What are some ideas for quirky magic items? Things that don't feel like they're meant to kill armies...

What are some ideas for quirky magic items? Things that don't feel like they're meant to kill armies, but have weirdo effects that feel unique.

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dishonored.wikia.com/wiki/The_Heart
palinola.com/projects/lab/greenbox/
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A feather necklace that lets you become a small songbird.

You can fly but you're prey to bigger birds

Jar of spiders that weave a hammock and return whenever opened.
The jar may need to be "fed" either rations or dipping ones hand in the jar and taking a slight amount of damage/lethargy poison effect.

A cursed hammer that makes any building it has hammered even a single nail into uncharacteristically dangerous. Staircases collapse, windows shatter in the breeze.

An abandoned coop for carrier pidgeons, now overrun with Crows. The Crows collect bits and baubles from around town and upon inspection they are weaving minor magical items into a protective tapestry that conceals the nest. Offspring raised in the nest are becoming tainted by the magic field they are growing in.

Personal favorite of mine is the gloves of boxing: they look like normal boxing gloves but when you punch something with them a cardboard box encases whatever you punch. Also gives you +1 to stealth rolls if you hide in one of the boxes you make.

A pair of pants that never go out of fashion.

A pair of glasses that lets you see what other people are thinking of as a little animated cloud that floats above their head with a picture in it.

Shoes that reorient the wearer's gravity to any surface the shoes are walking on.

A mask that can magically appear to be the head of any specific person. Includes voice alteration. Does not alter the body.

A wad of clay. A keyword makes whatever shape its in as solid as reinforced steel. Another keyword makes it soft again like clay.

Magic handcuffs that make the wearer disappear from existence, imprisoned in the cuffs. Opening the cuffs releases them.

A horse with 16 legs that can be ridden by 15 people comfortably

A deck of cards where any cards that are not being directly observed can switch places. The deck is intelligent and swaps cards in ways that create the maximum amount of mischief.

A bag of caltrops that turn into angry geese upon touching the ground

A decanter of endless molasses

>Singing Bell
A bell covered in arcane marks, when rung the bell sounds normally, then replays a woman singing in a long dead language. The music is beautiful and bells like this are prized by those that own them.

>Magic Lantern
A simple crystal lantern that glows with a steady, strong light. Far cleaner and easier to keep lit then a oil lamp or candle, they are prized by nobility and anyone that can afford them.

>Jon Snow's Appratius
A broad pipe with a smaller pipe extending away, any water entering one side of the large pipe comes out the other side clean, pure and safe to drink. The smaller pipe diverts away a brine holding the concentrated containmenents and unsafe material from the water. The apparatus is self cleaning and can operate indefinitely.

A disembodied beating heart that whispers to you minor secrets about those it's pointed at. The heart offers no great insight or strategic information. It simply offers you minor, often negative details about others and perhaps the environment. Useful only as a morbid curio or a means to loose friends quickly

A Bottle that never gets empty. Its filled with the last substance you put in there.
So you could potentially have a endless beer mug or a bottle of sand...whatever you like

What?

The one out of Dishonored?

That'd be insanely powerful.
Put a potion in it, or worse, put acid in it.
Now you can decant a million potions, or acid flasks.

Either way it's definitely in the 'useful for taking on an army' thing

It's a pun based on two different usages of the word 'boxing'.
They appear to be boxing gloves and you expect them to do what boxing gloves normally do which is help you punch people.
In actuality they are 'boxing' gloves. Gloves which put things in boxes.
The last sentence appears to be a MGS reference.

Maybe..

It's an item my DM made up

And yes it is a MGS reference

dishonored.wikia.com/wiki/The_Heart

Can you just sabotage any house by hammering a nail into it or does the nail have to be part of the building process?

I'm talking about the boxing gloves

>fill it with gold dust or small diamonds
>extreme inflation
>???
>profit

>A pair of pants that never go out of fashion.

>Mood ring
the wearer is filled with an emotion based on the colour of the rings gem, for example, ruby mood rings make people irrationally angry, all the fucking time.

>>extreme inflation
>>???
>>profit
That's a hell of a "???" you got there, South America.

A warhorn that doubles as a drinking horn.

When used there is a 1/4 chance it will have the wrong function.

>need to blow the horn and alert your friends
>you mouth is now full of frothy mead

>time for a refreshing horn of mead
>everyone on the ground floor of the inn now have a sharp tone in their ears for the rest of the evening

A stone slate that projects an image onto the surface. The image distorts and changes depending on how and where it's touched, with some sections acting like buttons.

This can be used for a variety of things, such as:
>As a clock, timer, alarm and stopwatch
>As a weather predictor
>As a journal or spellbook
>As a compass
>As a calendar
>As a map of scouted/mapped areas.
>Creating a visual copy of your surroundins
>Creating an auditory copy of your surroundings
>Creating a continuous stream of visual AND auditory copies of your surroundings

The nail must be added when the house is incomplete.
Alternatively it only works if you were hired in some fashion to work on the building.
Further alternatively the work might not need to be strictly construction. A painter or a maid may be able to apply it's effect subtly. But the individual must have been paid

A magical quill that never runs dry. In addition, you can change the color of the ink with a verbal command. Just make sure you store it in a way that doesn't cause it to spill everywhere.

>chalice of vision
Whenever you drink from this chalice, you gain the ability to see in the dark(including magical darkness). Doesn't matter what it's filled with, as long as it's liquid.

A sheathed, dull and ancient magical blade that when unsheathed and struck on metal hard enough (str check) it creates an ethereal copy of the wearer of the sheath. The wearer of the sheath can command the spirit, though ethereal, it cannot touch, move or grab objects. It can pass through walls and communicate. When the master sheaths the sword, the spirit is withdrawn into the sword almost instantly. The sound of the sword clashing with metal will release a stronger sound than usual, thus alerting anyone nearby.

>can't talk into the stone slate and have another stone slate repeat it
>grumbling about new slates

>The wearer of the sheath can command the spirit,
Change of script:
The wearer of the blade can command the spirit.
(created so if an enemy grabs the blade by the sheath, if the PC realises this and pulls the sword and quickly bashes it onto metal, it creates a copy of the wearer of the sheath, in this case, the enemy, in combination with some other spells, it can become a powerful artifact)
In addition:
The spirit communicates through the blade.

A lantern, anything lit by its light will cause people to be annoyed when they look upon the thing.

A magical beer bottle that never runs out of beer.


I've long searched for such an item irl.

>Peevish Pebble
>A small magical rock. When thrown at someone, it disappears midair. 1d6 rounds afterwards, it reappears and strikes the target from a random direction.

>the bottle only fills with Coors Light

A glowing sword who's mystical light renders anything it is illuminating indestructible.

Two halves of a small glass sphere. It holds tiny items and it seals and opens by sliding the halves on and off each other.
When pushed against bare skin it gently and magically parts the skin, fat and flesh under it and then heals it back up as it gets deeper.
The sphere masquerades itself as a lump.
You retrieve it by squeezing it out like a huge zit.

The cauldron of the goey witch: it looks like an ordinary iron cauldron, but whatever mostly liquid thing is cooked inside for 24 hours becomes a slime.

The cauldron is not very big, and the slimes only last for about a week and cannot reproduce all that well, but there's few other ways to have spinach slimes, or gelatin slimes.

Alternatively, it can be used as an insulator and heat shield, since it is a very very poor heat conductor.

A thin needle with a tip that breaks off easily and the tip audibly and constantly plays the stupidest fucking jingle until removed.

Useful, but disgusting.

A length of rope that speaks out all the things everybody holding it have in common, whether anybody knows them or not. It does so in Morgan Freeman's voice and always starts with the least relevant and meaningful things but it never lies and will go through everything eventually.

>A decanter of endless molasses
infinite money

>A bag of caltrops that turn into angry geese upon touching the ground
can you refill the bag with ANY caltrops and it works? if not, does it recharge? do the geese change back after x turns? i could have A LOT of fun with this item.

Escapist Pillow
When you sleep on it, you'll dream about whatever you whispered into it.

Potion of Skub
The drinker will start a heated argument with the first person he sees.

Jam the clay into a lock and bam skeleton key

A camera. Instead of zooming in, it moves your actual viewpoint.
The boring thing to do is zoom in, turn around and take a picture of the back of your head.

That's dumb, no one will fight over that. I hate you and your skub.

a candle that senses the mood and provides light with the appropriate color and intensity

>infinite money
Until your huge supply causes the demand to go down and molasses to be dirt cheap.

Bam, chastity belt.

That's not going to work

Scp 914

A gorget that only lets your voice be heard by those who know you well. Takes at least 5 rounds to remove.

A polished granite sphere, intricately carved. If you replace one of your eyes with it, it totally fucks up your depth perception, but lets you have a perfect photographic memory from that day forward. Also aches when it gets too dry, and sometimes shows you things that aren't there.

A stout leather belt, easily two hands wide, with a buckle like a snarling bear. Gives you a bonus to your physical abilities, but makes your nose extremely sensitive. Plus whatever to your toughness, a bonus to perception for anything scent-related, but a significant penalty to saves related to gasses/stench, and you're incapacitated for worse and for longer if you fail the save.

A dragon dildo. As long as it slotted in person dragons feel sympathy for this person.

A better idea is to start a rum company. Takes the game in a fun direction and opens it up to pirate adventures!

If you get hit hard enough, does it pop out? Does it hurt? Could you nail somebody with it with a sling from a concealed position and would they notice?

A whistle that makes everybody who hears it sickeningly homesick.

A candle that once lit shows a dancer made of fire doing her (or his) thing on top of it. The dancer gets older the more the candle is consumed.

It was designed by a mage as a birthday candle, but for some reason the idea didn't probe as popular as hoped.

>A horse with 16 legs that can be ridden by 15 people comfortably

This is just a very long horse

You never know, ot could be a very wide horse.

Explain why?

Go wild
SCP Foundation
www.scp-wiki.net

I was thinking it would only move with gentle and constant pressure. Otherwise you'd have a foreign object sloshing around you all willy nilly.
It's real gentle and hush-hush with nerves, won't hurt a bit. A faux-friendly hand on a shoulder, or hiding it in clothes could work.

I had a bunch of shit from a freeform RP where my character worked in a weird item shop for other people. I don't remember all of them but here's a few people seemed amused by:

>Jack of Unmoving Plaid: This jacket is a window into the elemental plain of PLAID, as such, the plaid pattern is always seen head on regardless of what direction it is viewed from (Warning: may cause vertigo, nausea, and vomiting)

>Magical Japanese Yumi Bow: this bow is capable of firing ANYTHING Japanese as if it were an arrow, including but not limited to anime figures, Japanese candies, yari spears, Japanese swords, Japanese people, and Japanese cars.

>Sweat Pants of Infinite Room: the interior of these pants operate like a bag of holding, combined with an ultra-stretchy waistband and legs, these pants are truly one-size fits all.

>Shoes of Moonwalking: Designed by jealous wizards who lacked the moves, these shoes, allow the user to moonwalk when they grab their crotch and shout "OW!" in the highest pitch voice they can.

Side note: also for sale at one point was a stock of sapient pearwood trunks.
Someone playing a mimic detective bought them all up to make their own harem with them.

But yeah, squeeze it wrong and it could open inside them.

But if I go to drink, how am I blowing out to sound the horn?

I created the womb dagger, ama

The key needs to already be solid to push the pins into the right positions when you slide it in. The soft clay is just going to form a mould of all if them in their locked positions.

Could you wrap the clay around a, let's say a key-sized teaspoon, push it against the pins, solidify, pull out and work out a working key from the imprint? Nah that's way too complicated.

Doesn't sound so comfortable.

Sometimes I like reading what objects have been submitted to the green box generator. Some of the objects are magical, others mundane but lack logical explanation for their existence.

palinola.com/projects/lab/greenbox/

Here are a few.

>A compass whose needle appears to change randomly throughout the day and night. If studied, it will be found that it is always pointed in the direction of the star Aldebaran.
>A manilla envelope sealed with an "EVIDENCE" sticker. If the seal is broken, it contains a half-dozen passports to various countries, some of which no longer exist (East Germany, etc), all bearing the likeness of whoever unsealed the envelope.
>A 'Get Out of Jail Free' Monopoly card. It is signed on the back, 'Rip in half to use. Good any time. ~S.A.~'. If ripped in half, the agent's phone rings.....

>A Garmin dashboard-mounted GPS navigator which, when plugged in, will automatically map a route to a nearby recent murder scene (although never quite recent enough to allow capture of the murderer).

A box of snuff that lets you see smells.

A torch that inverts the light in the room.

A bookmark and a blank book. When you put the bookmark in another book the blank book shows you the bookmarked pages.

A hankerchief that when sneezed into will make a random nearby person feel like you gravely insulted them.

A beer stein that when drank from makes you less drunk.

A bulls horn that points to the nearest bovine creature. The creature also becomes aware of you.

A hair ribbon that makes your all of the hair on your body invisible.

A bow tie that makes people perceive you as a pug puppy wearing a jumper.

A picture frame that shows peoples immediate family when you hold it to their face.

An USB that when plugged into a PC turns every audio file on the computer into Bloodhound Gang's The Bad Touch

Mimic gloves, replaces the sound of whatever object you're holding with improvised mouth sound effects.

A black lens. Well it's not actually black, when looked through it shows absolutely nothing but the single, currently closest to you piece of any official currency, in its location and distance. Scrounge up them pennies, or ride out to the wild and find them buried treasures. Or more fucking pennies.

>The Immovable Sword

The result of a magical mixup, this sword can be rendered totally immovable while its owner holds it. Attunement with the weapon allows it to be used more frequently. Though unassuming, it can parry a blow from a giant's blade, even in the hands of an unassuming young hero.

>The Unstoppable Shield

Some idiot threw it like a frisbee shortly after its creation, and it's been flying around the world ever since.

>hold sword
>you get pinned in place until you let go of your sword or take off your belt because you can't move it to take it out of its scabbard

ALTERNATE ENDING
>go to draw sword
>get torn in half by your own belt as the sword flies off, following the planet's rotation

>A beer stein that when drank from makes you less drunk

Does it stop at normal sobriety or can you get knurd?

>Fly up high
>Eagle swoops at you
>Turn back into a human
>SURPRISE FUCKER
>Grab it, snap a neck or wing or something
>Turn back into small bird
>Fly to the ground and go find your meal for the night

pretty sure the belt would break before it rips your body in half... still funny to see the trousers drop tho

Beetle candies. Why anybody though this was a good idea is a mystery for the ages, but they look exactly like candy and act exactly like angry beetles. They sting too.

Rainbow: it looks like a bad joke, also a multicolor warbow. It can actually clear the clouds if you aim it at the sky, although it does little to stop the rain.

It's all fun and games until you fly into a window, and then in years hence you retire to the countryside with your waifu only to discover that one day a cuckoo has stolen your baby and placed one of its eggs in the crib.

Cursed Lego brick. Send it to your enemy and now at random they'll find the brick underfoot, somehow in their shoes. It's insidious.

In every game I DM, the first magical item that the players can happen upon is:
>The Rag of Cleaning
a rag, that when rubbed over a surface, uses the 'clean' effect of the prestidigitation spell. It is always damp and wringing it out can create as much water as the 'create water' cantrip once per day.

Fuck you, buddy. I like the idea.

Posted in a thread a while ago. A couple of the items are intended to be so minor that you question whether it was really magical at all

DMs discrestion.

Dude, he's just anti-skub. Not worth your time arguing with him.

>Pan of Feeding
A single grain and a few drops of water will, when heated inside this pan, expand into a full loaf of bread filling the pan. Add multiple, more varied grains, spices, nuts or other liquids(such as beer) for more flavorful bread.

>Spell Coins
These are coins that are finely engraved and made of an extremely soft, easily breakable metal. Each coin has a spell stored inside of it. When this coin is crushed in one's palm, the user can cast the stored spell once. If broken by other means the spell will go off, sometimes causing odd, completely random effects, depending upon the spell.

>Salt of Enraged Tears
Whoever consumes this salt, in any capacity, will quickly develop a painful headache. Shortly thereafter the user will become extremely irritable, often to the point of crying, screaming and lashing out over what would normally be minor inconveniences or trivial nuisances.

You could use the cooking pot to ruin a chef's reputation by making his lovely stew taste like plain porridge. Seems like fun to me.

>At first glance, the subjects of this collection of photographs appears completely ordinary; a man riding a motorcycle down a busy street, a twisting garden path leading to an elegant house, two children in an empty street in autumn. Strangely the photos are in color, but the era seems to be the early twentieth century. A closer examination reveals that the flora, fauna, clothing, architecture, writing, and technology depicted are unlike anything you have ever seen in any past or present culture. Successful history, natural history, mechanical repair and/or anthropology checks will confirm this. The motorcycle seems to be powered by a small pneumatic engine. Large dirigibles with underslung cargo can be seen in some of the backgrounds. The dominant architectural style mixes graceful Art Nouveau metalwork with round roofs and walls decorated with geometric repeating patterns. The writing consists of a series of small, vertically arranged circles emitting short lines and curves. Most of the people in the pictures have a somewhat Eurasian appearance, but subtle differences in their features suggests otherwise. Their clothing is composed of thin multiple layers with repeating patterns in drab colors. You gradually start to feel something about the photos is off, almost as if you shouldn't be looking at them - and that you are being watched. Thankfully, the feelings wear off 24 hours after viewing the photos. (These are photos from an alternate Earth, whose timeline diverged sometime within the past 8 million years, thus having a different technological, social, natural and even geological history. This information simply should not exist in this world. Every day an agent views the photos, there is a five percent chance that a Hound of Tindalos will catch their scent...)

There were time traveling shenanigans in our fantasy campaign which led to the following item:
>The Lich's Revolver
>A Revolver made of a darkenned, yet chrome metal, with skeletal and floral etchings, and a mahoganny grip, also etched.
>Never needs to reload
>Always hits what the user wants
>the user takes the same damage as the target

>A horse with 16 legs

>You... you... Double Sleipnir!

>Stopwatch
A staple of thieves and anyone else who wishes to escape pursuit, a random, inanimate, mundane hazard is expelled from its face whenever its latch is opened, making a 10x10 area difficult to pass.
Some possibilities include:
>Web, as the spell
>Grease, as the spell
>Caltrops, varying materials
>Marbles, glass
>A cloud of powdered spices, eg. hot pepper, salt
>A cloud of harmless poisons, eg. knockout gas, aphrodesiacs
>A large quantity (10-100 gallons) of a liquid (water, sewage, various bodily fluids, etc.)
>A large quantity (1-10 gallons) of thick paste
Variations exist based on daily uses, exact upper and lower limits, but particularly valuable materials tend to disappear after an hour or two, while mundane objects

>The D6
A metal box, about half a meter in each dimensiom with varying numbers of dials and buttons on each side that dont seem to do anything.
The box is attatched to the inside of a gyroscope and can be opened on any side. The interior is large enough to hold multiple objects larger than the box itself.

When objects are placed inside and the box is given a good spin, a new object will appear, with a value equal to the previous contents.

No one knows where objects that have been "rerolled" go.

Some more.
>Novice's Axe
>This lumber axe, when struck against a tree in ideal lumberjack's stance, will cleave through the tree like butter, felling smaller trees in one swing and larger ones in two to three. Logs chopped with this axe are made especially dry and dense, thus becoming ideal firewood.
>Helper's Coals
>When burned, these lumps of coal create a trail of white smoke that, regardless of wind conditions or obstructions, will lead the personp who burned it to something useful to them within a 200 meter radius. It will never lead to something already in another's possession, and the usefulness of the item can sometimes prove cryptic until a later time as such the item would become useful.
>Dreaming Blinders
>When placed on a steed of any sort, be it ridden or drawn, these blinders seemingly display something that the steed desires more than anything. Originally intended to motivate horses to go further without food, thess blinders work too well. The affected steed will ignore commands and instead run forward blindly and ceaselessly, only stopping when it is physically blocked or dies, usually from exhaustion or mishap.

what are you doing here, dad?

>Until your huge supply causes the demand to go down and molasses to be dirt cheap.
no, no. you control the supply. you don't sell gobs of it for dirt cheap fr a quick cash-in. you sell SOME of it as molasses at market value, you use some of it to make booze and sell that, you use some of it for fuel research (ie. you make ethanol) and sell that. you see where i'm going with this?

For what purpose?

>a mimic detective
This was a good and worthwhile game you played, user.

Aka kryptonite

That sounds like a good idea for an item, actually.