Here’s a list of random joke items to use for fun in your campaign. I’d recommend adding them to treasure hoards rather than subbing normal items for them.
Anyway here they are:
1. Ace of Spades – An ace of spades from a standard card deck. No matter where you store it on your body, you will always be able to find it in your right sleeve afterwards.
2. Amulet of Extra Amulet Slot – This amulet allows you to gain the benefit from two magical amulets rather than one. It cannot be further enchanted.
3. Amulet of Feather Fall – When worn, this amulet turns into a feather and falls to the ground.
4. Amulet of Unbreaking Bones – Con-man says you can’t break any bones. Really, he means other’s bones. -100% damage against skeletons.
5. Amulet of weather detection – yells that it is or is not raining.
6. Anti-Matches – A box of matches. Striking one will make it begin to drip water from the tip while the match shrivels away. The amount of water a match releases is about enough to fill a tablespoon.
7. Arrow of Euarere – A silver arrow, suspended on a string. It always points to the person holding the string.
8. Arrow of Slaying, The – This magical arrow is capable of killing a creature.
9. Artist’s Bludgeon, The – Inanimate objects hit with this bludgeon will receive no damage; they will however change color.
10. Attentive Guardsman’s Pike – These ornate and deadly-looking ceremonial pikes are reach weapons and appear to weigh at least 20 lbs, not counting the weight of the fluttering banners that can be unfurled for parade use. Constructed of shadowstuff, they weigh one pound, and inflict only a single point of damage on an attack, being almost entirely for show, although they also have the unique property of remaining in place when set (although unable to support more than 20 lbs), allowing a ‘resting his eyes’ guardsman to prop it up and leave it standing under its own power, while his hand sags off of it.
11. Attentive Guardsman’s Tabard – A dozen of these tabards were fashioned for palace guardsmen in the Empire of Sard, 250 miles from the nearest enemy. The bearer is placed under a glamour that causes him to appear alert and awake, even if his eyes are closed and he is snoring lightly.
12. Axe of Big Numbers – This axe shouts “Big numbers baby, come on!” whenever it is swung, but always deals 1 damage or less.
13. Axe of Empathy – Every time you hit something with this +5 greataxe, you get dealt an equal amount of damage. Both you and the thing you hit are then healed the amount of damage dealt by the axe, even if either are dead. The Axe hopes you have learned your lesson.
14. Axe of Pain – The axe is always moaning and groaning with pain.
15. Bag of Faerie Gold – This sack appears to be full of gold coins and jewels. When one attempts to spend them, however, the glamour on them soon vanishes, revealing them to be nothing but leaves and pebbles. Obviously, most shopkeepers will not be happy about this, and no amount of ‘we didn’t know, I swear!’ will change their mind.
16. Bag of Holding – This item functions as a normal backpack, however when attempting to retrieve an item, a calm female voice tells them there is a wait time of 4d10 minutes before they can retrieve their item (actual time is stated time plus 6d6 additional minutes). During this wait, the bag plays either annoying muzak or advertisements for the bag’s creator’s other products/services. Upon attempting to retrieve an item, there is a chance that the wrong item is retrieved, or that the intended item is simply missing. Obtaining the original item requires an additional 4d10+6d6 minutes and has only a 5% chance of success.
17. Bag of Trading – You can take one thing out of the bag for each object you put in the bag. However, you have no control over what you get, and there are no trade-backs. Past research seems to imply there’s some sort of correlation to what gets you what, but it’s extremely convoluted and far from understood.
18. Bag of Trick – This bag operates like a Bag of Tricks, except it only works once a week and produces a rat each time it is used.
19. Bag of Unholding – Quite a large backpack but even the smallest item doesn’t fit.
20. Bagpipe of Stealth – Grants the user invisibility as long as it is being played.
21. Ball of Eyes – A snow-globe filled with miniature eyeballs. When shaken, it grants the user a blurry, jittery vision of some future event.
22. Banana Walkie-Talkies – There exist two, and only two, of these items in the world. One of which is possessed by a cranky and lonely half-orc. It appears to be an innocuous wooden banana with a coat of faded yellow paint. When an end (doesn’t matter which one) is placed against your ear, you can hear a ringing followed by a click and a half-orc yelling at you for waking him up at this ungodly hour. If you drop the banana or “hang up,” the call ends. If you stay and listen, the half-orc will yell at you, call out obscenities, and start going on about his daily problems and mishaps in his love life. Every so often (2% chance/day), the banana will ring while you are sleeping and the half-orc will want to talk to you about his problems.
23. Barrel of Holding – This large wooden barrel measuring √(12/π) feet in diameter and 5 feet in height can hold up to 15 cubic feet of matter.
24. Beam Sword of Severed Nerves – A beam sword. It cannot cut anything but nerve strings. Will pass through any other material leaving no harm.
25. Belt of Pants – This belt creates illusory pants on the wearer. The wearer can suppress the illusion at will
26. Belt of Tightening – Every time you put this belt on, all of your clothes permanently shrink a fraction of a millimeter. The effect is compound.
27. Belt of Unbathed Breath – When worn around the waist, allows the user to breathe underwater. Does not function when wet.
28. Boogie Skeleton – This pile of bones is small, such as one that might be obtained from a bird or a toad, though it can look as though it came from any creature. When a song is sung or played in the vicinity of the skeleton, it begins to dance appropriately. As soon as the music stops, it collapses into the pile of bones again. The skeleton, when dancing, can be no larger than Diminutive.
29. Book of Canon – A book that automatically transforms into a copy of the sacred text of any religion, translated into the language the user is most familiar with.
30. Book of Confusion – The letters in this book always appear to be upside down, even if viewed from different directions at the same time. The book is a bad novel about zombies.
31. Book of Curses – When opened, the book verbally berates anyone in the immediate vicinity, calling into question their combat ability, intellect, personal hygiene, lineage and profession of their mothers, and other delightful insults. Once closed the book continues shouting (although it is muffled) until placed inside a bag or some other similar container for 1d4+1 minutes and ignored. Replying to the book in any other way causes the insults to get louder and more childish the more time you spend replying to it.
32. Book of Exalted Deeds – Contains a listing of some of the finest houses ever sold and the specifics of the titles to the properties.
33. Boots of Blinding Speed – The wearer’s speed is doubled, and they are blinded.
34. Boots of Levitation – These boots levitate a few inches off the ground when not worn.
35. Boots of Stylishness – Knee high black boots that are always clean and shiny. They never take in water, thus feet are always dry.
36. Boots of Teleportation – Allows the player to teleport wherever they like, but don’t carry the wearer with them when activated; the boots teleport just fine, though.
37. Boots of Walking – The wearer of the boots cannot run, nor can he take a double move action, and takes a -5 to Tumble checks. These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do.
38. Bottle of Air – It’s a bottle. Full of air. Congratulations.
39. Bottomless Beer Mug – Any liquid poured into this mug treats the bottom as incorporeal, but solid objects don’t.
40. Bowl of Comfortable Warmth – Any liquid in the bowl will feel comfortably warm, so icy cold water will feel like it’s a bit over room temperature. Do note, however, that it’s still icy cold water, it just feels warmer.
50. Breastplate of Secret Detection – If the wearer of this breastplate gains a piece of information that is somehow connected to the concealment of a hidden conspiracy or plot, a live and still wet red herring forms on the inside of the armor.
51. Bullying Gloves – At random intervals, these gloves instil the wearer with a near-irresistible urge to hit themselves.
52. Bunyan’s Belt – When worn, causes an enormous, bushy black beard to appear on the wearer’s face.
53. Cape of Resistance – When this item is placed on any living thing it somehow manages to fall off, untie itself, slip past the owner’s neck entirely, or otherwise avoid being worn.
54. Case of the Litigator – Translates any document placed in the case into legal jargon; non-reversible. Does not confer the ability to understand legal jargon.
55. Cat of Schrodinger – When this cat is not being observed in any way it is both dead and alive. When something observes it, it suddenly becomes either dead or alive with a 50% chance of either.
56. Chair of Steadiness – This chair can be moved but cannot be tipped over by anything less than a DC 35 Strength check.
57. Charles – This small, unremarkable figurine of a gnome refuses to be called anything but Charles. No other name will leave the lips of the speaker. It has no other powers.
58. Chime of Interruption – This instrument can be struck once every round, which takes a standard action. On any round the chime is activated the user may ready one action without spending an action to do so.
59. Chime of Opening – Commonly affixed to or near doors, when pressed it emits a sound on the interior of the owner’s home to let them know guests have arrived.
60. Chime of Opening (Alternate) – When struck against a solid surface, this chime emits a loud click, and opens along its length, to reveal a tiny compartment adequate to conceal a single ‘smoke’ worth of pipeweed or a blowgun needle. When the compartment is closed, it is seamless and can be detected only with a DC 20 Search check. If hit with an instrument such as a small mallet, it chimes.
61. Cloak of Billowing – This black and silver cloak will always billow dramatically behind the wearer, it has no other effects.
62. Cloak of Displacement, Minor – This item appears to be a normal cloak, but when worn by a character its magical properties distort and warp reality. When any attack is made against the wearer the cloak has a 20% chance of falling off, no matter how it is secured.
63. Compacting hammer – The force imparted by it is multiplied, but is spread around the surface of a struck object facing inward.
64. Cymbal of Symbols – This musical instrument enables the user to comprehend dead languages, but only while they are deafened by noise.
65. Dagger of Told Secrets – A simple-looking dagger. If used to backstab someone to death, it will whisper your most embarrassing secret to that person.
66. Dagger of unnatural sharpness – The blade is exceptionally sharp to your touch. It confers no combat bonuses but can be used as a normal dagger for fighting or crafting, but the user seems to always cut himself in minor ways when using it.
67. Dagger of Untold Secrets – A simple looking dagger. If used to backstab someone to death, it will whisper the most embarrassing secret of that person to you.
68. Decanter of Endless Sorrow – A pewter flask that produces limitless alcohol when held to their lips by someone who is troubled. It gets them drunk but they never feel any better.
69. Diadem of Brothaurity – When wearing this headpiece, you are as elegant and well-spoken as a famous diplomat or regent, but you can’t stop calling everyone bro.
70. Enchanted Book of Collected Stories – Opening this will cause miniature creatures/people to pour out and perform a chapter from the book much like a theater.
71. Focusing Ring – The digit on which this ring is worn can be viewed in extremely high definition from a great distance.
72. Gloves of Tinkering – Wearing the gloves will make you able to almost repair any broken item. However, you will always end up with pieces from the item that don’t seem to fit anywhere.
73. Glowing sword of orc detection – When it gets orc blood on it the sword glows.
74. Good Luck ring – Gives your enemies good luck!
75. Greater Staff of Random Summoning – Summons a random creature at a random place. You could be summoning a giant Ogre on the other side of the globe for all you know.
76. Helm of Awareness, The – The wearer is acutely aware of the fact that they are wearing this helmet and that it has a magical effect. – All you need to do to make this work as a DM is frequently remind the player that the helm is magical while they are wearing it but be evasive about exactly what it does.
77. Hoarder’s Wand – Does nothing but for some reason you think it might be important later in your quest.
78. Hood of Offensive Facades – This hood will change your identity in the eyes of others to the appearance of the person they most personally dislike.
79. Hood Of Worrisome Facades – This hood will change your identity in the eyes of others, however the identity used will be random.
80. Indestructible Notebook of Memories – This otherwise normal notepad of normal notepad size cannot be damaged or destroyed, and anything written in it cannot be obscured or defaced. It also has unlimited pages despite its finite size. However, the data it holds only lasts as long as the writer independently remembers it, and decays in exact proportion to the relevant memories. Remember who and when, but not where? Then the words describing the location in that particular entry are the only ones gone.
81. Intransigent Rod – When the button on this artifact is pressed in, the holder’s opinions solidify and they become impossible to convince.
82. Key to anywhere – opens any door into a closet with a water bucket that falls and hits the player’s head. Inside this closet is the treasure of true adventurers. If opened with a key, it opens a closet…
83. Lunch Box of Delicious Unfulfillment – This lunch box will hold whatever food you desire. However you will never get full and the food will deliver no nourishment.
84. Mask of Concealment – Hides the wearer’s face and conceals everything from them by blocking their eyes! Bonus points for requiring a strength check or a time limit to expire to be removed.
85. Mattress of Poverty, The – No matter how you fluff this gorgeous, thick, mattress, you will always sleep on the thin part of it.
86. Mug O’ Dissatisfaction – A mug that always produces a steaming hot cup of coffee or tea when tapped on the bottom. It conjures the opposite of what the tapper prefers, so if you like tea you get coffee and vice versa. Handing the full mug to another person will make the drink in it transform to the opposite of that person’s preferences.
87. Murder Dagger – All damage it would deal is instead replaced by the target being harassed by crows for that many hours.
88. Needle Of Learned Compromise – This needle will create beautiful tattoos of any design, however they hurt a tiny bit more. When used to sew it is entirely normal.
89. Portable Dark Tavern Corner – Consisting of two wooden boards connected by a hinge, this artifact draws those nearby into assuming it is a perfect spot to conduct seedy business.
90. Potion of fire breathing – For the length of time that the potion is in effect, every breath out is on fire, whether you want it to be or not.
91. Potion of Quelchment – Cures thirst when consumed
92. Ring of Fire Detection – becomes warm when placed into Fire.
93. Ring of First Impression – Wearing the ring will make you able to perform a perfect handshake with the hand wearing it.
94. Ring of Stoneskin – Turns your skin, muscles, and organs into stone! Character is now a stationary statue. Can’t be reversed until someone takes the ring off.
95. Rope of Entanglement – Becomes entangled when left in a pack
96. Sack of Hive Eggs – Crushing one of the numerous tiny eggs will cause the thoughts of everybody in the proximity to merge. Everybody can hear what you think and you can hear everybody.
97. Shirt of fire protection – this shirt is sopping wet.
98. Shoes of the Restless Traveler – These shoes allow their user to run for miles without feeling fatigue, but if they try to do anything else with it (walk, sit down, jump), they will instantly trip
99. Sword of Parrying – Parries every attack, swinging it yourself will force it to “parry” your opponent’s weapon/attack even though he/she/it is defenseless.
100. Torch of Night Vision – grants bearer Night Vision while lit.
101. Vorpal Grindstone – It can “sharpen” any object to become vorpal. Any object.
102. Wand of command – Lets your character be controlled after saying the command word!
103. Wand of Create Wand of Create Wand – Creates a Wand of Create Wand. Consumes original Wand.
104. Wand of Pigeon Summoning – summons 1d20 pigeons everyday. On a 20 it breaks and summons a giant pigeon god (can be the size of Godzilla or like 5 pigeons.) Giant pigeon god should be in the mid 20s for CR, but is uninterested in attacking, and will simply fly away when summoned.
105. Water Hat, The – A small red hat, when worn, causes water to pour from the wearer’s fingers at the speed and pressure of a kitchen faucet at half power.
106. Wineskin of the Eternal Primary – This wineskin never runs out of water, but even the tiniest sip makes you have to go potty, like, super bad. Right now.
@probablybadrpgideas so I found this chart on Reddit and put it on tumblr. This chart replaces all other magic items.
not to get mad nerdy but I just discovered tabletopaudio.com and I’m fuckin losing it
this person (people?) goes about making 10 minute long loopable ambient noise tracks for every imaginable setting (docks, taverns, forests, airships, spaceships, office buildings, sewers, EVERYTHING) and has over a hundred tracks to offer, and on top of that if none of them suit you there’s a huge feature called soundpad where you can mix and match from their set of hundreds of individual sound effects and music clips to make your own ambient background track
holy shit dudes
I did a little further reading on his about and the guy running this is just a dad with two kids who like playing tabletops with him and he had the composition and musical training to start making soundtracks for his games then decided to spread that to the world for absolutely free, he even welcomes you to use his tracks in your works (podcasts, videos etc) and is open to being hired for custom tracks
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing – every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemicby Randy Shiltsis a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaustcollects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watchThe Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Streetor watchMilk. Dallas Buyers Clubhas its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played Onbut JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y’all. Please, take care of one another.
I feel the mountains burn inside 