So I was having a lovely conversation with @princeofsparrows about magic and magical items and he sent me several links to very useful lists and tables. Those can be used by any DM to improve the game and set some more fun/challenge into the game without adding enemies or limiting themselves to always better armors and weapons.
My players usually discuss for an hour about the best way to open every door with a single rune on it (even if the rune actually just means “toilets”). So if I give them an omniously glowing fork and they will turn around it for half of the evening…
We decided to share with you some links with awesome ideas for loot (or your NPC merchants). The links below include (but are not limited to):
Belt of Pants: This belt creates illusory pants on the wearer. The wearer can suppress the illusion at will.
Digging Spoon: This tiny spoon can dig through any substance with a forceful push.
Hungry coin: Cursed. Will attempt to eat other coins that it comes into contact with. Eats 100 coins an hour.
Crossbow of Whispers (Weapon, light crossbow): You can use an action to whisper a message and fire a bolt from this weapon at a target within range. If you hit, the target (and only the target) hears the message.
Scroll of Cure Blindness: Cures blindness when read.
101 Silly/Useless Magic Items – You need to read through 7 pages of the thread but there are some very nice ideas!
1001 most useless (dungeons and dragons) magical items – There are actually 21 of them on this list but they are really useless. It could be nice to drop something like that on the players so they can have some fun…
Now I will let @princeofsparrows to continue. He still has some things to add 🙂
The great thing about a lot of these items is that, despite their apparent uselessness, as with most things in D&D, an innovative player can find some use for it… and I feel it throws a bit of a wrench into the mix. Here are some other honorable mentions:
It’s free, available on Mac or PC, has an app for your phone and is fucking amazing.
It’s all the fun of an old school binder, including tabs, sub pages and images, entirely in a digital easy to edit space.
It’s great for people who want to keep large campaign binders but ink is expensive yo, and this is available to edit and make changes at any point throughout your day.
I’ve got an example here of my section for the world map of my campaign setting, and the individual pages for the individual locations.
Then I’ve got the faction page I made with each faction’s individual page and symbol.
Then you’re shown a look at a individual faction page as an example.
You can also password protect sections you don’t want anyone besides yourself, the DM, to have access to meaning you’re free to share this binder freely with your players.
Your players can have your entire campaign setting, where they’ve been, the npcs, the factions, etc. available at their finger times that updates in real time.
It can sync between all your devices too.
I can not recommend one note any more highly for D&D prep and planning. It is seriously a life saver.
[[ Source. Original creator: wats6831. Additional information and images linked under each one. ]]
Universal:
Homemade artisan herb bread, home grown and dried apples and prunes, uncured beef sausage, munster cheese. Made a small bag from cheesecloth and tied it closed.
Top left to right: Evereskan Honey Comb, Elven Travel Bread (Amaretto Liquer Cake with custom swirls), Lurien Spring Cheese (goat cheese with garlic, salt, spices and shallots), Delimbyr Vale Smoked Silverfin (Salmon), Honey Spiced Lichen (Kale Chips), and Silverwood Pine Nuts.
From upper left: “Honeytack” Hard tack honey cakes, beef sausage, pork sausage mini links, mini whole wheat toast, cranberry cheddar cheese mini wedge, mini pickles, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, lower right is my homemade “travel cake” muesli with raisins, golden prunes, honey, eggs and cream.
Orcs aren’t known for their great cuisine. Orcs prefer foods that are readily available (whatever can be had by raiding), and portable with little preparation, though they have a few racial delicacies. Toughs strips of lean meat, bones scavenged from recent kills, and dark coarse bread make up the bulk of common orc rations.Fire roasted rothe femur (marrow is a rare treat) [beef femur], Strips of dried meat (of unknown origin) [homemade goose jerky], foraged nuts, only edible by orcs….nut cracker tusks [brazil nuts], coarse black bread, made with whatever grains can be pillaged [black sesame bread], Pungent peppers [Habanero peppers stuffed with smoked fish and olives].
Lizardfolk are known to be omnivores, forage for a surprising variety of foods found within the confines of their marshy environs, in this case the Lizard Marsh near Daggerford. Fresh caught boiled Delimbyr Crayfish on wild chives, coastal carrageen moss entrapping estuary brine shrimp (irish moss, dried brine shrimp), Brackish-Berries (blackberries), Blackened Dart-Frog legs (frog legs) on spring sprouts (clover sprouts), roasted bog bugs on a stick!
From top left: Menzoberranzan black truffle rothe cheese (Black Knight Tilsit), Donigarten Moss Snails (Escargot in shallot butter sauce), Blind cave fish caviar in mushroom caps (Lumpfish caviar), faerzress infused duck egg imported from the surface Realms (Century egg), Black velvet ear fungus (Auricularia Black Fungus Mushroom).
Hello. So one of my biggest complaints of the D&D 5e Player’s Handbook is that searching for spells is a bit of a pain. Even if you manage to obtain a pdf file of it, many of the spells’ titles are written l i k e th i s, making it quite difficult to search with the classic ctr-F.
Because of this, I created a pdf of all of the spells that are in the book, complete with a table of contents linked to them, so you can search the table of contents for your spell, and then zip to the spell you need. Very useful, if I’m allowed to say.
Behold. It is on dropbox, though you can view it (without the magical zipping) without a dropbox account.
D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out – but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
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