Mad Gaming Madness

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.

So, I’ve been scanning old issues of Polyhedron (the RPGA's house magazine, put out by TSR) for humor content, and came across the module “The Camel’s Nose” is Polyhedron #29 (May 1986). The adventure follows a group of nomadic Valley Elves as they make a pilgrimage to a site holy to Camelopardus, the Camel Lord of the Desert. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a joke module from the mid-80s, but it has some charm for all its flaws. A werecamel plays a part, and I couldn’t resist converting it. I also include a camel stat block because I'm not happy with the several different ones I've found online. I didn't get to finishing this up until Tuesday, but “Monstrous Monday” only works one day a week, so I'm back-dating it.

 An article from the April 1994 issue of Dragon magazine (#204), this was by Matt Posner, “Arcane Lore: The Crazed Book of Mog.” Unlike a lot of articles of a similar type, the joke spells provided actually had real uses, and the book was an interesting object in and of itself. I've used different spell names that I found in The Incomplete Book of Books and Tomes IV on ENWorld. I'm not sure who the authors are, so I haven't credited them; if somebody knows, please post the information!

So, in Dragon #168 (April 1991), there appeared an article by Robin C. Ashmore and Michele Batter titled “Merty’s Manual of Magical Merchandise.” The article provided a number of items one might find in a magic shop, each with a useful effect (well, mostly useful) and a detriment, along with a price. The prices for these items were somewhat absurd, but it was meant in humor.  This article appeared after I stopped regularly reading the magazine so it passed me by, but when I got the Dragon Magazine CD Archive  and read through issues I missed, it drew my attention. While I don't think the items are as flavorful as others that appeared in previous April issues, they had more utility than most. Others seem to have thought so -- most of the items appeared (with prices unmodified) in the AD&D 2nd edition  Encyclopedia Magica series, Volume 2. Here, then, are some of the items. Prices have been removed, as we don't generally do those for 5th edition. If your campaign does...

So, when the blog went into hiatus, I had been wrestling with the Pink Dragon. I was trying to combine two different pink dragons from comedy articles: The pink (candy) dragon from Rick Reid's scenario “The Caves of Confection,” in Polyhedron issue #051 (January 1990). The pink dragon from Jeanne McGuire's entry in Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium in Dragon #156 (April 1990). Both of these had humor elements, but still had (I judged) some gameplay value and I felt it would be good to combine them into one fully-fleshed out creature. But making a full stat block for a new type of dragon in D&D 5E is hard . You can go simple for Lair and Legendary Actions, but that feels like a cheap copout. And I'm a huge fan of Spectre Creation's Cosmic Dragon Breviary , and in that one he statted out five full new species, with new Lair and Legendary Actions. So, when I came back to the blog, I felt I needed to finish this guy before moving on; he'd been waiting long e...

Continuing with the comedy items are these two, which are, again, of extremely limited use. I don't tend to use curses much, but the curses on these items feed into the humor. EDIT: Accidentally posted an earlier draft of this blog post. Oops! Fixed now (5/18/2023).

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.

So, since I'm picking up over a year after my last post, I decided a good first move would be to update the list of humor articles I posted last year . There were a few I missed the first time around, but I'm still pretty proud of it -- it's a comprehensive list.

So, I had a change in work shift, and recently I had a baby! Nevertheless, I have a backlog of stuff I should post, things I'd started to work up and then put on the back burner to focus on Real Life. So, two weapon items today.

This blog post refers to this post by Skerples of the Coins & Scrolls blog. Go read it, it's fantastic. Equipment A mining rig consists of a mining pick, a lantern, a rope (50', hemp), a sack (small), and a backpack. An Adventurer can purchase one at any affiliated kiosk near the Blockchain Mine at the price below; the added cost includes fees for AdventureGild ® certification of the durability and quality of the elements of the pack. A High-Quality ® mining rig consists of two pickaxes made of Mythryl ®, a lantern (bullseye), a rope (50', free-range organic hemp), a sack (large), and a backpack with a patch certifying it is a High-Quality ® item, making you the envy of other Adventurers. An Enchanted ® mining rig consists of the same gear as the High-Quality ® pack, but the pickaxes are enchanted with Nystul's magic aurum  ®; the sparkling gold sheen provided by the enchantment displays to all the magical nature of the pickaxes, which guarantees they will be use...

One of  areas which all role-playing games share (as opposed to, say, story games) is some amount of random chance affecting things. Some games have randomly-generated characteristics used to define a character. Even in games where characters aren't randomly-generated at all, dice are used in determining the results when a player attempts to overcome a challenge where the outcome (one way or the other) is not guaranteed. For many years in the early days of the RPG hobby, most games used random numbers for character generation. Since there was a dearth of material for any one game (even the big dog in the early days, TSR, didn't originally produce scenarios -- the first scenario produced for D&D was by a company called Wee Warriors), many hobbyists converted material back and forth. This is simple to do if you're handy with math, and trivial now, when there are websites where the computer will do the work for you . I was reading an article by Graeme Davis from Imagine #...

Today's items come from "Still More [Gods Forbid] Out-rages From the Mages," by John M. Maxstadt from Dragon  #144 (April 1989). In their original form the joke really only works if the items are found together. I think there's the germ of some interesting usability hiding in these jokes, and with a little work I think the following retain humor while being potentially useful in a few edge-cases in games.

 Another one from Mr. Maxstadt. I like the idea of giving some character to monsters, and this is a very flavorful cursed version of the rug of smothering . Rug of Mothering Would-be independent adventures prepare for thrilling heroics, only to end their peace of mind prematurely as the rug be-neath their feet animates and smothers them – emotionally.    A rug of mothering can be made in many different forms, from a finely woven carpet fit for a queen-mother to a coarse mat from a peasant matron's hovel. Creatures with the ability to sense magic detect the rug's false magical aura of transmutation magic.    In some cases, a rug of smothering is disguised as a carpet of flying or another beneficial magic item. However, a character who stands or sits on the rug, or who attempts to utter a word of command, quickly finds that it forms an emotional attachment to them. Once the rug has formed an attachment to a character it will always be found somewhere about their...

Two food-related items today. 

Today's monster comes from the Dragon #156 article, "(Not Necessarily the) Monstrous Compendium." Submitted by Sharon Jenkins, I think it's an interesting low-level celestial you can put into a module and not worry about it single-handedly taking on an encounter. I've had players convince unicorns to do their dirty work, and while it's a valid option for PCs, I don't mind having a noncombat alternative. The unicow is not nearly as potent as its more famous cousin, while still providing a healing respite for the party—but it's not going to tank the Big Bad on their behalf.

Back in the day of the dead-tree print edition of Dragon magazine, there were always two themed issues every year: every October issue was horror-themed and every April issue was humor-themed. They got a lot of pushback on the humor, so over time the joke articles died out, but I think there's a lot of gamable content in those, and most of them are only slightly more ridiculous than a game that already has a floating eyeball monster and fourteen different types of polearm. As far as I can tell, here's a list of the humor articles in Dragon , Dungeon , The Strategic Review , and Polyhedron . As I find others, I'll add them in. Year Mon Periodical # Article Author Pgs Notes 1975 Aut The Strategic Review V1 #3 Monster Reference Table Addition, Hostile & Benign Creatures Wesley D. Ives 3 Monsters: buydras , drolls , green granules , grifferees , hippygriffs , hobnoblins , umpyrs , we...

Another item from John M. Maxstadt's "Still More [Gods Forbid] Out-rages From the Mages,"  from Dragon  #144 (April 1989). This one is obviously just a gag in its original form. But nobody said it had to stay a pure joke item. For example, if you have purchased Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos , and wanted to introduce it to your PCs but were stymied for a way to do it organically, just drop a candle of convocation into your next game. A "gag" scenario, maybe, but I could see a number of ways it could play out, from the totally silly to the more serious, and now that the PCs have heard of Strixhaven, they'll probably be interested in going back... Candle of Convocation Wondrous item, very rare This slender, garishly-colored taper is linked to a learning institution on another plane of existence. The candle's linked learning institution cannot be detected. The DM chooses the school or determines it randomly.      Curse.  The candle's magic is activate...

 Today's entry once again comes from "(Not Necessarily) the Monstrous Compendium?" from Dragon #156 (April 1990). The pigeontoad was submitted by John Hamilton.

Many moons ago, in Dragon magazine #39 (July 1980), the article "Good Got You Down? Try This For Evil: The Anti-Paladin NPC," by George Laking and Tim Mesford. It introduced an NPC foil to goodie two-shows PC paladins in the form of their diametrical opposite: a foe who received power by following vices and eschewed virtue. Since it was presented as a class, there were tables that allowed player character anti-paladins, but it was presented as purely an NPC class. Adding to inversions of the paladin's abilities they also added the thief's backstab and the assassin's use of poisons, so they weren't exactly balanced for play. Later, in issue #106 (February 1986), there was an article called "A Plethora of Paladins," by Christopher Wood. To the lawful good Paladin and the chaotic evil Anti-Paladin were introduced 7 more paladin-alikes:  the neutral good Myrikhan, a lightly-armored questing knight of good with a bit of a focus on fire. the chaotic good G...

Back in Dragon magazine issue #156 (April 1990), John M. Maxstadt had an article called "Yet Even More [Gods Forbid] Outrages From the Mages." The name refers to his article in issue #144 (April 1989) called "Still More Outrages from the Mages," but where it 1989 article had joke spells, the 1990 article had joke magic items. While most of the items are pure humor material (such as the ring of spell storing which just spells the word "storing" out loud when activated), some of them had more gamable content. One of these, my personal favorite, was the robe of useless items . The normal robe of useful items is a good low-level reward for adventurers: a magic robe that can produce mundane items that characters might find useful that they frequently forget to buy when shopping. Or, items that can't be bought, like a door that automatically installs itself. To the best of my knowledge, this item first appeared in the AD&D 1st edition  Dungeon Master...