my dm in one session gave the minotaur fighter with the 3 intelligence a "helm of brilliant thought". no it didn't raise your intellect. instead it was a white safety bump cap with holes for his horns that had a light bulb on the top of it. it would only shine when he had a smart thought. great gag, but it ended up coming in useful a few times when he would come up with ideas the DM actually thought were pretty good and the light bulb would shine in all of its 25 watt glory.
I gave my party a torch called the Torch of Bashfulness. It was basically an ever burning torch that would only stay lit when no one was looking at it and would go out when someone was watching it. The party had to make it through a cursed, abandoned city. They attached the torch to a pole and held the pole behind the last party member in their marching order. If they could see the torch light from behind them, they were safe, but if the light went out then they knew they were being observed. Smart.
I just imagined them placing it gently on a table, then going into rage, screaming super loudly, rage-smacking their face into the table (and rock) about 20 times, and then coming out of rage now fully healed
Our Dm once gave us a "Mint condition Deck of Many Bees" that mechanically would summon a random number of a random sized amount of effectively harmless bumble bees. Entirely meant to be a gag for fun from a magic shop. Well we got into a nasty fight and our bard decided to see what would happen if he played 52-card pick up with the deck. To note we were inside of a tight hallway in a closed building. So 533 bees where 60 of them were gargantuan sized suddenly appeared in a 30ft wide hallway. subsequently causing most of the building to collapse from the sheer amount of bee mass.
the sensitive shield (sentient), a shield that begs for mercy and screams when it is hit. it knows the shield spell which it uses to defend itself from heavy blows that would otherwise hit it (not the orc fighter that owns it). The player kept it because it had a higher intelligence then his and knew more languages.
Well, that shield spell protecting the shield will, indirectly, protect the user. After all, if the blow that would have hit the shield is blocked by the spell, then, the user would not even feel that blow not hitting the shield.
A smart DM would simply add an Elder Red Dragon to the retinue of the BBEG to attempt to get them back on track. A wise DM would just simply go with it and see what hijinks ensue. A good DM would do both.
As a player, I received the vial of infinite drips. The vial would only pour any water (only pure water) if the mouth of it was below the bottom end of it, and only one drop every two seconds. There were two distinct uses of it during the campaign, one being the passive collection of water into a bucket for drinking, cleaning, or other basic uses. The other use was when one of the other players borrowed for a session of water torture, took several in game days and multiple failed wisdom saves, but they managed to render the mind of an enemy recon scout utterly useless. Never let the the thing out of my sight after that.
I made a broken bag of holding. It opened on a demiplane of random lost things; you could pull something out of it 3 times per day, and I made a D100 list of items that would come out. They got it several dead cats, an enchanted leather armor, a bag of sweets, a vial of vinegar and some other things, I scarcely remember. The necromancer used the dead cats as a diversion far too many times.
@@themightygallium9509 It's a d100 item list and it was several years ago. You could pull out useful stuff on single digits, all the rest was garbage. 90 to 100 was a dead cat.
In a party with a Necromancer, dead cats aren’t useless. Especially if he is high enough level to make them Ghouls instead of zombies or skeletons. Be warned, “dead cats” is an almost perfect formula to get your a$$ beat or lose players depending on the players.
I gave a party I ran with for over 5 IRL years a cool magical item I made. It was a "Skeleton Key" found in and for the "Endless Dungeon" style campaign that would always "Change shape to fit the keyhole but would ALWAYS fail to unlock whatever it was placed in". The party kept thinking it was for a special door and the joke went on for almost a IRL year with them trying it on all manners of things before they finally figured it out. The trick was to COPY the key after it was pulled out of the keyhole and "THE COPY" would open the lock. They got Sooo mad seeing as they lost out on SO MUCH LOOT because of it. Everyone had to take a month break, and when we came back, we had to start a new campaign. This is because no-one wanted to experience the shame of playing a character that ever had it in their possession. I tell this story to every group of players I meet IRL.
I once gave them the "extra helpful arm" (homebrew) cursed version, it was basically an extra arm you could attach or detach to yourself or to any surface bigger than the arm's radius, but only did something when specifically told so and couldn't attack. This seemingly innocent item was used by them to interrogate prisoners (ignoring local laws about interrogation) and to scare enemies. They'd just stick it to the floor and shout "wave, wave!" For it to wave, and the human enemies thought they were calling waves of undead. They gave the idea, I said "ok, why not?" Crit. Two guards died of a heart attack and a nearby goat slammed a cart, which fell over the retreating guards. Other five guards less. When in front of the king they did that again, nat 20. The king passed away and the royal counselor ran away, cowardly. In the end, they had: -terrorised a town and broke laws regarding prisoner treatment -provoked the loss of an innocent family's cart and workplace -killed seven public servants -gave the king nightmares -disrupted the 2nd in command by causing the king's counselor to flee in fear. We had fun and the actual campaign wasn't risked at all, so it all was good.
this doesn't make sense. . how exactly do you use a third arm to interrogate prisoners? why did "screaming "wave! wave!" and having the arm wave, trick the guards into beleiving they were being attacked by "waves of undead"? guard 1 : " why is that guy yelling wave?" guard 2 : "well, obviously, wave, means waves of undead!" . . or did they see the arm stuck to the floor and assume it was the arm of a zombie and the rest of the zombie was buried in the floor, trying to come out? i don't get it, how would this drive them insane with terror, causing the to die of a heart attack?
On one of their journeys my players heard the legend of the "rote Hering" (red hering in ger). As red herings don't mean anything in german, they are convinced that it's somehow related to the plott. Theymade it into a trophy, used animate object on it, and in case of undead they use it as zombyheadsmasher to the tunes of "Don't worry, be happy".
I gave them a wand of Create Water. They argued it was such a useless item that no one would ever make another, therefore it was unique item. They further argued that, as a unique item, they could use it as the focus of a Locate Object spell. When they found a petrified dwarf, they decided to bury said dwarf and return later to restore him. They planted the wand next to their "buried treasure" and walked away. *slow clap*
My dm had us locked inside a jail cell and we decided to annoy the guards till they threw a rock at us. So I used it to break open the lock birthing the Lock Rock.
We once had a shifty merchant sell us some great looking socks. They looked perfect until someone put them on then it was torture. Pine needles in the socks rocks in the socks loose in the wrong places one of them felt wet you get the idea. We proceeded to use them to interrogate and _ahem_ "persuade" enemies to give us info or do something for us.
I remember me and my party fought necromancers and my character really wanted a live head because she has a collection of heads, and so the DM gave me the head of the necromancer leader and it was still alive, and every time I try to talk to it it tries to bite my character, it was extremly useless but I was so happy I was dancing, also I gagged the head so it couldn't bite me, it's like a pet now hanging off my belt
Best use of that rock for dms going to smash and break you is party member jumps wizard casts feather fall on them so they still fall pretty quickly but take no damage from falling….
A Nut Sack. Made to resemble a certain part of the body, you reach in, and pull out a small collection of nuts or nut-like fruits (peanuts, water chestnuts, buckeyes, walnuts, or occasionally a coconut). I intentionally made it seem useless at first, but have multiple potential uses in the relatively resource-starved setting of the campaign. Our bard mostly uses it to create ammunition for a slingshot, but there's been talk about grinding up the buckeyes as poison.
one of my players made a crazy old wizard character and he wanted a staff that could summon random mundane items. each session, i changed out the items on the rolling table if he rolled it to keep it new and fresh. his first use of it was to summon a jar of mayo that promptly smashed on the floor as soon as it was conjured. other items include a full set of instruments for a band, 1000 ball bearings, a chicken that immediately attacked him, paper and ink that basically feathered and tarred him, jesters clothes, a human heart and a door, which was summoned directly in front of another door.
I gave the party a obviously magical rock that attracted pigeons to its location, and they would get violent if you tried to get rid of the stone. Naturally, they gave it to a guard of the local town they were in. Guard started having some weird experiences with the birds until they straight up merked him. Party proceeded to loot his unconscious body for the key to the house they were trying to get to.
"he can still stabby stabby"... reminds me of a VERY silly old game "lucky tower" where your character would sometimes say "slashy slashy" when swinging his weapon. it's still available on Newgrounds.
That would be a mutated second head for my half orc fighter due to mutation from strange magics contaminating an area. Due to low charisma, his social rolls were terrible but due to the second head I often got to roll twice. This repeatedly became a thing.....fail roll, second head succeeds. I put a tiny hat on him and gave him a cigar.
Mine was something called "the piss blanket" it was a joke item that could absorb any liquid it came into contact with and it could hold about 15 liters of liquid and when you wring it put it dumps all of the liquid in 1 liter intervals, my dumb ass forgot that lava is considered a liquid so they used it to absorb some lava and dump it on most enemies they come by
With "wand of painful pain" a magical wand that i came up after the party wanted more magic items, (dm) i gave them this, it binds a target to take all damage caster takes but you can only target the caster in other words it literally made them take x2 damage, i did not think of a custom rule we had (for all damage bonus purposes healing is also boosted by these, ex: x2 damage=2x healing) The fighter was at 1 hp, used the wand, and the cleric healed the fighter. It was the FINAL boss
My party has a box that opens when you say “footprints” because it was the answer to a riddle. I did not think that our barbarian would pick it up and keep it lmao
A chicken nugget that made me immortal when holding it, I just attached it to my gauntlet and became permanently immortal. Caused the whole party to laugh
My party was always complaining about loot not being enough so I started incorporating odd shaped golden items from a golden chair to a golden canoe to a golden pair of shoes. Then when they finally wasted all that time trying to loot it getting into bags of holding and get it back to town they find out it is actually fools Gold xD
Be fighting super-tough enemy, haven't heard a single noise from him all fight. suddenly he says he wants the piece of a map I have in my backpack so he can destroy it. DM thinks we'll either give it to him or keep fighting a fight we'd probably lose. An idea strikes me. Replicate the map piece onto a piece of paper, then give the enemy what he wants. DM sits in silence for like 30 seconds dumbfounded that the plot he thought he had masterfully crafted had suddenly derailed. At the hands of a barbarian with minimum intelligence no less.
My group was in a dungeon full of undead at around level 4. After a battle with a room of mixed undead creatures, one of the players noticed a red cloak on one of the skeletons. (Just a plain, regular skeleton) It was still in good shape and was obviously magical, as it was completely untouched by time. One of them decided to put it on, and discovered it's magical effect was to move according to his mood, anything from a slight movement in a nonexistent air current all the way up to billowing dramatically in a nonexistent breeze. As they continued to level through the campaign. They would sometimes find themselves being approached by a single skeleton. This happened all the way up in high levels, no matter where they went, there was always a chance that they would feel a tap on the shoulder and turn around to see this skeleton, no matter how many times they killed it, and no matter where they were, be it the Abyss or the Astral Sea. It became regular enough that they named the skeleton 'Iggy'. Finally they figured out that the skeleton was the one that they had taken the cloak from, and a mild curse tied between the curse of undeath and the cloak tied it forever to the cloak. By this point the skeleton was never going to be a danger to them, it became almost like a pet to the group.
I once gave my players a stone of three wishes. It would recharge for every new person who held it, but only gave each person a total of three wishes. Of course they were skeptical as this was a third level campaign. The hitch? It was sentient and would take wishes literally. Also, when it was created, it was programmed to not let people be greedy and only give them what they needed. If you pushed your luck, things got messy.
Physically sweating fat through your skin would feel like your body was being squeezed through the seive of your skin. Your skin would feel as if your flesh was piercing through it, your flesh as if your skin was imploding upon it- all the while you would be suffering any number of horrible side effects ranging from blood loss to dehydration. You probably wouldn't survive literally sweating fat for more than a minute..
My DM gave my party a bag of flour in the death house, just so the pantry wasn't entirely empty. I used it to explode a room of paralyzing ghouls in the basement. My party declared that my cleric was a pyromaniac after that. Note: the pyromaniac title came after doing that and lighting an animated taxidermy wolf on fire to avoid further combat.
Just asked my dm if my bard could have “hat Of disguise “ as part of my background, he said it was too op right now but he’s add it to the d100 list of loot (had to roll a specific combination of three numbers to get this item) the dm himself rolled it one day after it being added and now my rogue and I share the hat
My first campaign, dm give the cursed ooze that let you become a slime for a moment (forgot the actual name). Was fighting a giant, turn amorphous and slither into the nose of the giant blocking air supply. DM: confused, players: screamss yeahh!
One of my favorite items ive come up with is what I call a stone of summoning, it has one charge and when you expend the charge it summons another stone of summoning rendering the original ineret. It's basically just an infinite rock summoner
@@sabotabby3372 In much the same way a normal rock is infinite sling ammo. If he shoots his rock away, how will he use it to summon another one? If he fetches it to resummon a new rock, he might as well have used the old one.
1:32 YOU ENGAGED IN COMBAT WITH A HYDRA AND CUT OFF SOME HEADS WITHOUT VERIFYING YOU COULD CAUTERIZE THE NECK?! Also, I love the image of a little elf-head flame in a lantern screaming as the lantern is used to whack a hydra.
Currently running Curse of Strahd (slight spoilers) and one of the players rolled a Glass Eye with a worm inside of it as their trinket. I gave it the property of being able to find what ever the character is looking for, i.e. he doesn't know who he's looking for in a crowd but the eye glows when he's next to the person or it'll spin and point in the direction of an item if that's what he's looking for. At the 3rd activation I threw an event at the party when they were taking Ireena to Vallaki, they got ambushed by Slender Man as no one was able to get a high enough perception to see where he was at. The group is still lv 3 so I toned the attacks damage down quite a bit so that no one died since this was more of a side quest that I'm making up as I go. So the fight goes on, 3 of the 5 players and Ireena are incapacitated (failed the save for Slendy's Slender Sickness) and the pc with the eye gets hit and grappled for 1 attack and then instead if a second attack, I had him reach into the pc's bag with a tendril and take the eye which started glowing a dark purple and replace it with a different eye. A few pcs make their saves and they go to help the grappled pc out and he breaks out when its his turn again. However, he did see his original eye get taken and he failed his acrobatic check to try and get the eye back as the tendril disappeared into the shadows. After getting the glass eye, I had Slender Man dip out and the pc chucked the glass eye that was swapped out into the forest but I kept having it reappear in his bag. He was royally pissed in game and did everything that he could and the other players helped to try and destroy the eye but to no avail. He vowed then and there to hunt down Slender and get his eye back. Now I've gotta come up with a skill for this new eye and see who/what it attracts. Kinda leaning to have it end with the eye being hunted down by either Cthulu or have the eye down the line lead them to the domain of the mind flayers.
You know it. I once got this weird length of metal with a sort of handle on the end. I sharpened it with a rock and it was effective at stabbing and slashing things to death. Go figure.
I added an item that was so useless the party traded it in to a random magic item vendor for basically free Clammy gloves. Gloves that whenever worn, are cold and damp and unpleasant feeling.
Not that silly of an item, but I was proud of the use I found for it: We were once caught off-guard and on low health by three trolls. Our wizard killed one with a fireball, but was shortly thereafter knocked unconscious. The rest of us kept hacking away at them but they kept regenerating. We were all close to death and were considering running away and leaving our now dead wizard when suddenly I remembered I was carrying an "everburning torch" we had found in a dungeon many sessions prior. It had the appearance of flame but produced no heat. I pulled out the torch and charged at the trolls. A high intimidation roll sent one troll sprinting for the hills never to be seen again. A slightly less high roll on the other troll caused it to move away cautiously and reluctantly. It returned shortly after, but our freshly revivifyed wizard took care of it with another fireball. Thanks, everburning torch.
A scroll with a really impressive name written in an ancient language. Eventually at the end of their quest, the Nezumi chieftan that they delivered it to revealed it to be a cheese recipe. It was really good cheese though.
First campaign with a "new to me" GM. We go into a bathroom-ish place. After we get the neat stuff. I ask what else is there. Towels, soap, perfume... What kind? Scent? No... essential oil, oil based or alcohol based? DM asked what the differences were in the types... Later when we fought a foe who was deaf & blind but had precise scent... it is hard to use that to see when someone throws concentrated lavender oil up your nose. (Nat 20) Traumatizing him had already started. (Werewolfs based campaign. Got bit, knew I got bit and was starting to turn. This was final act in combat. (Real time as fast as you would speak. No pauses on my side. ) Bit where? Wrist. Ok. I go quickly to stand by [character w really sharp blade]. Put my hand against the doorframe. Grab healing potion. Pop the top. Point to 2 inches below the elbow. "Take it off here. Right now!!" He has had many more sense, but that was the first time I heard the wheels in his brain lock-up and leave skid marks on the inside of his skull as it crashed. Not the last though😈
Our dm made economy crazy hard. At lvl 3 i had like 25 gold. Before going for monster we wanted to shop in preparation. Magic trader, when i asked him "is there something for like 25 gold here" laughed at me, gave me this "stone of gravity". Yep. It was obvious even for me that he was mocking me, with simple stone. However i took it, "for luck" you know. When we encountered said monster it turned out to be some sort of homebrewed young remoraz. He digged himself under the ground, and thats when i remembered about the stone. I threw a stone away from us, made a decent roll, and remoraz was baited by the sound of the stone hitting the floor. We almost tpked that fight, that one free round basically saved our life. Thanks for free gift of OP item, you, dumb magic trader, jokes on you!
The rouge had a small sack of dice carved from dragon bone that she stole from a shop. It was nothing useful, she just carried it around cause they looked quite pretty. We ran into a red dragon one day that could understand speech. It had a small hoard of treasure. It was a quite large dragon and we could win a fight against it, but i wouldn’t be worth the damage. Rouge takes out her dice, and shows it to the dragon, she then starts off a long monologue of how we are actually dragon slayers and we make stuff out of dragon bones. She rolls for it, and gets a pretty high roll. The dm wasn’t even ready for the dragon’s reaction. Turns out the dragon would lead to a side quest.
The latrine of instant compost. At a given word a small bedpan would become a latrine that once the waste passed through the hole would instantly be turned into a high grade compost. Given at the request of a Barbarian obsessed with cleanliness. (It makes an odd sort of sense that a roaming savage with limited access to medical care would be concerned with disease if he understood the principles). He posted it in a public square during a time gap and made a damn mint selling fertilizer to the large local farms. He didn't even have to shovel it the bard convinced the farmers to cart it off at their own expense being much cheaper overall than attempting to bargain with a rather cantankerous druid I had already introduced.... I may have bought him a real bedpan and painted the words never again around the outside.
I gave my party a Dragon egg. They had to heat it regularly and keep it save. My mistake was, that I told them how hard that damn thing is. A player used the damn egg to completely smash an enemies head in with multiple hits
Dm gave me a tinfoil hat that made you believe you were invisible if you failed a intelligence saving throw and nothing could convince you otherwise. I failed that saving throw and so did my entire party so we all believed it made us invisible once we put it on. Eventually through swamp adventures we found a tribe of lizard folk that had kidnapped some town guards that ventured into the swap which we befriended instead of trying to fight them since 3 of us could speak draconic, and we ended up learning the tribe was almost entirely wiped out by undead roaming throughout the swamp and they thought Humans sent them so we decided to give em a hand after which the chief invited us for dinner. The next day in preparation for some zombie hunting put on the Tinfoil hat and the chief asked me what it was so I told him what my character believed since I failed the intelligence saving throw and he asked to try it out and guess what he failed it thinking the tinfoil hat was the best thing ever and so he offered to trade me a flail snail for it which I accepted since Stealth wasn’t exactly what my Barbarian did and that’s how my Barbarian ended up with a pet flail snail named Gary all because of a silly useless gag item the dm gave me
I gave my players a trumpet that when you blew it you became invisible. So literally everyone knew exactly where you were when you blew it because it was so loud. That was until a player learned silence and suddenly they basically had greater invisibility for as long as he could play the trumpet for.
a bunch of random papers out of a desk, sorcerer used mage hand to stick it into the face mesh of a flamethrower guy, someone else lit it on fire at the same time that they used prestidigitation to make a really loud noise, effectively a flash bang since the paper was shredded, meaning it would burn bright and quick. Both rolled nat 20. Instead of a flash bang, meant to get the level 1 party away from a nigh unkillable bbeg, it turned into a grenade, blowing the guys head to bits. Guess he had some loose flamethrower fuel. TL;DR: used a piece of paper to one shot a boss at level 1
It wasn't somthing given to us, but we were traveling when one of us straight up ran into nothing... turns out there was an invisible tree. The Rouge decided to bury a dagger there, when we came back to the tree later on, we touched the tree, but it was littered with invisible metal thorns. We concluded that the invisible tree could grow anything it had buried near it, so we buried a tome of leadership and influence and a few potions, as well as a few gold coins.... can't wait to go back there and see what's been growing the past 10 years in game.
This is gonna be long. In my current campaign, the party wanted to take out a famous crime lord because they suspected he was responsible for manipulating them and messing with their heads and memories of the last month, which they could not remember. They learned where his portion of the town was, and without any planning at all, decided to confront him. On the way they saw a group of guards demanding payment from a small, local shop, who's owners pleaded, saying they already paid to the land owner two weeks ago, and that the payment is supposed to accure once a month. The party didn't like the guards very much, and so after sussing out the situation- slaughtered all of them. As a thank you (and out of clear fear of the party), the shopkeepers gave them what they could offer, which was a single, not very impressive glass vase. The party then continued their way to the crime lord's land, and asked to meet with him. They were of course denied, because he wouldn't just meet with complete strangers. They knew they couldn't fight his gang because it would alert all of his guard and they would be captured, and so they left. Then the party's rouge (who has a little magic) had an idea, casted illusion and turned himself into a young man wearing simple clothes. When the guards asked him why he came and who he was, he said "I brought Mr. Bogdne's new requested vase, he wants to decorate his office." Then he presented the vase to the guards. I asked for a desepcion check. He got a nat 20. They got into the crime lord's mantion without a fight at all, and managed to get into his office without any problem. (only to find him dead by the hand of a master assassin they were also looking for, but that's another story).
My favourite/least favourite one was the Bag of Rats. I had a Travelling Magical Merchant Goblin that would occasionally meet the party and sell them items that ranged from completely useless to horribly cursed, and very occasionally is extremely powerful. This one was intended to be the former, ended up the latter. It was sold as a Bag of Holding but the catch was that it was full of infinite rats that would devour whatever items they stuck inside, causing them to be lost forever. They would also bite the hands of whoever stuck a hand in. My Players saw how violent these rats were and decided that they could use them as a way to kill enemies. I had essentially given them a way to spawn a swarm of rats at will. Shit got very close to a Plague Tale after that.
My character has memory loss of the first 15 years of his life. I found a 'pipe of remembrance', which I used as a plot hook to get back memories I had lost. My wife was given a Mystery key in session 1 as part of a bundle of rather useless mundane magical items we found. In our most recent session, she used it to unlock a mysterious chest and rolled a 100. We circumvented a large quest line to get the proper key, but it was super cool.
In a ravenloft I had the players encounter a baby rattle in a ruined orphanage that when shook reanimated children and babies and caused the holder to attack them leaving solo players in an infinite loop of raising and destroying the undead until exhaustion or death. They safetly removed the rattle from the orphanage and they snuck in onto the sheath of their enemy's sword and lured him to his massive gravesites. Some say he's still their slaying his victims for all time.
The Staff of Hard Knocks... When you tapped it too a surface it made a loud knocking sound They got the Barbarian to smash it on the ground to shatter a bridge with a roll of 19 plus modifiers
I recently started playing dnd and this just gives me so much hope that my games will end up like this. So far I have been shot by my own teammates cause I scared them by transforming into a giant spider and scaled a 50 ft tall cliff in one turn and can't wait for more shenanigans
We got a collar that will allow dogs or cats to speak But does not up their intelligence or comprehension so mostly they just yell loudly for food or attention constantly.
For that ring to give 1000 AC if you wore an item with a contingency spell of animate object set to when you turned solid crystal, then you just became a crystal golem with 1000 AC.
To quote my DM, "I could give you assholes a potato when you're starving and you'd still find a way to fuck up my day." This is likely true; despite repeated requests, she refuses to give us potatoes so that we may confirm. My family plays together and the DM is our mom, who has been playing since before I was born (I was born in 1980). The assholes in question are my brother, sister, brother in law, and I. We absolutely deserve to be called assholes; will today's session be RP heavy or Murder Hobo Central? Even we don't know! What we do know is that we will, without fail, completely derail the campaign/session plan and we will not be sorry about it. At least mom's entertained by our foolishness and never gets upset by it.
My party had just gained the favour of a powerful Fey being who lived in a jungle in the form of a faerie dragon. She gave them some gold, some clues regarding the main plot, and some magic items that each had a label attached. Boots of Blinding Speed "Going somewhere? Put on these boots and you'll be there in a flash!" Boots that double your speed, but blind you as long as you're wearing them. Bow of Firing “Did your enemy get fired recently? Haha, what a loser! Tell them so with this handy dandy bow!” Deals psychic or fire damage, player's choice, instead of piercing. Captain’s Boots “What's another name for a captain..?" Makes the wearer skip everywhere, allows them to disengage as a bonus action without inviting an opportunity attack. Ring of Fire Detection “This ring will help you locate fire nearby! If it’s in fire, it gets hot!” Locket of Friendship “Are you lonely? Not anymore! This pretty, pretty locket will help you make friends!” Can cast the friend spell, but it also casts friend on yourself as if the target was the caster. If the target fails the save, then the caster automatically fails the save. The Tent of Urban Survival “This wonderful tent looks like a mere blanket, but when used to create a fun little fort, you learn important lessons about friendship and how to survive in the wilderness. Note: only works indoors.” Provides +5 to survival checks, but only indoors.
Okay, absolutely not useless normally, but in the context it was used in, it counts. I call it the unstable blade. It's a magic longsword with a curse. You can pick any number between one and twenty, and you get to deal equal damage to the number. On the downside, whenever you land an attack with the weapon, you roll a D20. If the roll is equal to or lower than the number you chose, the weapon explodes, damaging the wielder and breaking forever. The players thought it was going to be super useful if they only used it as at max a +3 longsword, but one player decided to get creative. They set the damage to +20 (a guaranteed break and explosion), and handed it to a boss, offering it as a sign of good faith that he would serve the boss. Suggested the boss test it on a training dummy. The boss half killed himself before the fight even started
I was in a one shot where our party of 10s caravan goes into a cave to wait out a bad storm. The cave of course is infested with about two thousand kobalds. My friend (and mechanical engineer) figures out about 10 different ways to make defensive weapons with the random supplies we had, including using gust of wind on a wagon wheel to spin it super fast, and then dropping nails on it for a relatively effective minigun. Intresting times...
As a little bit of a gaff, I rolled randomly and I gave a player a feather duster for his character's trinket. Naturally the nose-tickle-to-sneeze came into play. This culminated in a Tom and Jerry routine involving this players halfling and a confused and agitated hyena. The halfling was very near killed but everyone at the table had a great laugh.
My dm gave me a cloak of billowing as a joke. For those who may not know, a cloak of billowing is activated by a command word that causes it to billow dramatically, as if there were an isolated gust of wind. That's it, that's all it does. My character, Squat, the dwarf rogue just unintelligent enough to not realize there's something wrong with his name, mostly used it to look epic. I never imagined that cloak would save us from a total party wipe. We were climbing a cult's flying tower dungeon to save Squat's hometown. We started the session right where we left off and went straight to exploring without any proper recap, which will come back to bite us later. We searched a few rooms and finally arrived at the stairs to the halfway point of the dungeon. The only problem was someone was sitting on the stairs waiting for us. Once the human started monologuing, Squat noticed his unusually sharp teeth, while Treehole, the party's awakened decapus ranger, noticed the creepy doll standing next to him and had a ptsd flashback. It's only when we rolled for initiative that we realized we had forgotten to take a long rest in between sessions. Squat was at 1/4 health, Gusta, the genasi cleric, only had one healing spell left, and Saria, the genasi wizard, was at ZERO spells left and no combat cantrips. Uh oh. The human, who turned out to be a lycanthrope, attacked first, cutting Sutha, the half orc barbarian, our only party member at full health, down to 1/3 health. Squat realized we had no chance of surviving the encounter, so he did the only thing he could think of; He tackled the lycan, trying to grapple him, while telling the others to run. Treehole was already having a panic attack and Saria knew she was useless so they ran, with the living doll hot on their heels (and tentacles.) Meanwhile, the lycan was able to escape the grapple with ease. Though badly hurt and low on magic, Gusta and Sutha refused to let Squat sacrifice himself for them and stood and fought. Gusta used her last spell to heal both Sutha and Squat before resorting to melee attacks with her mace, not that she could hit the lycan. Seeing as he couldn't convince his friends to save themselves, Squat decided to start thinking of how to beat this guy. Then it hit him; what if he could throw his cloak over the lycan and tangle him up in it? Before he could test his idea, the barbarian raged... ... and activated her wild surge. A d100 was rolled and everybody suddenly turned invisible. You can probably guess the level of confusion that caused. Everyone attacking thin air and running into each other. Even with disadvantage, the doll still managed to grapple Treehole and start doing constant psychic damage. So now we have an invisible decapus with a creepy doll clinging to it attacking it's mind. It did look odd though, since Treehole was waving the grappled tentacle wildly into things trying get it off, so it basically appeared to be a floating doll. However, that was just the distraction Squat needed to throw the cloak of billowing over the lycan's head. Obviously the lycan tried to wriggle free, and though he did manage to bite at me, the dm ruled it missed automatically, because there is no such this as double disadvantage. Then, while Gusta and Sutha whacked at the lycan, Squat added the cherry on top. No adventuring kit is complete without a trusty rope to tie up bad guys with. And that's what Squat used his for. While Squat had moral issues with killing someone who couldn't fight back, he understood why it was necessary. (During the lycan's monologue he straight up admitted he wouldn't stop trying to kill us until one side of the conflict was dead.) Luckily he had no qualms with breaking a creepy doll trying to kill Treehole, his best friend. So, bing bang boom, we managed to kill the bbeg's second in command and his creepy doll. While we long rested immediately afterwards the dm admitted that if I hadn't used the cloak like I did, it really would have been a tpk. And that's the story of how Squat used the most useless magical item in existence to save an entire town.
... A rock. I had a part of five or six at the time, and they needed directions. So. My ranger kneeled down, picked up a rock, and asked it for directions. Rule of cool is our rule 0 at my 'table' and I told her to roll for animal handling ( How the heck else are you supposed to roll that???) and she got a nat 20. Welp. Now that rock is her rock, and it is always their last resort if they need directions. On a successful throw, it falls out of your palm and onto the ground in the direction it needs to go. Unsuccessful? The rock sweats nervously. And now it has a top hat and a monocle. But that's a story for another time!
We came across a dagger that was made from a metal that took the last person's as long as they were touching it when they died. My dwarf fighter began to carry it around just in case, since it made it easier to ressurect and such. At one point he was disarmed and ended up killing a Hill giant with it, because it was available. Several levels later we were in an epic situation, We walk into a room and a deity tells us we must present them with a soul or we cannot pass. While the others are debating I pulled the dagger out and handed it to the diety. The GM and the party were dumbfounded and confused, but after double checking how the ability worked the GM said yeah its a soul. Later in the Epic fight the Hill giant joined our side, it was intended to be one of the party members and we were supposed to be surprised when they turned up. lol
Some cryptic gnome in a hood approaches the party in a dark tavern and asks if anyone is brave enough to draw a card from the Deck of Mini Things. Her accent is pretty thick, so you can't tell she didn't say "many." The fighter steps forward to prove he's no coward. He draws a card. The gnome pulls her hood down and smiles adorably. "Oh cute," she says. "It's a tiny tea kettle." The kettle only holds about as much liquid as a thimble. The fighter has no idea what to do with it.
I remember one of my clerics had a bag of donations. Any treasure that was placed inside, 10 percent would disappear as a donation to his church. On a different note, our party made very good use of a 'Portable Hole' until one person with a 'Bag of Holding' tried to hide inside the Hole. I can't remember what the DM did, we was either transported to another dimension or completely destroyed that town and we all died.
9:01 I have never, and likely will never play dnd, but I love to think of the knock off magic shop for some of my imagined characters. The pact of the chain druid would probably get the hat of many hats and a copy for his pixie familiar because he values her more than his own life. The fairy wizard would probably pick up a cloak of change, like the cloak that can release a blinding flash once a day, but can only cause small illusions that can't do anything other than be for vanity and style. And so on.
"Wand of Magical Aptitude" When the wand is cast, roll a check. If the check succeeds, you permanently gain a +1 to casting the Wand of Magical Aptitude.
I would would like to introduce the shield of self defense. + 999 armor. But, when about to be struck, the shield would swap places with the user (also making the user unable to move for 5 seconds,unless the shield swapped them again.), making the user take the hit, but if unable to avoid getting hit, would make the shield take the hit. Two months into a campaign (I forgot about the shield), one of my players (a fighter) used it against a hydra, that was attacking from 6 different directions. (Wizard was unconscious, no one else had fire based spells or weapons ), and blocked all six head at the same time, giving the cleric time to h heal the wizard. Wizard wakes up, and uses ANOTHER seemingly useless magic item I gave them. The infini-rope. As long as one end is hidden, the rope continues to get longer (20ft every second). Rope can not be cut, or used in any type of crafting, nor can things be attached to the rope.(grappling hooks, lamps, spiked balls, etc). Nat 20 Hydra chokes to death on a 2 mile long rope, after attempting to swallow the wizard. This was supposed to be a 2 hour boss fight, over in 10 minutes.
in Starfinder, we ended up making Grenades of Moderate Discomfort, which were like smoke grenades except their congents caused random uncomfortable effects like gas or diarrhea. seemingly pointless, but giving an op opponent terrible flatulence can be surprisingly helpful.
I gave my party a homebrew scepter that was able to control how big or small a fire would burn. It could only control the size of the fire, not its shape, and it couldn't start fires itself. I thought it was so situational, they couldn't use it for much of anything except making sure campfires stay lit. My players managed to set the roof of a stone cottage on fire in order to draw out a necromancer and his zombies from inside after seeing a murderer run inside.
Those glitter bag should be GREAT when fighting invisible creatures. They are still invisible, but entirely covered with totally visible glitter. Shrink/enlarge spell... How about shrinking huge boulders and drop them onto some area effect magic negating opponents ? Just like we did in the last D&D cession I played in... Drop shrunk boulders, boulders fall into anti-magic field, shrink spell get nullified, boulders unshrink, boulders crush everything. BOMBS AWAY !
I once made a not so useless item named : The glorious facial hair of the persuader The only way it could be used is if you managed to attach it to a hair follicle, which afterwards you would grow more of the facial hair. This beard hair gave you a +2 to your charisma stat as long as you never shaved your beard shorter then 2 inches, if you do shave it shorter then 2 inches, then you have a -4 to your charisma stat until it grew back (which take between 1 through 4 in-game weeks by the way)
Not a useless item per se, but on my first campaign ever I realized I had forgotten to give my barbarian a ranged weapon while fighting an old rusty dragon automaton. When it decided to start flying I just had him break out his grabbling hook and use that to climb onto the dragon. The hook was destroyed when the dragon fell from the sky, so in the next stop to a town he was given a magical grappling hook. It only had 10 feet of rope that glowed blue in the middle. That clowing section could extend as needed and retract in an instant if the barbarian wanted. And from then on his method of attacking anything out of reach was grappling hook.
I gave a cleric a reward of a Cloak of Billowing. It was a reward for a quest from an NPC they saved, secretly the head of the theives guild. But given I had also given her a fancy spear earlier that was campaign important, and a future item of power to Bahumat, I thought it might be a good idea to not give her more power. Others got a clockwork amulet, a moontouched blade, and an Enduring spellbook. All stolen of course, but considering not 2 sessions later they killed the original owner of these items, no harm no foul
i gave my players a chicken egg that "repairs" itself 2 hours after being broken. I figured they'd use it as a endless snack machine or something. My rogue bought a bunch of glass bottles, smashed them up into glass dust, then filled the egg with the dust and used it as an improvised glass dust grenade that could blind people if throw at their head. They then had endless grenades because the egg repaired itself and glass bottles were cheap as hell.
I gave my player an Alchemist’s Rock. It's a rock, but it deals 1 force damage when you throw it. It also flies further in a Sling, but the player didn't have one. He was asking for something similar to Alchemist’s Fire for cheap, and so I listed all the other main elements and that's what he got attached to. Unfortunately, I think the rock was disintegrated when he got dusted against a Demon Lord.
In my first session(very new at dnd) my dm let me, a druid healer, steal the kneecap of an npc. I kept it and later on in the session fed it to rats. A few sessions later, it's revealed that the rats would have attacled us and tried eating us, if it weren't for the kneecap! Not to mention the whole city except the rats and a single npc were an illusion, but oh well, some adopted the rats anyway!
