I’ve hit a bit of a dry spell on the old blog recently — I just haven’t had a good topic. Fortunately, reader Baquies came to the rescue in the comments section of my post about alternate magic item forms. In response to his initial comment about wanting a random table to generate forms I glibly said “yes please!” Well, Baquies took up the challenge and came back with a massive table of 200 objects and 100 powers to combine into a wonderful array of random magic items.
You can pop back to the comments of the post linked above and see his original tables, but I now present to you my somewhat modified version of his work. I made the following changes:
- I replaced the odd “roll again” or “roll twice” entries. This is just a personal preference. When I use these kinds of tables while gaming, I don’t want more rolling, I want an immediate result.
- I removed the +X entries from the powers. I felt they were too common on the table vs. how infrequently the objects made sense to have a plus. What the heck is Ink +2 anyway? Fortunately, Baqueis mentioned that he scraped the powers from the LBBs, so I just followed his lead and cracked open S1 Greyhawk to fill in the gaps.
- I removed any explicit dice rolls, eg. the number of wishes or the duration of the disease. I prefer to give myself leverage to scale those on the fly as I see fit.
- I alphabetized the powers, mostly just to double check that I hadn’t accidentally added any duplicates.
And the results? Amazing. Here are some examples:
- Pan of Disease
- Flower of Locate Objects
- Comb of Telekinesis
- Bone of Giant Control
- Bucket of Protection
- Flute of Lightning Bolts
- Quilt of Delusion
- Soap of Heroism
- Clock of Resurrection
- Ladle of Wizardry
- Dress of Treasure Finding
OK, I could go on and on. Sure, there are some odd ones that don’t make a lot of sense (Candle of Holding, Kite of Endless Water) and some that are amusingly already sort of a thing (Liquid of Extra Healing, Stick of Missiles), but most of them are fantastic. I can’t wait to incorporate these into a game.
“Enough already, bring me the charts!” I know, I know. They felt a bit large to post in their entirety, so instead here’s a nicely formatted PDF for you, or if you prefer, an IPT file for use with Inspiration Pad Pro. What’s that, you’re not using Inspiration Pad Pro? How can you even live like that?
Now excuse me while I try to figure out what the heck a Jar of Elven Kind does.
Jar of Elven Kind? That’s like a priceless art object, the Ming Vase of its setting. Returning one to the Elves will grant you a boon.
Ink +2, write a truly moving composition granting a +2 bonus to reaction rolls to anyone who has read the work.
Glad you found use/inspiration from it.
OMG! (Oh Magic Garage Sale!) I love these!
I imagine the Bone of Giant control to be a petrified mammoth femur inscribed with runes and hung with stone charms and smilodon teeth. Like you need a guy at either end to carry it around.
The Bucket of Protection should be worn over the head Ma Hunkel style, although it won’t have eye holes. You’re gonna bang into walls and door frames a lot but it won’t hurt ya. Probably goes well with the Quilt of Delusion, which needs to be worn knotted about the neck like a cape, convincing the user it’s a Quilt of Super Heroism or Giant Strength. Or even just a Quilt of Competency.
Soap of Heroism: The first rule of Dungeon Club is you don’t talk about Dungeon Club.
Comb of Telekinesis: You gotta brush it thru a wizard’s beard 100 times to get a good magic/static charge going.
Flute of Lightning: Pretty easy to envision. You’re gonna be playing a lot of later era Jethro Tull as background music for your games.
Dress of Treasure Finding: It would be fun if instead of being a pret au porter dowsing rod it had a lot of weird little pockets and there was a 1-2 on d6 chance of pulling a gemstone or handful of coins out of one at any given time.
The others are all awesome too but those ones stood out.
I really like your random spell/magic item write-ups! Also, thanks for the tip about Inspiration Pad; I finally transferred some of my random generators (including a spell name randomizer…) from Excel to a better-suited tool!
Well that’s fantastic, I’m so glad you enjoyed it. And IPP is still one of my favorite tools. I regularly have it open on my phone when running games.