Wondrous Wednesday: Arrow of Sleighing & Wand of Lightening Bolts

For this installment, I’m going back to an early issue of Dragon. When they were editing the AD&D 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, there were a number of typos. Allen Hammack did an article in issue #35 (March 1980) called “The Lighter Side,” where he came up with stats for magical items based on his favorite typos. Here are two of them.


Arrow of Sleighing

Weapon (arrow), rare

An arrow of sleighing is a magic weapon meant to provide transportation; engraved along the shaft is a command word in an old Northern language. When this item is drawn and fired, it immediately expands and unfolds mid-flight into a toboggan. While initially sized for one, people within 120 feet of the toboggan may speak the command word in the first round after it has been fired and be instantly transported into the toboggan while it is in motion. As others speak the word the toboggan lengthens to accommodate the extra passengers, up to a maximum of six people.

The toboggan can achieve speeds of 60 feet per round when going downhill on snowy or slippery slopes. It does not function on other kinds of terrain, and must be pushed or pulled to move on a level snowy or slippery surface. Once the first round has elapsed after being fired, the toboggan loses its magic and becomes mundane.

Other types of magic ammunition of this kind exist, such as bolts of sleighing meant for a crossbow, though arrows are most common.

Wand of Lightening Bolts

Wand, uncommon (requires attunement by a spellcaster)

This wand has 7 charges. While holding it, you can use an action to expend a charge to cast the levitate spell (save DC 15) from it. The spell does not require concentration, but only lasts for 1 minute. Since the wand causes the target to actually become lighter, it may be moved about by air currents depending upon local conditions.

The wand regains 1d6 + 1 expended charges daily at dawn. If you expend the wand's last charge, roll a d20. On a 1, the wand crumbles into ashes and is destroyed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Friday: Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Races (OSE)

Image
 So, one of the many games I've backed on Kickstarter is Old School Essentials , which is a cleaned-up, streamlined, and corrected version of the B/X version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons (Moldvay/Cook) rules. Gavin Norman (who posts as Necrotic Gnome) does an incredible job editing and collating info into a super-easy-to-read format. One of the modifications to the B/X rules introduced in the OSE Advanced Fantasy book is separating race from class. In original B/X, the races are represented as classes, with the idea that, if you're playing an elf, that should be special enough in-and-of-itself. If you allowed non-human races to take classes, then players will play the non-humans because their innate abilities make them better than equal-leveled human characters. Separating race from class, the default introduced in AD&D, caused huge flamewars and continues to do so today. The Advanced Fantasy book has reasonable versions of the races so that, if it's your preferen...
Read more

Eberron 5E: Race -- Shifter

With shifters, the problem is the new edition's focus on simplicity. Shifting changed your characteristics, and if you wanted your shifting to become really good, you had to take a tree of shifter feats. There were builds focusing entirely on maximizing your shifter advantages. The new edition doesn't really do temporary ability score changes in the same way -- the barbarian's rage, for example, gives a boost to damage and hit points, but doesn't require recalculating your character's abilities. Similarly, the gauntlets of ogre power / amulet of health / headband of intellect change the impacted ability score to a flat 19 -- a +5 bonus that's easy to plug in, and lasts indefinitely as long as you leave the item on. So I decided that 5E shifters should get their +1 stat bump from their trait, and tried to make the traits (which I had to rename "legacies" because "trait" in 5E is a very specific thing) almost as powerful as a feat, ...
Read more

Monstrous Monday: Blink Wooly Mammoth (D&D5E)

Image
Another creature adapted from Dragon issue #156, "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium" -- the feared Blink Wooly Mammoth! It probably would have been even more thematically appropriate to have worked up the werelagomorph (were-hare) but I only thought of that last night. Ancient people, accompanied by the first domesticated dogs, hunted mammoths during the Endless Winter at the beginning of the world. Some mammoths developed a strange magical ability to escape their pursuers – the ability to teleport short distances. While the vast herds of mammoths were eventually greatly reduced through hunting, these blink wooly mammoths proved tricky and many herds survive at the outskirts of civilization, especially in areas that border frozen climates. Some sages believe that some ancient hunters may have bred their dogs in an attempt to create a hunting companion that was a match for these mammoths; these sages believe that this is the origin of the blink dog species. Blink Wooly ...
Read more