Scroll of Gorilla Warfare. When used summons 15 gorillas. These gorillas are wild and do not obey orders given by the caster.
The gorillas disappear after 1d12 rounds. This effect ‘echoes’ 1d6 times, effectively recasting the spell after 1d6 rounds.
Bag of Olding: A very generously sized bag of holding, however it unfortunately speeds up the passage of time significantly inside it. Don’t store food in it!
Harder tack: Magically compressed ships biscuits, commissioned by an admiral who heard of lembas bread but found it too expensive. His corpse was found in the harbour waters a week later.
One contains enough calories to last you a week of hard work, but you need a chisel and a sledgehammer to crack it into pieces and one hand-sized biscuit weighs 3kg. It tastes like cement dust.
Amulet of speak with the dead - cursed. Once attuned the user can speak with the dead, but can only interpret chat with the living as wailing, any attempts to speak with the living will sound like wailing to the other entity. Removing the item does not break the curse.
A magical sword that extends, but the longer you have it, the longer the incantation you have to say to get it to extend… Maybe show it some pictures of people cleaved in two, or try stabbing somewhere else to get it going.
This sword is enchanted with fire magic!
…The handle is made of super flammable material, though, and a bunch of people got third degree burns trying to weild it. There was a massive recall.
You know what “recall” means, though? Collector’s item! These are rare af.
Praytell the price on yon banana blade to your left, fair merchant? I find it somewhat a-peeling
Scroll of summon wisp.
When used nothing appears, but you gain a speech impediment for 1d6 days.
Owo what a tewwible cuwse to put on youwselwf…
i hawe a fudden defiwe fow wabbit
But it is duck season.
How do I delete someone else’s comment?
You down’t :3
Become a moderator
*modewatow
ew
As always, the real cursed item is in the replies
Bag of Communal Holding
Content is shared with all other bags of communal holding in existence. Sometimes retrieving objects involves awkward hand contact if someone else is using their bag at the same time.
Not accidentally holding a strangers hand. This is the worst one by far.
Even more hilarious if you could accidentally pull out someone else trying to retrieve objects from the bag. Would be kind of awkward getting them back to their origin though…
A potion of True Healing… heals 1d8+2 damage, recipient MUST truthfully answer the next question they are asked. Sell the characters 6, but don’t tell them about the truth serum. Let them figure it out on their own.
Boots of Elvenkind… except Elves can hear you.
A bag of holding that contains infinite clowns. Every time it is opened, 1d4 clowns come out. The clowns are useless in combat and attempt to distract, annoy and mock the holder. While this could be used as a distraction, the clowns will follow the holder, drawing attention to them. You could create a table for what kind of clowns you get (mime clowns, pie throwing clowns, balloon animal clowns, magician clowns, etc). The clowns will wander off after 1d6 minutes. Where the clowns go and what they are (Illusions? Demons?) is unknown.
There’s so much role playing potential in the ability to create a giant mob of clowns at will by repeatedly opening and closing the bag. You almost don’t need anything else!
Spawn them as a distraction!
Use them to hide!
Plug any entry or hallway at will!
Build yourself a mountain of clowns to scale any wall!
Never starve again with their endless supply of pies! (Eaten fresh off your face.)
Use their weight to bring down any air-/ship!
Air drop them on your enemies! (Assuming they have a weight and are bound by gravity, they do damage - all you need is a bit of levitation, a tower, airship or a ceiling to hang from.)
Just crush your entire party by spawning hundreds of them in a closed room!
The possibilities are truly endless.
Herd them ahead of you to clear traps
As a diabolical GM, I can think of so many ways to make these strategies backfire. :D
That’s half the fun! Sometimes, the true clown you spawn is yourself.
I can’t see any of these working as intended. Clowns don’t subscribe to reality
Spawn them as a distraction!
Some of them cause a big distraction that accidentally points directly towards those you don’t want to be seen.
Use them to hide!
One of them will look giant and big to hide you while the others honk and gesture/point behind, clearly showing where you are.
Build yourself a mountain of clowns to scale any wall!
Crabs in a bucket. None will let you climb. You must stay to hear their jokes…
Never starve again with their endless supply of pies!
Shaving cream pies. Ain’t nobody got time to bake 30 coconut creams
Use their weight to bring down any air-/ship
They all blow up helium balloons to help it float. Unless you want it to float in which case their balloons turn into bowling balls at the last second with a big shrug.
Air drop them on their enemies!
See balloons
Just crush your entire party by spawning hundreds of them in a closed room!
Clown car logic. You’re all “crushed” but it’s just extremely difficult terrain.
Luckily, most of these arguments assume living clowns. Something that can be easily remedied, it just shifts the entire problem space to doing it fast enough!
On that note, what’s their EXP value?
If my PCs responded to the clowns this way, I would absolutely make the clowns demons and the “bag of holding” a portal to a circus themed layer of the Abyss. And that’s the campaign now.
It turns out the ruler of this layer of the abyss appreciates your lust for violence and mass murder. That’s probably not actually… good? For you?
I don’t know about you, but the prospect of becoming a warlock themed around blood, flesh and clownery sounds pretty sweet to me!
I’d definitely play that campaign.
I would definitely let you play that in my campaign. Also reminds me of that bad guy from One Piece.
Immortal Clowns of Jest. Zero XP and their death only fuels development of further abilities
They just despawn and it’s 1/10^(78) xp per clown.
A fraction of 1 EP for each atom in the universe.
Exactly this. Also, one of the clowns will have a trombone to play sad trombone noises at you.
Just crush your entire party by spawnibg hundreds of them in a closed room!
Relevant (semi-NSFL) scene from Invincible season 3.
Jesus…
That’s certainly not great, but this show has way worse.
Sell the bag to a lich to keep him from robbing graves, collect big $$$ for the unique magic item, and the bounty from the town
Never starve again with their endless supply of pies!
Probably bad that without the parentheses, I was already assuming this was some kind of horrific Sweeny Todd situation.
That’s just practical thinking right here! Someone else argued for shaving cream pies, which naturally leads to the counterpoint of cannibalism.
No, but the pies are a bit off, so they always give you the runs.
I have two I will be using in my next campaign:
Ring of attunement: Provides 1 extra attunement slot. (Requires attunement)
Event Staff: This staff allows the wielder to gain unquestioned entry into any “employees only” areas or zones otherwise off-limits to the public. Anyone (including actual staff or other officials) who sees the wielder in one of these areas will assume they are a known employee or other official who is granted special access to the area. Unfortunately, they will all also view the wielder as the least competent and least trustworthy employee or official with the organization. Any actions taken in the area are likely to be closely watched and highly scrutinized by any observer who would know better.
ETA: One from the current campaign in which I am a player character. Our DM thought of this one:
Bullet of Healing:
This magical bullet can be loaded into any firearm. Whomever is shot by this bullet first receives 1d6 piercing damage followed by 1d10 healing. If the initial damage causes recipient’s HP to fall below 0 before the bullet’s healing effects begin, they will fall unconscious and will not gain any healing effect from the bullet. Instead, one death save is automatically passed.
That bullet of healing is awesome. Would be great for a supernatural Wild West game. Which, is I think what I want to run next now.
The Ring of Attunement idea has come up before, and if I remember correctly there’s a class (Artificer?) that gets a bonus based on how many items they have attuned, making it a genuinely useful item in niche cases.
Riffing off the ring:
The Hand of Holding. When held, it can hold items for you and allow to use them with whatever ability you would normally have. Technically helpful in slightly extending your reach, and depending on the niceness of the GM may also mitigate curses or other effects that are triggered by holding the item, since you technically aren’t. You are still essentially wielding, using, and various other verbs-ing the item, so those still hamper you.
Haha I like it
I played a campaign where we had a dagger of healing. It worked great against undead (as intended by the DM) and also to torture information out of people (not intended by DM).
Dagger of purification
Can only be used to heal wounds inflicted more than 1 hour ago. Each recent use on the target reduces the effectiveness of the dagger’s healing powers.
Potion of Water Breathing: DOES NOT RETAIN AIR BREATHING
Bag of folding.
A bag of holding except anything stored in it comes out folded in half.
Given how murderous some parties get this could become a bit of a problem!
Sounds really useful actually.
Emphasis on anything. I doubt the inkeeper will take kindly to being paid with coins folded in half.
Well that’s what you have a coin purse or primary bag of holding for. Assuming the hand retrieving items is not folded (which I would assume is safe to assume based on how bags of holding generally work), it could be used for forging, folding washing, making something really long by reinserting it repeatedly, or sabotaging by folding things that should not be foldable.
Folded in a random axis.
That indeed would make it significantly less useful.
Ring of invisibility. Makes you invisible, but makes everyone else invisible to you as well.
Ring of (Logical) Invisibility v2. Makes you invisible except for your eye balls so that they can absorb light. You may now see but you appear as a pair of floating eyeballs.
V3, your eyeballs are only visible when your eyes are open.
An additional note here. With no visible eyelids, and nothing visible to protect the back of the eye, bright lights would be extremely painful.
So either double blinding effects of light based attacks, or halve the saves vs the same.
Like in Quake multiplayer… damn that was fun.
Ring of minor invisibility - The ring is invisible, and only makes your body invisible, not any of your stuff
But people can see your footsteps cartoon style
If light travels through you then you would not leave a shadow.
Does glass leave a shadow?
Invisibility implies you are more transparent than glass…
It’s magic. It can make your footsteps visible.
It adjusts the depth map where you walk to appear as though something footprint-shaoed has sunk into the floor, as if in thick mud. Regardless of the surface - stone? still looks like someone sank into it a bit. When they run their hand over it, the floor is actually smooth as if nothing had happened, but the depth map makes it look like it.
Or makes you smell horrible. Yes I just stole this from ‘cruelty squad’.
To see something, you need your retina to absorb light, and that makes it visible. Alternative version is ring of invisibility that makes all of you invisible except for eyes.
Sir Mix-a-Lot (unrelated) is a traveling potion salesman who shows up for my party at suspiciously specific times, and generally has discounted potions specifically tailored for whatever they happen to be doing at the time. For example, if they need to be really strong, he’ll have a bottle of Sir Flex-a-Lot’s Magical Muscle Maximizer, which does increase the strength of one’s muscles, but not of their bones or connective tissue (it was designed to be used only in bodybuilding competitions), so whenever the drinker does a STR check, they must also make a CON saving throw to avoid breaking a bone or tendon. Need to decipher an ancient text? Try Sir Scripts-a-Lot’s Polyglottal-in-a-bottle, which will let you read unknown languages, but also comprehend all unknown languages, even those of the plants and animals around you, making it very difficult to concentrate on any one thing. (inspired by https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/springtime)
Pathfinder 2nd edition’s rogue class has an ability chain that allows them to have already bought certain kinds of item, and they declare it while on the adventure already and decide they need it. “Oh yeah, I bought a spyglass when we were in that last town.” The lowest level is for adventuring gear-type stuff, and it’s usable like once per in-game week. Later tiers of it expand the kinds of items and the frequency. You do also mark off the gold the item would have cost.
I have to steal that for whenever I run a campaign again. Seems like an entertaining recurring character to also clue players in that something is going to happen
