27
votes
Let's discuss poorly-crafted or niche magic items
Artificer school is rough. You have to learn so many ways to manipulate magic forces and try to shove it all into small items. Sometimes it doesn't work as well as hoped. Even if every student gives it their best effort, someone has to be the worst passing student in the class.
In my campaigns, I try to explore this concept by adding niche items or items of student project quality. Often times these items end up adding quite a bit of fun to the lower levels before access to "real" magic items is available.
I would love to throw this idea out to the world and maybe get a bigger collection of these items for all of the Tildes DMs to use in their campaigns if they fit in the setting.
I will start with some of my items that were highly used.
Ring of Quicksilver
This ring, with use of a command word, will liquefy and add a silver coat to the user's weapon (or 12 ammunition) for up to 24 hours or until another command word draws the silver back into a ring on the user's finger.
However, there is a 1d4 chance that the targeting is off and the ring coats the user's hand instead.
One use per day, refreshes at dawn.
This has been extremely helpful to lower level parties over the years to allow them to have something for melee users or bow and arrow users to deal with monsters immune to nonmagical or non-silvered weapons. On one occasion, the fighter ended up liking the silver coated hand enough that his hand became the intended target often and he punched werewolves to death. Eventually he upgraded to a pure silver gauntlet.
Wonky Talkies
These magical stones allow you to send and receive spoken messages within a mile radius.
But the magic communications protocol is hard. Each word has a 1d3 chance to not make it to the receivers.
This one was especially fun because I wrote a program to run on a local server that people could access through a web page. They typed out the message that they wanted to send and the server did the message chopping before sending it out to everyone else. This was a magic item in a game rather than a software engineering issue so there was just a handshake agreement to try to not bypass the message chopping algorithm.
Bags of Holding The Same Stuff
The classic bag of holding is incredibly useful. A classic artificer project. There are even books that explain how you could do the incantations to create your own.
Unfortunately, some people don't quite understand which parts of the incantation to change and sometimes just follow the book verbatim. This makes a Bag of Holding that leads to the same demiplane as all of the other bags that used the incantation. Each day there is a 1d20 chance per item in the bag that the item was taken out by someone else in the world with a similar bag and replaced by a similarly valued item.
Careful not to store your macguffin in there.
This one actually caused a side quest for one party to track down every instance of the bag that they could find to have a shared inventory system. It was a lot of fun and ended up very useful.
That last one has serious Null Island vibes and I love it
I have plans for a silly one-shot escape room game I'd like to run one day that centers on this kind of thing. The party is shopping at a discount magic item shop, someone trips and falls onto the Tile of Teleport Everyone Into Nearby Locked Room, they accidentally get locked in the stock room in the back, and then have to make their way out using these defective/silly magic items.
Potentially useful things
Wand of Typo: Zap it at an item to replace it with a similarly named item. Do it again to revert to the original item. Special cases: zapping it at the floor spawns flora (assorted plants); zapping it at the wall replaces it with all, at which point the universe's anti-paradox mechanisms kick in and revert for you (you can't fit all the things in existence, including the wall, in a wall).
Orb of Short-Range Time Travel: From everyone else's perspective, using it causes you to disappear and then reappear a few seconds later. You do not remember these few seconds. Typo'd, it's short-rage time travel, which is the same thing but makes you get angry for a moment.
Coat of Arms: The wearer can cast Mage Hand at will. The summoned hand is attached to a particularly muscular spectral arm. Typo'd, it's an oat of arms, which casts Mage Hand when eaten.
Boots of Steed: They were supposed to be boots of speed. Instead, they turn you into a horse. Typo'd, they're boots of seed, which always seem to be filled with assorted seeds.
Questionably useful things
Bag of Beholding: It's a sack with some plush eye stalks sewn on the outside. If you put it on your head, you can see out through it. Typo'd, it's a bag of bee holding, which holds bees.
Defective Wand of Polymorph: It polymorphs itself into an angry beast (roll on your favorite table of angry beasts), starting combat. Typo'd, it's a wand of ponymorph, which polymorphs itself into a pony.
Bag of bee holding is my new favourite magical item of all time
I think your wand of typo is beyond brilliant, if you have any more examples I would absolutely love to hear them!
This was a sampling from a larger list, some of which is party-specific inside jokes, but here are a few more that aren't:
The idea was mostly inspired by Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey, which is worth a look if you enjoy this sort of wordplay-based gameplay.
Hah thanks for the recommendation, and thanks for the other examples - I especially love the book of Ruth!
My DM once gave our party a Ring of Undead Turning. Once per day, it rotates target undead within 60' 180°. Usually useless, but it sure saved our bacon with a prepared action when facing an undead minotaur. Charged himself right off a cliff!
I've always wanted to run a magical murder-mystery whodunit set at a small magic item exhibition for niche magic items with complications and unusual behaviors. Unfortunately I couldn't write a satisfactory plot involving some of the items' quirks in a manner conducive to being reasonably solvable and fun. I still think the idea is pretty solid though, for anyone interested.
I am 100% in the same boat. I would love to run a magical murder mystery but there are just too many variables for me to wrap my head around. I would love to hear of anyone that has made it work without being super railroady.
The Ring of Goldenburg
Twist the outer piece around the jewel, and then press the jewel two times. Turn the outer piece back into its original position, and then press the jewel again, three times. Click the tiny button on the bottom bit and then twist the outer piece again just like you did the first time. Press the jewel once. The ring fires one magic missile.
The Sword of Inner Truth
Crafted by a very insecure wizard, this sword when drawn causes the wielder to immediately start talking about all of the things they really don't want to talk about. Placing it in its sheath stops the talking effect, but a propensity to say too much remains.