D&D players are often like toddlers: They are easily distracted by jingling a set of shiny keys or offering them a cardboard box. You can spend months crafting an elaborate campaign world overflowing with stories and adventure hooks and exciting dungeons to explore, and more often than not your players will choose instead to spend what little time they have available gathered around the roleplaying table doing something pointless and ridiculous. I can’t count on all my fingers and toes how many times the players in every one of the games I’ve ever ran have taken the game completely off the rails while all I could do is facepalm, sink my chair, and try to maintain some sense of progression while the adventure descends into chaos at an alarming rate.
Fortunately, this is not often a bad thing. Most of the time it’s hilarious, and if your Dungeon Master is a decent improviser, they can weave any weird sideways foray into strangeness into the main story seamlessly while your players laugh themselves off their chairs. Many DMs are first tested by the absolute chaos that Deck of Many Things creates. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s a big shiny magic item in the DMs Guide that just begs to be thrown into a game. However, there are far less dangerous items that can be introduced that will inject your game with a good dose of humor and strangeness that won’t break the world so obviously and completely.
Submitted for your approval are just a few of the harbingers of chaos that I’ve used in-game:
The Ring of Bureaucratic Wizardry
The Encyclopedia Magica is a massive 4 volume, 1,500+ page book set that was published in 1994-1995, listing every magic item in the Dungeons & Dragons world, from every product and magazine over the last 20 years, including some downright bizarre items. I still use (and convert) magic items from this treasure trove to this day, and my favorite by far is The Ring of Bureaucratic Wizardry.
This cursed ring is indistinguishable from a ring of wizardry, but has one important difference. When a wizard casts any spell while wearing the ring, a sheaf of papers and a quill pen suddenly appear in his hand. The papers are forms that must be filled out in triplicate explaining the effects of the spell, why the wizard wishes to cast it, whether it is for business or pleasure, and so on. The forms must be filled out before the effects of the spell will occur. The higher the level of the spell cast, the more complicated the forms become. Filling out the forms requires one round per level of spell.
As soon as the papers are filled out, the forms and the pen disappear and the spell effects occur as the spellcaster desired.
The ring cannot be removed willingly. Remove curse or a similar spell must be cast upon the wearer in order to remove the ring.
I don’t let my players identify cursed items that are this fun, otherwise they’ll never put them on and use them. I instead give them a clue as to what school of magic they’re from and leave them guessing. The real kicker is when they go to cast a spell and you physically produce the aforementioned sheaf of papers for the real player to fill out before their combat turn comes around again in the initiative order. INSTANT FUN. For super extra fun, make this the macguffin of a campaign, and provide an actual ring for someone to wear.
A Skull That Only Tells Lies and Insults You
This was a slight edit I did to an item pulled off a random magic item table. It was supposed to be a skull that only told lies, but I added in insults as well, borrowing from those annoying gargoyles in the Fable video game series that just bag on you constantly until you smash them. (“Hey, how’d you dodge the coffin for this long?” and other such utterances.) The bard in the party named him Bob (with a nod to the Dresden Files) and took Bob with him, much to the verbose dismay of the rest of the party, and pulled him out at the most inopportune times, until Bob met his untimely (read: pre-meditated and violent) demise.
Coin of Obsession
Mike Carey’s original Lucifer run from Vertigo Comics was a masterpiece. In it, a villain was distracted by a janitor in a diner and lost his train of thought. So he gave the janitor a hypnotic coin that causes its possessor to stare at it a little more each day causing them increasing levels of pleasure and pain until eventually they wither up and die. That detail stuck with me when I was creating a dungeon room with a classic mimic atop a pile of silver and gold.
I made one of the pieces of silver a cursed item that gave off a faint magic aura that seemed to attract you if you fail a wisdom save. Of course the bard (the same one from above) picked up the coin because it was very shiny. Then, slowly, and I mean SLOWLY over the course of many games, he became almost imperceptibly more greedy (which was hard to do because he was already greedy), and he became slowly obsessed with the coin (soooo shiny!), eventually causing him to take increasing negatives to his rolls, to the point where he because almost Gollum-like. Of course noone in the party could remove this curse (what a shame), so fun times ensued.
The Bagpipes of Invisibility
I got these as a player in a friend’s game. This is supposed to be a cursed and useless item, but somehow our group ended up with two of them, and made them useful. For added fun I play bagpipe music turned up to 11 when I use them in game, aggravating the hell out of the table and greatly amusing myself and anyone else with my sense of humor. We used them to rob a vault successfully, with the stupidest and most convoluted plan ever. See, you’d think that playing bagpipes while invisible would make it easy to figure out where you are. Not so. Have you ever tried to find anything, much less think straight, in a small room with bagpipes playing at ear-splitting decibels? Doesn’t work so much. Luckily, we play in a private residence and not a game store, so we can play bagpipe music and yell as loud as we want, which always makes for a good game.
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