“Minor” Magic Items
So here’s the thing about magic items. If you’re trying to be a lawful good gamer and do exactly what the item says, then it can only ever be so interesting. Your flaming sword deals +1d6 fire damage to the baddies. That bead of force is good for anti-personnel shenanigans and not much else. But I’ve seen flaming weapons used to cauterize wounds. I’ve seen beads of force used to recreate this ludicrous moment from The Avengers. You can and should use the tools at your disposal in interesting ways. The trick is learning the difference between “cool idea” and “blatant abuse.”
For this, I always like to refer to Laurel’s college GM. They played a lot of d10 System in those days, which necessitated a certain open-mindedness in terms of rules. As any White Wolf fan can tell you, the setting information for those games is deeply immersive. The rules, on the other hand, can be frustratingly vague. Therefore, whenever a questionably legal idea came up at the table, this GM would resort to a wonderfully useful phrase: “I’ll allow it once.”
I love this idea as a philosophy. Suddenly you don’t have to worry about whether a given tactic is game-breaking. You let the cool thing happen, and then you don’t worry about it. The table knows and understands that it’s a one-off event, and the system doesn’t crumble beneath the weight of the ruling.
As I write, I’m thinking about this obnoxious little item in particular. A tree feather token is one of those minor magic items that’s pretty much designed to encourage creative play. It’s a quick ladder, a 5′ wide wall, a convenient hiding place, or even a source of food if you can convince your GM to allow you to gather acorns. But the problem comes in when you have players asking to attach the token to arrows so they can shoot literal trees at people. And since the item is so cheap, it’s possible to turn this tactic into a go-to strategy. I won’t bore you with the questionable legality of the tactic. And I won’t deny that it is exactly the kind of ridiculous hijinks I like to see at the table. But I do think that this is a prime example of that lovely little phrase in action: “I’ll allow it once.” You get the cool moment, but you don’t have to worry about Tree Shooter the archer wrecking your game.
Question of the day then. What are some minor magic items that you’ve used in interesting ways? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Sadly I basically never wind up getting interesting minor magic items. It’s either basically nothing at all or things that are very clear cut in what they do like potions.
Well you could pull a Tifa Lockhart from Dead Fantasy and blind someone by smashing the bottles together after… But that’s more a “bottle” thing in general I guess…
I guess maybe you can spike punch with potions. A Disguise Other (orc) could really ruin a sweet 16 party.
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They’re not quite as minor as what you’re talking about, but I can’t get enough of Immovable Rods. My characters often have two or more of them at a time. Uses:
Pinning a foe who has been knocked prone
Holding doors shut/open
Stopping those traps where the spiked walls slowly close in on you
Two of them make an infinite ladder (this one is actually specifically in the rules)
Never take fall damage again
Stick one between the spokes of a moving vehicle
Makeshift tent poles
Etc.
Immovable roads are a fantastic example of use AND abuse of magic items. Yeah you can do all that cool creative stuff you mention, but you also get dudes trying to automatically wreck ships and slay dragons with the things. That strikes me as more towards the “blatant abuse” side of the coin.
It’s not something that I have done yet, but I always imagined that a Campfire Bead would make a rather nice surprise in a ship’s Powder Room if you are within shouting distance to it… Or even better if you know a common phrase that a crew member with access to said room on the ship would use… Like say “powder” or “keg”
Now see, you’re opening up a can of worms here. Command word activation is cool and flavorful. From the Pathfinder rules:
“A command word can be a real word, but when this is the case, the holder of the item runs the risk of activating the item accidentally by speaking the word in normal conversation.”
But activating such an item is still a standard action, right? So…can I activate all of my items at once by simply saying their command words as free actions? This sort of difficulty in rules is exactly why I like the “I’ll allow this once” method. I want to enable you to blow up an enemy ship by letting a dumb mook say “keg.” I don’t want to worry about the unintended consequences of allowing a cool and fun idea to enter the game. Your world loses a bit of verisimilitude, but I think it’s worth the exchange.
There’s also a worrying thing where, even under the Standard-Action rules for it, there’s no rule against all of your items having the same command word. THAT could be very easily abused.
What comes to mind to me is less “abuse” and more “dead-man’s switch” as you set it up so that they all have the same very obscure (maybe made up) command word and if your nemesis ever has you at death’s door, you last words are drowned out in an explosion of nonsense. And also actual explosions. =D
Right. Hilarious moment, but obviously unintended. Making a “skeleton key” command word is a cool concept, and I might try and develop it in some product or other. Still, I think that no we can all agree it shouldn’t be generally possible.
Not a minor magical item…but minor magical spell.
I tend to plan long-range for my characters abilities/dynamic (like a 5-10-20 level plan) and then modify the plan as a campaign goes. I had a gray elf druid that I spent all my best rolls on the mental stats, and then the DM allowed me to make him an old elf…so he had like a Con of 8 Str of 7, but at level 1 an unmodified Int of 18 Wis of 20, and things like that.
Cue our first battle…against a bunch of pirates on a ship. I asked if there was moss/mold growing on the ship since he said it wasn’t well taken care of. As soon as he said yes I used Entangle…which is a 40′ radius…on an 80′ long ship. It immediately grabbed the CR 1/2 pirates who were failing the DC 16 Reflex saves or the next round getting grabbed and being held by DC 20 Strength Checks. And it lasts “Minutes per level.” Then proceeded to use 1 other spell that was concentration to move a sphere of fire around and just hold it against dudes until they were burned to a crisp.
That was bad enough…and I just used hyper-efficient low level spells to turn my wolf companion into an utter terror. Finally we eventually hit a level where I got Wild Shape…followed by “Natural Spell”…and now I was a super intelligent, wise, charismatic–Bear, in combat. We had other characters who all played off this (thankfully) and we quickly decimated the scene by just being waaaaay more powerful than our levels would indicate. And we generally were only using a couple Level 1-2 spells at most.
Awesome! Why didn’t the ship catch on fire though?
Wet plants? Sea spray? Because “Flame Sphere” isn’t that powerful a spell?
I half-remember reading about pirate codes that punish dudes for leaving unattended candles. Now I wonder if there should be some fire magic rules for fantasy pirates…
A Necklace of Fireballs has appeared in two campaigns that I’ve been in and both times we’ve used it to nuke something we didn’t like.
First occasion- we exploring a giant stronghold and, after defeating some enemy, we discovered a Necklace of Fireballs on the corpse. Travelling a bit further, we scouted out a large room with a fire and several giants around. I suggested that the Inquisitor of the group tie the necklace to an arrow and shoot it into the fire, because it would be awesome. He agreed and did so. One arrow later, we hear a whoosh and a boom, then come into a room full of scorch marks and dead giants. There was much celebrating.
Second occasion- We Be Goblins 2 game in-between RotR sessions. To sum it up, necklace of fireballs + sovereign glue + alchemist bomb = one very happy goblin pyro
What did your gobbos wind up calling “the big bomb?” I’m thinking something simple like “best bomb,” but I bet many-fire-make-lots-dead would work too.
It’s not a minor magic item, but I have killed a baddie with a dancing lights spell. Yes, the cantrip.
I was playing a kitsune Witch with an enchantment focus in that campaign. We were in a guardhouse (sort of the campaign setting’s version of the FBI) interrogating a few prisoners, trying to uncover some corruption in the local city’s guards. So the local guard captain (a Magus) decides to attack the guardhouse we were in, leading a group of not only rank-and-file soldiers, but also some guys using undead form spells to pass off as undead, as well as some actual undead. The attack is preceded by a cloying mist, limiting visibility as such effects tend to. As combat rolls on, we discover that the mist retreats from light sources, and every spellcaster we have busts out the light cantrips so we can see better. At one point, I decide to put my dancing lights directly on top of a ghoul menacing one of the frontliners in an attempt to remove the concealment that had been benefiting the undead. To my surprise, the ghoul keels over dead at that point. It turned out that the mist, in addition to providing cover for the assault and hampering our visibility inside the building, had been bolstering the undead contingent, giving them temporary HP as long as they were within it. When my dancing lights withdrew the mist from the ghoul, they also withdrew the temporary HP, which had been the only thing keeping the ghoul up.
Nothing better than rules interacting in unpredictable ways. Just last session we had a half-mad dwarven barbarian in the party trying to burn down a hag’s tree house. The party had burst in through the roof on their flying carpet, so all the smoke went towards this newly formed chimney.
“OK,” says I. “You can see the shape of the hag within the smoke. However! Everyone still on the carpet make Fort saves vs. smoke inhalation.”
“Nae!” sayeth the witch. “Remember how I took precautions against the cleric’s mind fog spell? My Aura of Purity is still up, and it negates noxious gaseous effects. Thou may biteth me, Mr. GM Man!”
It was a good fight.
I once made a weenie character, technically high level but very oddly built, that made the most out of a ton of minor items. He was an Inquisitor built around skills, mostly knowledge. I found countless ways to cause trouble with ‘Gloves of Shaping’ and a mithral ‘Traveler’s Any-Tool’. The combination allows you to cut through adamantine.
I even accidentally killed a guy with them. He used ‘Meld Into Stone’ and I started shoveling him out and he failed his save. That was the only kill the character managed; generally I was invisible behind the paladin tapping her with a wand of ‘True Strike’ every six seconds.
I can just picture the dude popping out of the wall like a perfect Minecraft cube.
I love using the folding boat from 3.5 for all sorts of thing. Blocking up passages, fortifying a camp site, dropping a ship on someone. Ive even heard of players using it to travel on water!
Also shapesand. If you know what you’re doing, it can solve most problems.
I’ve been loving 5e’s “find familiar” for similar reasons. Having an extremely adaptable ability invites SO MANY cool moments.
Bag of devouring attached to a hoop on the end of a 10′ pole = Butterfly Net of Devouring.
Necklace of Adaptation on the vengeance paladin, who climbed into the bag of holding of the warlock (undying patron), who was made invisible by the wizard and snuck into the camp of the enemy warlord.
One Silence later, and the warlock helped the paladin out of the bag of holding, next to the sleeping orc warlord: flanking him, the paladin started off the surprise round with a second level smite and then another one. On the warlock’s turn, he did some more damage and then it’s time for initiative. Paladin manages to go first and smites the prone warlord some more and kills him.
And that is how our group went from being bumbling heroes to efficient hitmen.
Hahahaha I didn’t peg wizard to be this adventurous! (Pun fully intended)
I’d think that oil of slipperiness would be more popular on that front.
In my D&D 4th Edition days, I played as a Warlock that had learned several abilities that allowed her to teleport an enemy. I had also acquired a magic item; I forget what it was called, but it was a piece of chalk that would, when used to draw a doorway, create a 4squarex4squarex4square extradimensional room. It was intended to be an escape room, of sorts; you could set up camp safely inside, for instance. It wasn’t really meant to be used in combat, unless you planned to stay there until the opponents got bored and left.
I came to the realization that the room could be used strategically when fighting particularly large monsters if I were to teleport them into the room. 3×3 monsters would be vulnerable while trying to squeeze out the normal-sized door, and 4×4 monsters were outright trapped and totally vulnerable to ranged attacks.
This tactic became known as “putting them in the box”. One round to draw the door, another to teleport the enemy, and then the party goes to town. It was pretty effective – and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I was starting to annoy the DMs I played with with overuse of this particular strategy.