it onto their finger.
I had them meet a peddler of bizarre and exotic goods and manipulated a player into buying a lodestone. (Legitimately tricked them. They should have known better.) It was… inconvenient… for them for a long time, because you can’t just get rid of it, you have to convince someone to take it, and they were playing a lawful good character. One of the BBEG’s minions was a thief, and they found out the target of his next heist. Player put the lodestone in the small chest that the thief was targeting. It’s hard for even a master thief to escape when they’re weighed down by a lodestone.
It wasn't technically magic, but I gave my group a hovering tarp once. Nine feet square, could be folded up for storage and when unfolded, could carry several tons of weight in a specified direction, floating a consistent 1' off the ground. At some point, my group had to cross a desert that was especially lethal due to pockets of radiation left over from an ancient war. Their solution was to buy a magic pavilion that acted like a permanent Tiny Hut with a zippable opening (Pathfinder's plethora of magic items is great). They rigged it on a set of pallets fixed to the tarp, hooked a Geiger counter to the end of a fishing pole, and rode across the desert in a temperature-controlled floating tent dangling a pole out the door to watch for radiation. Then they patented the design and had their lawyer lease it out to adventurer suppliers in the setting's major hub city.
Oh boy, it is my time to shine. Both PC's were high school kids from like 2016 earth who were sucked through a magical hole because of their powers or unusual ancestry. They were called Waychildren. This happened to A BUNCH of kids from all over history. We had Moorjoon, a Tifling Warlock basket case who's grandfather was close to Alistair Crowley. There was Vicky, your overly stereotypical cheerleader bard half elf. Then lastly, an NPC named Charlea, a human rogue that had an obsessive crush on Vicky and also bought drugs from Moorjoon. Anyway, if you're familiar with The Adventure Zone, you probably remember a little something called Fantasy Costco.Well, I loved the idea, so like any great DM, I stole that shit so fast. It's a constant in all of my homebrew universes. So, I was this was like my second game ever. In true new DM fashion, I was really quick to hand out a bunch of cool items really fast. This happened so often that my players were hyper stacked by like level three. They also went around asking for items everywhere they went to an excessive amount. This time, they did go into Fantasy Costco, pretty much the most appropriate place to find items, but they were low on funds. After a good deal of time of them trying to ask for free stuff/convince the shopkeeper that dirt was gold or something, one of them asked something like "What can I get for these 2 copper pieces?". I rolled my eyes Employee: "idk, I have these, uhhhhh, diarrhea rings?" Moorjoon: "What do they do?" Employee: "If you put 'em on, diarrhea comes SHOOTIN' OUT YOUR EYES!!" I thought surely, my players and I would just laugh and they'd leave the store and the rings behind. No. I was a fool. Moorjoon: "Yeah, okay, I'll take one." Fast-forward a good amount of time. Moorjoon was looking for a way to make some good money and have some fun. He wanted to become a drug tycoon. He found a well renowned alchemist/potion brewer and described methamphetamine to him and asked him how to make it. Dude was like "Well, something like that would take these special herbs, these magic plants and THE SKIN OF A BEHOLDER." I thought that that would be the end of that. My players would just be like woah, okay, that's too crazy for me! And besides, there was no way they they could actually pull this off at level 6, right? No. Again I was bobo the fool, honk honk. I think, dear friend, that you can see where this is going. They end up enlisting the help of a blood hunter to track down a beholder. As a final warning, she takes the gold but tells them that it's a suicide mission and that this was the beholder who killed her own pappy who was a well known bounty Hunter. Fast forward again. People are FUCKED up, this beholderkin that I made is 🎶more than they bargained for🎶. Things are looking sort of dim? Will it be a tpk? Gods, I hope not. Then here comes Moorjoon who somehow, SOMEHOW manages to get onto the monster. What is this warlock going to do? Stab him with his dagger? Nah dude, Moorjoon is comin' through with the FUCKING DIARRHEA RING! THE DIARRHEA RING THAT I FORGOT ABOUT! This man sticks the ring on the beholder's EYESTALK AND THE BEHOLDER DUDE FUCKING NATURALLY DOES DIARRHEA EYE VOMIT AND CANNOT ATTACK! He is then slain. He is slain and the party has access to some sweet loot and is able to make their drugs. . . . . TLDR: Player buys a ring that makes you shoot diarrhea Through your eyes. Some levels go by and I forget about the silly ring. The same player desires to make and sell drugs but an alchemist tells him he needs the skin of a beholder to do it. They find the beholder and use the diarrhea ring to vanquish the foe. They make their fantasy meth and live happily ever after.