Low-key Magic Items for Tabletop Role Playing Games

Magic weapons are old hat. Yes, it’s nice to have a blade that goes snicker-snack, but they’ve been done to death. Here are a few enchanted widgets that won’t make your characters invincible in combat, but will make their lives a lot easier and enhance the atmosphere of any fantasy campaign world. No statistics have been included. This is intentional, as some gamers favor the WotC d20 system, some like Steve Jackson’s GURPS, others prefer Alderac’s Roll-and-Keep system, and pretty much every gaming group has their own house rules for whatever system they use. If you like these items and want to use them in your campaign, fill in your own statistics. You will be able to balance them to your own setting much better than anybody else ever could.

Yes, it’s a magical ring, but you’ve never seen one like it before. It doesn’t make you invisible, or grant wishes, or increase your strength. What it does is store kinetic energy. A character wears it on her finger as she goes about her daily life, and as she moves about, the ring absorbs the energy she uses to swing her arms, type, play the lute, reshelve books in the archives, what have you. But if the character is forced to defend herself and lands a punch with the hand that wears the ring, the ring’s accumulated energy is released to devastating effect (usually in the form of a damage bonus, but if your system allows special effects like knockback or stun, by all means use them). For game-balance purposes, the gamemaster could impose a limit on the amount of energy that can be stored at one time, declare that the energy can only be used on a live foe and not, say, a locked door or chest, or impose a slow recharge rate. Perhaps a small percentage of the stored energy also affects the wearer? The kinetic ring comes from Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series.

The Amber Light is a magical fire-starter. It’s about the size and shape of a half golf ball, and (obviously) amber-colored. If it were simply a lump of amber, it would fetch a fair price on the open market. But if a character waves his hand over it and places it in the middle of a pile of wood, it will get hotter and hotter until the wood catches fire. The amber light is waterproof, windproof, and never wears out. When the fire burns down to ash, all the chracter needs to do is pick it up, dust it off, and take it with him. Clever characters will find other uses for the amber light besides lighting campfires. Firey diversions, arson, and practical jokes are only a few alternatives. To make the amber light a more complicated item, the gamemaster can rule that it will only work with wood, or that it will keep getting hotter until whatever it happens to be touching catches fire. (If the amber light is sitting on something like an anvil, this could lead to disaster!) The amber light comes from the 1983 film Prisoners of the Lost Universe, with Richard Hatch.

These items are just a few examples of clever, not-so-obvious enchantments that I’ve run across while reading. No doubt you have seen similar useful if not glamorous magical gadgets in your own favorite books or films. I hope this brief article will inspire you to look beyond your tabletop RPG’s official sourcebook for unique treasures to place in your campaign.