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| Unidentified items screen grab from Diablo 3 |
“You wanna sip that potion?” Side effects may include: burnt hole through stomach, turning inside out, tummy ache.
Identifying a magic item's properties is something that has often been done via experimentation, but some people complain that because the properties are obtuse, their players never get it. So instead they just have the players cast a spell for it, or pay an NPC, or they outright tell the players and skip this experience. BUT, I say experimenting to discover the properties CAN be fun, provided that the magic item itself was designed right.
I don’t expect experimentation to be fun for every conceivable magic item under the sun, but I think if you have the right kind of items you’ll be just fine. Below are some things to keep in mind when designing items that are fun to experiment with. I provide some magic item examples of my own design along with my thoughts on why they are fun for players to… play with.
Let them know it’s special
How do your players know an item is magic?
With spells like “Detect Magic”, it can be easy to think that this information should be hidden. I think that is lame and hopefully others have written posts on why that is so I don’t need to explain myself. Please let me know. I just tell my players the items they find are magical. Sometimes I play coy and say that particular objects look shinier or sharper or warmer than the others. Sometimes I just say that they feel like magic. My in-game cop out is that magic items want to be used, so they should be thrummin’ as hard as they can.
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| Wikipedia: The three monkeys at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India |
Golden Monkey Idol
Collect all three! Depiction of a monkey with its hands over its eyes, mouth, or ears. Any creature while in contact with the idol suffers the effects associated with the type below.
- See no evil. Creature is blind.
- Hear no evil. Creature is deaf.
- Speak no evil. Creature is mute
Simple. All the PCs have to do is touch it to figure out what it does. It’s got clues based on where the monkey hands are located. After the PCs encounter one statue, they’ll have a pretty darn good idea what the next one they find does.
Make the interaction obvious
Wikipedia: Mystery watch
For all the stuff that requires more than just touching it to activate, make that interaction obvious. Hint at it heavily and encourage ideas that follow suit. The interaction for these items should be so obvious and inevitable that the player’s can’t help but discover it. Wind the clock, rub the lamp, eat the bread, drink the milk, shake the maraca, swing the sword, push the Weeble.
Wind-up Eye
Human eyeball with wings and a wind-up key on the back. When wound, the user sees what the eye sees and can control its flight. Lasts 6 turns. d3+1 uses.
It’s got a wind-up key. The action is literally in the name of the device. Would your players be able to guess it’s a fantasy drone? Probably. It’s a friggin’ eyeball with wings.
Bloodletter (two-handed sword +2)
Deep red broadsword that drinks blood. When fed well, it ignores the “slow” property of two-handed swords.
This one’s dead simple. If they’re slicing, they're solving the puzzle. Is it mechanically good enough for them to give up their shield? Probably not. But it might just be cool enough.
Exploding dice
Six-sided dice that explode when rolled or thrown. They deal damage equal to the number of pips their face shows. A face value of “6” spawns a new die which is then rolled immediately.
Will PCs roll all those dice they just found, or just one? Maybe they will just lazily toss nitro into their bag.
Bake in clues
Eyeballs see. Wings fly. Frogs kiss?
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| Illustration by Munkao from "With the Cult of Crimson Revelers" |
Jade Frog
Fits in your palm. Lips are puckered. A creature who kisses the Jade frog transforms into a bullfrog. The effect ends when someone kisses the polymorphed bullfrog.
Story time. My players are familiar with the folk tales of frogs that transform into princes when they get a smooch. The froggy lips are right there waiting. Did they guess they would be the ones transforming into a frog? Probably not, but that’s part of the fun. No hole in the stomach, just opportunity for adventure. One of the PCs kissed the frog while in the comfort of their stronghold. They didn’t know how long it would last and wanted to use the opportunity to spy on a faction at the tavern. They hopped on over and shenanigans ensued. Throw in a cat and you’ve got yourself a Frogritter game going.
The PC wound up hiding in the store room for several hours before starting to worry that the effect would never wear off. Eventually, memories of the fable prevailed and the PC was restored with some information on the faction at the tavern and a fun story.
Silver Gorilla
Shaking this maraca-sized statue causes sounds of gorilla hooting. Further shaking causes the sounds to get louder and more irritated until a full-sized angry gorilla pops out attacking anything near it. Touching the gorilla with the idol recaptures it.
I think the term is “associative imagery” where you use physical descriptors of objects which imply unspoken associations due to the thoughts conjured. Please tell me what it’s actually called, if you know. Search engines are failing me at the moment. Whatever it’s called, describing this as “maraca-sized” was my attempt to get players thinking about shaking stuff to make noise. As soon as the PCs pick this thing up, tell them it makes a noise and then stops. Make the noise yourself, even. It’s fun to hoot like a gorilla and your players are going to know something’s up. Play up the crescendo and then it’s up to them if they want to poke the bear… uh… gorilla anymore.
Jar of Winged Shift
A creature who consumes one of the five candy coated pupae within is transformed into a horse fly for one turn.
Why would a PC want to eat one of these things? Because they smell like candy! There’s always that guy who wants to eat or drink everything. Here’s their chance to fly. Side-note, if you want players to start eating monsters for fun and for benefit, start giving them reasons to try. Show other creatures or NPCs eating monsters when PCs enter the room. Describe the warm apple pie smell and texture of the giant floating eyeball corpse that just shlopped to the floor. They’ll get it1.
Ebony Monk Figurine
A robed, bald monk with their finger over mouth in a quiet gesture. Once per day, activate by saying "shhh" and/or mimicking the monk's hand gesture. Nullifies sound within a 15' radius around the figurine. Lasts 2 hours. 4 Charges left.
Monk(ey) see, monk(ey) do.
Be flexible, adjudicate
As with all OSR-style challenges and OSR-style puzzles you should be open to new ideas. This is a roleplaying game and players can try anything and all that jazz. If they are making attempts you never thought of, consider the steps required to make those attempts and help them out.
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| Bone and metal pins used to fasten clothing in the Bronze Age |
Pin (spear +1)
Normally resembles a pin in both size and shape. When the command word, “pin”, is spoken, the spear instantly grows to the size of a full spear or shrinks back to pin size. Can be grown and then re-shrunk once per day.
Is it overpowered? Probably. But think of the look on your players' faces when they realize what they have—like Christmas morning 19962.
Command words are interesting. Sometimes they are literally written on the magic item like the previous owner didn’t trust themselves not to forget it3. Sometimes the command word is somewhere else in the dungeon and you need to find this written key to unlock whatever it is you might have. But how do you know you have something that needs to be activated? I think ADnD has something about oracles divining lost command words. We don’t need oracles. It looks like a pin. Someone is going to say “pin”. Activate fun. Is the player or the PC the one saying the word “Pin?” Sounds like the perfect question for a caring referee to ask. A follow up question: “what direction is the pointy end facing?”
Portable Window
Framed glass with eye motifs, half a foot wide. When held against a surface no thicker than one foot, the surface becomes transparent. The window is destroyed if the glass is broken, but a hole remains.
My players immediately looked through this thing, as all players should. One held their hand behind it. I ruled that they’d see right through their hand, which led to more experimentation and eventually figuring out that they could see through walls and objects. But they never figured out that they could break the glass. Which brings me to my last suggestion.
Unsolved puzzles are cool actually
Wikipedia: An iceberg in the Arctic Ocean
Later, in the same dungeon with the Portable Window, the PCs came across a similar sized frame with eye motifs. This one was broken. There was glass on the floor and shards sticking out from the frame. And there was a big ol’ hole in the center that went through all the way to the other side of the wall. Maybe they suspected what further abilities the Portable Window had, but they never spoke them aloud. I laid out my hints and they finished the dungeon without further question. One day maybe something on the other side of the wall breaks through to them instead—Some venomous snake with a thirst for magic. And then they’ll think back and put the pieces together and wonder what else their magic items might do that they have no idea about. Or not. That’s fine too4.
Recap and Final Thoughts
Let them know it’s special
The challenge is not determining if the thing is special. The challenge is figuring out what the thing does and how to use it advantageously.
Make the interaction obvious
Players need a place to start. Hammer that nail.
Bake in clues
Lean on tropes. Lean on folk tales. Leap on opportunities to drop hints.
Be flexible, adjudicate
It’s a TTRPG, not a LucasArts SCUM adventure5.
Items can be recontextualized and rediscovered later or never. Whatever. Give out some more.
Now that I think of it, this stuff sounds pretty similar to my advice on running puzzle dungeons. You should run one.
1 In case you’re wondering, eating a floating eyeball grants intrinsic telepathy.↩
2 In this fantasy, your players get a Nintendo 64 and are over the moon about it.↩
3 Or the creator didn’t trust their client not to message spell them in the middle of the night—“Yeah hey it’s me, what's the command word again?”↩
4 Number 7 of The Dungeon Checklist: “Something the players probably won’t find”.↩
5 But now I want Monkey Island, the TTRPG.↩
