Above, beneath".Īn intricate knot that nobody seems to know how to tie or untie – sailors believe it to be bad luck. If you couldn't guess by now, I really like trinkets (so much so that I actually wrote a table of 100 new trinkets to add to the list in the DMG).Looking for more D&D items, check out our store.Ī bronze box containing a tiny wooden owl.Ī solid blue metal sphere, one inch in diameter, with three parallel grooves around the circumference.Ī ceramic puzzle cube, with each face divided into four independently rotating squares enameled with astronomical signs.Ī square of bear-beetle leather, a creature unique to the misty woods of Cix.Ī sheet of vellum on which is crudely painted a herbal plant that you have yet to identify.Ī cut yellow chrysanthemum that never dies.Ī palm-sized iron cage: the door doesn't shut properly, as the tiny lock was broken from the inside.Ī blob of grey goo, slippy but safe to touch, kept in a ceramic pot.Ī dried sky lily, from the tip of the Godshead, an impossibly high mountain.Ī glowing blue-green line, six inches long, but with no discernible radius.Ī scrap of paper on which is written, in Goblin, "My dearest Bess,".Ī keychain holding the head of a broken key.Īn echo pearl from the depths of the Vibration Lake.Ī fossil of an extinct many-limbed critter.Ī bronze gear on which is etched the word "Moon".Ī map of a labyrinth, on which is penciled a line that starts at the centre but fails to connect to the entrance.Ī square of ironsilk sewn by the geargrubs of ancient Siclari.Ī travel set of paints: someone has used up all the black.Ī small bar of orichalcum, a metal only mentioned in ancient literature.Īn invitation to a formal ball to be held in two years time.Ī torn page on which is written "Death! / Plop. What if the gold coins that the party find are marked with faces of long-dead rulers nobody has ever heard of, along with a slim book containing legends from this long-dead culture? That book is nothing but a trinket, but combines with the strange currency it might prompt the players to go and investigate it, sending them off on an adventure that feels organic to them - that is, it feels like they're adventuring because they have a purpose that they decided on themselves, rather than because they're following a quest that you set them on.
GOTHIC TRINKETS TABLE DND BEYOND PLUS
Plus you provide possible hooks for future adventure. If you pepper loot caches with unusual - but non-valuable and non-magical - trinkets, you not only get more interesting rewards for encounters than "You find x amount of gold and x potions, plus some magic weapons", but you also have the opportunity to tell your players things about both the location they're adventuring in and the world in general. I think there's also a possiblity for them to add extra levels of detail to the world that you as a DM build.
Why do I have a small glass feather? Why, exactly, can this slim black candle I'm carrying never be lit? Some of the most interesting roleplaying moments at my table have come from players coming up with explanations for, and interesting uses of, the trinkets that they've been carrying since first level.
Personally I see trinkets as both a fun thing for the character to have, and as a key to generating interesting details about a character that the player may not have thought of before. But there are definitely ways to make a trinket much more than just a unique item of questionable use or value. I wouldn't do that kind of thing for every campaign for fear that it would grow old, but then, I also don't insist that players roll trinkets at the start of every campaign for the same reason. And then they arrived at a ruin that wasn't at all related to the diplomatic mission that brought the group of strangers together as a party, and suddenly found their trinkets to be directly related - one had a partial floorplan that turned out to be a map of the ruin another had a glass eye that served as the key to open a secret door hidden with a statue missing an eye another had an indecipherable map that murals beyond the secret door served as a decryption key for and lead them through labyrinthine passages an alabaster mask one of them had was actually the face of a magical construct they found at the center of the labyrinth that would provide them information they needed that information also told them the use of the glass orb filled with moving smoke that the last of them had. They each had a trinket that had come into their possession years before the start of the campaign under circumstances that caused them no suspicion at all a gift, something found when moving into a new house, that sort of thing. In one of my campaigns, I used the trinkets that the characters started with as a means to show the players how deeply their characters lives were being shaped toward a particular result. Monstrous Compendium Vol 3: Minecraft Creatures
0 kommentar(er)
