Café de Nuit

I wonder how often this comes to pass, that a DM decides to inject/allow comedy through a possibly unconventionally useful but otherwise absurd item or spell.

I have a few that come to mind...

First is something that was called the Staff of Chaos... It did utterly random things that required the deposit of a coin into a slot. These effects were completly random, and of any severity. Also this had a disturbing effect on the characters sanity, as they came to rely on it and it seldom ever saved them. It's creator was a dragon that did not want to hunt for coins. Eventually it randomly vanished and the character most attached to it began to look for it where ever they went.

Next is the Immovable Hat... It just randomly becomes immovable for 1d6 minutes which can be quite inconvienent/usefull depending on the position/situation you are in while wearing it.

One item was a Beard of Trained Squirrle Summoning... Did exactly what it says, but the beard is permanent...

+5 Vorpral Spade Shovel... Digs perfectly and fast, scooping twice as much on a natural 20...

Hand of Future Glory (Still attached)... The character had to sell his hand to a mage to repay a debt from childhood and it detects as if magic, but has no actual power... When the character died the mage appeared and took the hand...

Golden Dragon Scale Cod peice of Natural Armor +5... Nuf said...

Cursed Ring of Sustance... Actually it was a Ring of Obesity, as the cursed character ate twice as much while still gaining the benifit of being full each day. They bloated up until they could nolonger move due to dropping Dexterity... Even then they deny any hunger, or weight gain...


As for spells only one my friend came up with comes to mind...

Exploding Shoes: As advertised the targets shoes explode loudly leaving scorch marks on feet and embarassing or causing the target to fall but otherwise no damage. Several galavanting bards fell prey to this spell... And anyone who messed with his character... And some people he just decided to use it on...

Just a few I have witnessed, come up with or acquired in game...

Wasn't in Ravenloft, but my all-time favorite magic item was the "bag of picking" that one wacky DM gave me. When you reach in the bag, you pull out a random item from the 2e equipment tables. Almost never useful, but lots of fun. The one time I got lucky, we all fell in a deep pit, and I was hoping for a ladder or grappling hook or something. I got a galleon. We climbed up the rigging to safety.

As for spells, I remember fondly an April fools issue of Dragon which took a bunch of spells and mismatched them to comic effect. Magic Mouth+Burning Hands=Burning Mouth (Material component was a Jalapeno pepper)

Polymorph other: Turn him to a girl. Somehow, when the big bad wizard threatened one of the PCs with this, showing him his former servant (now a girl) the barbarian panicked. He could live with being a toad forever he even hoped to be transformed to a bear... but to become a woman was something that this unwashed warrior could not accept.

The player was laughing quite sometime with this. He told me that at night, he wouldn't sleep just in case the mage sneaked in and did his trick... when I told him that eventually he fell asleep, he told me that when he woke up and understood that he had drifted, the first thing he reached for was his "manhood".

If I was playing Ravenloft back then (12 years+ ago) I would ask for a horror check on the sight of the weak woman the PCs have met as a male apprentice.

apple of discord!(see Greek mythology for details)

The Beggar's Cloak. A minor artifact that appeared to be nothing more than tattered rags. Has a benefit of halving any damage the wearer suffers. The other half of the damage is inflicted upon the most valuable thing the wearer has (or owns) other than the cloak. If the item has any hardness, the damage reduces the hardness until it becomes 0 and then the item starts taking hit point damage. Once the bearer owns nothing of value (including clothes) the next time they suffer damage they suffer the full amount and the cloak turns to tatters, only to reappear somewhere else on the same plane.

Barrel of Infinite Fortune Cookie Wisdom...

Contains an infinite number of fortune cookies that when drawn will give a cryptic but appropriately inspiring snip it of advice on the current situation. However sometimes they are off topic or even just amusing. Just buy a bag of fortune cookies and don't let the players over use it or you may run out or it will lose effect!

Rod of Relativistic Immovability

Normal Rods of Immovability just hang there relative to the planet they're on. But the RORI (Rod of Relativistic Immovability) stays in the same place with respect to other astronomical bodies!

Its effects will depend on the planetary physics of your campaign setting, but will be dramatic either way. If it's geared to remain still relative to the Sun, and is used on Earth, the rod will explode away from the user at several times the speed of sound in a parabolic arc, in excess of 30 km per second (which is the speed of the Earth relative to the Sun). The energy caused by a rod-sized object barrelling through the crust of a terran planet at such speeds has been known to cause earthquakes, undersea explosions, and perturbations in the planetary orbits.

If the user activating the RORI is lucky enough to be east of the rod, it will fly "away" from him. The sonic boom and atmospheric implosion will likely leave enough of his corpse to bury - albeit possibly flung a great distance. If the user is foolish enough to be west of the rod at this time, the RORI will fly through him, reducing him to a perfectly ionized gas as it accelerates instantaneously to a relative speed of 108,000 kilometers per hour.


Warranty expires upon activation.

Addendum to the above:

If you gear the RORI to be fixed and unmoving regarding the actual Universe itself, things get really scary.

I have consulted with a more knowledgable source and it seems that current science has it that the Earth is moving roughly towards the "south" pole of the cosmic microwave background at around 600 km/s. This is about 2.16 million kilometers per hour. So if the RORI was geared to the surface of the last known scattering, it would leave your hand at about 0.2% the speed of light. The last thing you'd experience would be a sensation of extreme speed and Einstein tearing his hair out.


For added consternation, a wicked DM can have it that any given RORI is automatically geared towards the surface of the last known scattering.