A Simple Idea, A Common Magic Item, A New Way To Deliver Messages Or Dead Drop Some Secret Plans. This

A simple idea, a common magic item, a new way to deliver messages or dead drop some secret plans. This one is courtesy of Darkflux from our Twitch chat! Thanks for the inspiration buddy!

Message in a Bottle

Wondrous Item, common

“An old rustic antique glass bottle. It once bore some words or images on the side but they have long worn off. It’s corked closed and empty.”

You can use an action to speak up to 25 words into this magic bottle and cork it. Whenever the cork is pulled the message is repeated back. Unless another message is spoken into the magic bottle it will always repeat the same message when uncorked.

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Would you kindly make a table for different things a party might find while searching an abandoned home?

Things To Find In An Abandoned House Rolling Table

We love a good abandoned house around here. They always hold a treasure trove of treasure...or traps.

Look at this precious little fella! They're just a lil' guy who wants to love you and protect you. So, whenever someone offers you a goodberry, make sure you check 'em before you eat 'em. And whatever you do, do NOT plant one of these. Just give 'em a good home on your shoulder.

Goodberry Borne

Wondrous Item, uncommon

“At first glance, this magical item looks like an acorn, but is actually a tiny magical creature. It’s a tiny fey that looks like a goodberry, but wears an acorn shell as a cap in hopes no one will want to eat it.”

As a bonus action, you can command this tiny magical creature to give you a hug restoring 1 hit point. A target must be conscious to benefit from this effect.

This magical creature is so small that it’s nearly impossible to hit. Any attacks against it are done at disadvantage, and you can use a reaction to take the damage yourself. It uses your AC, doesn’t suffer damage from area of effect attacks, but otherwise has 1 hit point.

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15 Things To See In The Astral Plane

Several dwarf stars are dotted around you, shining with spectral light.

You gently drift towards a dense orange nebula cloud, surrounded by intense magnetic fields that spark lighting across the sky.

You spot a young star incubating in a molecular cloud.

A comet with a tail of ionized gas whizzes past the outer edges of your vision.

Two stars in close orbit, connected by fiery tendrils of energy, light a path ahead of you.

A hypergiant star generates a turbulent solar wind that threatens to blow you away!

A shower of metallic and crystalline asteroids pelts your Party!

A turbulent gravitational wave that rips spacetime apart causes you and your allies to experience some strange warping sights.

A distant star emitting waves of plasma causes you and your allies to begin to feel lightheaded.

A swirling storm of ionized gas, thousands of times more massive than the sun, is on course to collide with your and your allies!

A star that flickers with bursts of intense plasma, creating a brilliant, rapidly moving point of light in a dark night sky.

A giant molecular cloud that burns hot and bright, sending out strange waves of sound and light.

An asteroid that glows with white hot molten metals leaves trails of burning lava in it’s wake.

Chunks of metallic silver wreckage, along with torn off pieces of a blackened purplish rubber-like substance, float past the Party at a speed just slow enough to catch.

A battle scene of years past has left several dead floating, perfectly preserved, along the banks of a dense fog cloud.

Orc Tavern

This Orc Tavern may look intimidating from the outside, but it is merely a tourist trap run by two entrepreneurial half-orcs.

This tavern simulates everything that happens in a real Orc mess hall, but makes sure that no one is cooked, stabbed, or eaten.

Download this map for free here.

This map is part of my Dwarven, Elven, and Orc Taverns pack.

Numenera Oddities

So. Numenera does the thing I love from D&D 5e, and that is trinket tables. Or, in this case, oddity tables.

Oddities are ancient salvaged techno-magical items that aren’t necessarily directly useful, like the more powerful one-shot cyphers or reusable artefacts, but are more there for the flavour of the world. Characters often start with them, GM assigned, and I assume you can find more of them out and about. And … I do love them. These are from the Oddity Table on pgs 305-307 of the Discovery corebook, and they’re just … so illustrative of this future fantasy, scavenger world, 'remants of past civilisations' setting.

I think one of the things that I most love is that, from the characters’ POV, in their medieval fantasy setting, these are inscrutable artefacts of a bygone civilisation, but from our POV, with our technology, you can so clearly see what some of them are intended to be:

26 – Series of thin plastic cards that show all kinds of unknown creatures. (Somebody had trading cards or card games during the past billion years)

20 – Plastic bottle that contains a spray that cleans any stain and never runs out. (Somebody finally invented a universal household cleaner, an infinite universal household cleaner, I bet they made an absolute mint)

30 – Metallic jar that maintains the temperature of liquid inside indefinitely. (Somebody made an improved thermos)

60 – Cup that instantly boils any liquid poured into it. (As well as an instant tea/instant pot noodle/instead meal cup)

33 – Small wand-like device that keeps away normal insects in a 5ft radius. (As well as mobile personalised insect zappers)

55 – Shirt that displays your muscles, bones and internal organs when you wear it. (And, for whatever reason, a portable x-ray shirt? Was this a practical invention first, for field x-rays, or was it for funsies, or both?)

58 – Bracelet with a tiny bell charm that rings like a massive bell when intentionally rung. (Personal protective device?)

80 – A bracelet that rends you unable to reproduce while worn. (An easy, non-invasive contraceptive device, interesting)

76 – Ceramic ring that makes you feel as though gentle hands are caressing your body. (As well as a possible sex toy? Or aide for touch-hunger? Not going to lie, if I touched this with no context and no idea what it was going to be, I’d freak the hell out)

79 – A pair of small, floating cubes that keep a small, enclosed room at the temperature at which water freezes. (Portable refrigeration)

Like, a lot of these are clearly futuristic novelty items or household appliances, as well as some more in-depth and casual medical technology. And I love that? I love that. You’re in a medieval fantasy scavenger world where the detritus of past super-futuristic civilisations litter your world, and you’re there picking up random bits of ancestor junk and trying from your own frame of reference to figure out what the fuck they had going on.

Some of the oddities are a bit more inscrutable even from our POV.

7 – Box with a tiny group of musicians in it who play when it is opened and look horrified when it is closed. (Now, this could be a novelty item again, but this is also a setting where ancient crystal obelisks eat people and trans-dimensional portals and pocket dimensions are also a thing, so … not beyond the bounds of possibility that those are live and enslaved musicians getting shunted into a pocket stasis dimension every time you close the lid)

And some have a language barrier in effect:

16 – Small rod that emits a voice saying the same thing in an unknown language every time a button is pushed. (Could be anything from a personal memo to an ancient distress call)

47 – Five metallic plates that orbit around your head and display ever-changing, unknown symbols. (I fucking love this one, if I was a scholar in this world I would dedicate my life to figuring out this language from the presumption that those symbols are some form of reading from me and if I can just figure out what they’re reading from what symbols show when, maybe I can Rosetta stone this language out? I mean, that’s a lot of assumptions, but you’d have to at least try, right?)

There’s also a series of oddities that are clearly communication/monitoring devices:

17 – Glass plate that shows what seems to be a live image of the moon, but from a closer vantage.

43 – Glass cube that shows what seems to be a live aerial view of an unknown, ruined city.

89 – Plate of glass that, when you view the night sky through it, reveals ten times as many stars.

And we, the players, know that the setting does have ancient satellites still in orbit around the planet, full of nanomachines and other ancestors-know-what. So these are clearly receivers for satellite feeds, or possibly in the last case a light-pollution filter. Though I’d be interested to know if that last one is a live image, or if it’s an image of the stars of this world several million years ago.

And then, in the midst of all that, there are several oddities that are clearly just art, or novelties, or just for fun:

57 – Amulet that, when worn, projects holographic images of fish swimming around you.

Is this a nightlight? A holographic art piece? A fun fashion accessory? I don’t know, but I desperately want one, and no matter how useless it is, I would not sacrifice this one oddity for any number of more useful cyphers or artefacts. It’s pretty, and I love it.

I love the design philosophy of these, the illustration of the world and its history that they provide. And, I mean, some of them, like D&D trinkets, can also function as plot hooks. Where is that unknown city on the live feed? Are those musicians real people trapped in a horrifying pocket dimension? Could you Rosetta-stone one of the ancient languages from that metallic plate device, and if you could, what other, potentially more powerful secrets would it unlock?

They’re just … I love trinkets. I love environmental worldbuilding, I love archaeology, I love the illustration of setting inherent in physical objects. These are fantastic.  

Trinket tables are the best. Honestly, if you are designing a game, do put in a class of objects that don’t exist for any mechanical, game purpose, but are just there to show your world. To show the ethos of your world via the tiny details and physical objects that populate it.

Also, this game appears to be, to a large extent, ‘fantastic archaeology: the setting’, and I’m here for it. Absolutely!