Café de Nuit

So. The loadstone basically looks like a smoothly polished stone and if thrown away basically reappears on the PC who carries it...

...has anyone ever tried to use it as an infinitely returning sling bullet?

Makes sense. Harkon Lukas has a cursed sword that always appears in his (humanform) hand during a fight, and he does weird tricks with it like throwing it at faraway people or allowing them to hold his sword as a sign of trust.

I suppose the question is: How long does it take to return? A crafty DM with a player exploiting this will have two obvious solutions...

a) the stone returns in 5 rounds (when most battles are over) (beware.. this answer will lead the player to toss the thing away every 5 rounds to circumvent the curse. If your speed is only slowed to half on every 5th round, that's only a 10% speed reduction)

or

b) the stone returns in less than a second (before it hits its target)


Of course, the mean DM will say:

c) the stone returns at the same velocity at which it left.

Generally speaking, when it comes to players trying to make lemonade from lemons when it comes to curses (including cursed items) I subscribe to the following rule: so long as the bad outweighs the good, they can do it. If the penalty of the loadstone is still greater than the benefit of using it as a returning sling bullet, then it would be fine to take the minor advantage. If the positive effects outweigh the negatives, however, I would rule that they could not circumvent their curse in that fashion.

That's a decision for each DM to reach on their own.