Unusual Treasures and DMPCs

>Was playing in a game last night and ran into a bizarre DMPC.
>A sentient sword that our paladin picked up a few sessions ago has suddenly morphed into a DMCP.
>The thing has the ability to fight on its own, and being that it's personality is DM driven it has stolen the show.
>The paladin is debating on weather or not to sell the sword, and to be honest the rest of the party is split when giving him advice.

So I'm wondering if one else out there has unusual stories relating to treasure or DMPCs that just suddenly manifest.

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theninthworld.com/oddities/
dandwiki.com/wiki/Nimblewright_(3.5e_Race)
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I used one recently, bit the players never got a whack at it.
> gaudy amulet
> Courtier's Clasp
> point it at someone and use it and it will start telepathically listing off true and accurate titles or deeds you could attribute
> not necessarily good ones
> use your own judgment on what's "positive" or not
> meager flat bonus on diplomacy equivalent, more practical for researching NPCs
> Xd4 random titles ranging from "Advisor to Clermont the Lion" to "ate all his veggies at dinner last night"

I inserted Baldur's Gate 2 intelligent sword Lilarcor and everyone liked it for a few sessions. When the sword started to get annoying they used some sort of horadric cube to fuse it with a couple itens and switched the sword's personality to a much sober ifrit, giving the sword flaming properties and less conversation.

That's honestly cool. Would be a pain in the ass once players start pointing it at random people for lulz.

I'd just give them things like "Grand vizier of nothing-of-note" until they stopped.

DM of my trainwreck homebrew pathfinder campaign, and how a nearly-free magic item wiped our party.

The players find a small trinket shop and they purchase the Oracle's Bell, a (secretly) divine item for a reasonable price. Our summoner/eidolon OP cheeser is the one who found it, so he's the one who gets to keep it. More on this later.

In order for them to know how to use the item, I reveal how it works.

>The bell's chime echos 5 minutes into the past from the moment it is used

My idea is it would allow them set up an alarm area around a camp, so if they get jumped or are going to be jumped, I can have the bell ring and they'll know shit is about to go down. It was meant as a more useful alarm spell.

One of my players is like "Hold on, this is a perfect opportunity for me to break the game. We can use this to essentially set up savepoints, if we go into a dangerous room and start getting party wiped, just ring the bell and we'll go back 5 minutes before we went into the room, and this will be our signal to know not to go in there."

This sparks literally 3 hours of "How do we game this item so that we never die" meta-strategy, and I have to retcon the effect so it can only be used to prevent a player/party wipe one time, and then the bell would break. Otherwise, as a simple alarm, it could be used indefinitely. The act of intentionally ringing the bell to prevent a death would shatter it though.

The summoner then proclaims "Fuck you guys, I'm going to use this for myself and not the party," as if his 150 HP at level 7 eidolon-armored quadruple-armed fire-clawed OP self could actually run the risk of dying after I allowed him to play it instead of banning that shit the moment it was suggested.

And thus, the Garden of Betrayal was formed. Half of the rest of the party fuck off into a sideroom and convene a secret council on how best to take the bell from Summoner, for the good of the party of course.

This involves numerous dexterity buffs to one of our sneakiest members, multiple overlapping Silence spells to suppress the sound of the bell ringing (four in total, centered in the corners of the adjacent rooms so that the overlapping venn diagram field had 100% coverage of the Summoner's room as he slept), timing the silence fields such that even if the bell were intentionally rang (if the summoner suspected a trap and stayed awake), if it echoed 5 minutes into the past it would still be in a silencing field and thus not alert him. The musketeer would then sneak into the room, using concealment spells, and put a shot of lead right through the summoner's head, with an auto-confirmed crit on an unconscious target, with no DR (flat damage resist, which is something I adopted instead of pathfinder's AC system). Using a crit ruleset which added in lethality effects, and muskets which have x4 critical damage under my ruleset (but low crit chance and horrendous reload times), this means an auto-confirmed high-itensity headshot, or a near-guaranteed kill.

The three party members involved pull me, the DM, into their Garden of Betrayal, and run down their strategy. I can't tell them if it would work, only whether what they planned was mechanically possible. Another hour later, and the plan could finally come to fruition.

As the party settles into the tavern in the evening, I ask Summoner if he wishes to end the day by sleeping, and he confirms. The musketeer then rolls damage. It was like 84 damage, overkilling the summoner.

Somehow, after an hour of half the party convening in the Garden of Betrayal, he's actually surprised and pissed off that they killed him, a valued commrade. They take the bell and take the nearest boat out of the city. All for the good of the party, of course.

You gave the party a magic item, and then because they used it in an interesting way you nerf it and spark an intra-party war. This situation was your fault as a DM.

You could toss in some default titles like "Distinguished Member of the Clean Plate Club" or "Grand Duke of BBQ," but I'm sure random jackasses aren't even good enough for joke titles like that.

The remaining two living party members the next morning find the corpse of our Summoner and notice the bell is missing. The obvious gunshot wound the face means it's really REALLY fucking obvious who did it, and the fact that the other three party members are just missing is a clear giveaway. But they don't metagame even though they sat and watched the whole thing happen.

They would get revenge for the summoner, and they would do it without metagaming.

They go to the city's jarl (they were adventuring in the north) who owed them a favor for their prior actions. They use this favor to enlist a fucking Skywhale, a flying whale with a mobile fortress on its back, and a host of the jarl's warriors to bring the traitors to justice.

The idiots on the boat (a fisherman's boat, really slow), notice an object on the horizon which closes in on them as the day progresses. Eventually, they make out the shape of this flying fortress and know that their doom has arrived. As they prepare for battle, the boat is blasted to pieces from multiple chain lightnings our Wizard/Fighter hybrid had enchanted into his staff.

Then the idiot brigade decide to ring the bell, because SURELY, going back 5 minutes will save them. The bell breaks, and now they find themselves on the boat, with an armored fortress and 50 men hunting for their death, this time 5 minutes away instead of right on top of them.

They all promptly commit suicide instead of suffering the shame of defeat.

And that was how a minor magic item I gave them ended the campaign.

I hadn't predicted that the party would intentionally attempt to exploit the item in order to cheese and completely prevent any risk. Of course, I hadn't myself considered the infinite possibilities on how to use the item, but I also expected the players to not intentionally declare that they would use the item to ruin the game for everyone by removing all the risk from the game.

So of course I retconned it, but allowed them some small degree of their desired use for it in the form of one "Get out of Jail Free" card. It was a compromise that everyone was happy with.

The way they intended to use it wasn't "interesting," it was cheating.

The entire situation was humorous and makes for a good story, so I'm not upset how it turned out. It was memorable, and that's the whole point.

That's twisting his words. He made an interesting magic item that the players used to break the game. He then let the players use the item in their meta-way and just changed it so it doesn't break the game.

>my party is currently stuck in a town infested entirely with zombies and are trying to get to the bottom of it
>party consists mostly of half elves and gnomes who are rogues, Rangers and spell casters
>gave them an ex-housewife dragon-born who gave them a map of the city, acts as my in-game voice (I.e: "what do you mean you want to go downtown and just "fight your way through the horde? What are you, stupid? You'd all die"), and cooks them meals that gives them low to mid level buffs when they eat them as long as they find her supplies
>"this house used to belong to the smiths. They had some zesty spices that would put some pep in your step(haste).
>non-combatant except for her daily cold breath, but is 250+pounds and strong enough to be forced into the roll of "party door buster and weight lifter"

They like her a lot. Even the edgy rogue who wanted to kill her when they broke into the barn she was hiding in because "guys! The walking dead basically guarantees she's gonna kill us in our sleep!"

Numenera is all about this, here is an open source generator for y'all: theninthworld.com/oddities/

Not him, but
>Pathfinder
>Expecting players not to cheese anything and everything they could find
You're a moron.
No, he made a shitty homebrew magic item that allows you to basically have free resurrection + divination, got butthurt that his players were able to add 1+1 together, nerfed the item in a shitty effort to prevent cheese, and then caused a TPK when the party decided to steal the item from each other so that they could get the one-time free do-over for themselves.

This is generally why I avoid homebrew games in general, shit DM's who don't know the fucking rules think they know better than paid game designers who actually understanding how the rules fucking work. I've never seen a homebrew session survive more than 3-5 sessions max.

Maybe there is a better way to utilize it than just removing it.
>party is about to enter the final lair where they know there are legendary items to be found
>right before they enter the bell rings
Would lead to an interesting decision by the players to go in or not knowing that whatever is in there is strong enough to possibly kill them. Do they simply abandon the mission after defeating the trials of the dungeon and go home empty handed? If they decide to go in anyway in the hopes that it was just bad luck and to go in alerted, how badly do you fuck their shit up?
If they are getting TPK'd fairly, maybe just think of a reason why they didn't hear the bell. Maybe it got smashed by an enemy's blow or the BBEG uses its reaction to counterspell it or something.

5e: an amulet that gives you 24 Strength (+7) but removes your sense of object permanence.

I called it the Charm of Peekabruise.

I once gave one of my... let's call her 'less well read' players a magic skull. The moment she touched it she made a Use Magic Device check to discover that the skull would only activate if she spoke the command phrase entirely and exactly without reading it off of anything:

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. "

And fuck me she actually fucking did it. Out of the bottom of the skull popped out Yorick, an intelligent undead Bard who, though low level, can still do low level bard things. (The party was sorely lacking in emergency healing).

Yorick is more of a Mr. Meeseeks sort of DMPC though, and would much rather 'sleep' in his skull when he's not in direct use. To summon him requires recital of the full command phrase...

She does it every time flawlessly (though admittedly I overheard her practicing a lot). This bitch didn't even know what year 9/11 happened when I asked her on the spot. Now she's reciting Shakespeare for a +2 bonus to combat rolls.

*out of the bottom of the skull popped out the rest of Yorick's body. Yorick was full sized, not a tiny bard living in the skull. Like his head was the skull but his body popped out of the bottom when... well I'm sure you get it.

Your idea was cool enough.

Your mistake was letting it have any player interaction at all. If the bell rings on it's own, under it's own conditions, then it's perfectly fine. Letting your players ring it, and set up their own conditions means you fucked everything up.

But here's a hint, unless you want things to explode into cheese and plotholes, NEVER ever include any temporal magic of any sort into your game. It's asking for trouble and never worth the time :^)

I understand what you meant after the restate. Choosing to ignore it. He's now a mouse sized bard in my mind.

My dwarf ranger got rekt in a wild magic encounter, ended up becoming fused with his warhammer. He had been a 15th level character so he had pretty decent gear. He had a pathological hatred of goblinoids, giants, orcs and vermin (as reflected by his favored enemies). He had a backup from the Deck of Many Things, the card where you can avoid any situation you choose once.
>instead of dying or avoiding the problem, he got melded with his hammer.
He now lives life as a +2 Dancing Impact Adamantium Warhammer and has access to his full spell list insead of any of the classic intelligent item abilities.
He is currently carried around by the paladin who refuses to put a "bane" modifier on the hammer because of the dwarf's chaotic alignment.

My artificer is building a nimblewright
>dandwiki.com/wiki/Nimblewright_(3.5e_Race)
he wants to replace some of the basics with better materials. Would it be easier to use the warforged upgrades or should he use an actual process for the upgrades.