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).

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