Wondrous Wednesday: Helm of Brilliance, 40 Watt & Manual of Trendy and Commercially Lucrative Exercise

So, two more items from the backlog today, of questionable use, from two different articles in the 80s — one by John Maxstadt and one by James MacDougall, both prolific authors of several articles to Dragon. One of the tricks with these items is trying to find a use — maybe not a good use, but some sort of use — for each of them; otherwise, there's little point to doing a conversion. Fortunately, I feel like these authors in particular also tried to make the items have some edge-case uses beyond just a one-use joke.





Helm of Brilliance, 40 Watt
Wondrous item, uncommon (requires attunement by a character of Intelligence 6 or below)

This dazzling helm is set with 3d10 clear quartz gems. Any gem pried from the helm crumbles to dust. When all gems are removed or destroyed, the helm loses its magic. 

You gain the following benefits while wearing it: as long as it has at least one clear quartz, you can spend Inspiration to cause the DM to provide a verbal clue to the party concerning a course of action in which they are engaged; this is delivered to the player characters by the wearer of the helm. When this function is used, one clear quartz gem briefly sheds dim light in a 10 foot radius, and is then destroyed. 

Source: John M. Maxstadt, “Still More [Gods Forbid] Out-rages From the Mages,” Dragon #144 (April 1989).

Manual of Trendy and Commercially Lucrative Exercise
Wondrous item, very rare

This book describes fitness exercises developed by the sage Fondah, and its words are charged with magic. If your Strength and Constitution scores are less than 10 and you spend 48 hours over a period of 6 days or fewer studying the book's contents and practicing its guidelines, your Strength and Constitution scores increase by 1 each, as does your maximum for those scores. Not only that, but you look good and feel great. The manual then loses its magic, but regains it in a century.

Curse. Failure to exercise at least two hours every day causes you to immediately lose all benefits, which cannot then be regained.

Source: James MacDougall, “Not Found In Any Stores!,” Dragon #120 (April 1987).

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