20 Odd Magic Items
The point of these items is to see what your players do. There are little to no stats as they are intended to be expanded upon during play. Hopefully, they can spark a few fun ideas, but the biggest purpose is to see what the players try to do with such things and where they take it. Perhaps the most absurd thing will come in handy when you least expect it.
Box of Fire Ants
This little wooden box with rusty hinges squeaks as it is open. Once open a thousand fire ants will come flooding out. Fire ant bites are not pleasant, their bite stings.
Cap of Confusion
This little ragged purple patched & stitched cap will let the wearer hear far away through walls and further but everything the wearer hears is muffled and confusing. The wearer can hear noise, but not decipher anything they hear.
The way I have players roll up characters has changed over the years.
I have seen players follow them into all sorts of red herrings of their own invention. When players pick up on unintended things and follow them, maybe go with it and let them lead you. Give them something they are looking for that you did not plan. Maybe come up with a couple twists to throw in there. You can puzzle together the pieces as it goes. They might ‘figure it out’ for you before you can come up with something.
RPGs. The earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons did not have skills as a core rule, but often introduced skills as alternative options. When third edition came out the skill system was added as a core mechanic of the game. Prior to the release of third edition, I played a lot of skill heavy RPG systems. I played a lot of Palladium RPGs which are very skill focused. In Heroes Unlimited you get skill packages that could be based on your level of education. This could be a PhD, Masters, Military training and much more. With this comes lots of skills and tons of skill options. That I have noticed tends to be one of the big hurdles in getting into Palladium, not as much using the skills in game, but how long it takes to select and calculate skills in character creation just to start playing or in leveling up a character. I have started using house rules in Palladium when it comes to skill advancement to try and make skill advancement easier, I will get to that later in this post.
In newer editions it seems that there is emphasis on putting your players against monsters that are rated at a combat level that they can defeat in battle. I am not a fan of this. I do not want the players to defeat every opponent in battle. I also do not like to give a lot of experience points for killing monsters and NPC’s in game. The tendency to kill characters does not correlate to a combat oriented game in the philosophy of running a game for me, it is quite the opposite. Combat heavy games tend to be those where death is less likely.