[Gygax 75] 20 FromSoft-y Treasures

I'm doing a worldbuilding challenge. The story so far:

Gygax 75
Week 1 - The Setting
Week 2 - Carving out the Valley
Week 3 - Into the Mines
Week 4 - Hitting a Wall
Week 5 - Divide and Conquer
Week 6 - Closing up the Cadaver
Week 7 - Building Irontown
Week 8 - The final week!!!!!!

Last week of the challenge! Let's have some fun :-)

Week 5 (8) - design the larger world around the starting region. you don't need a detailed map of the whole world, but you should know the other regions that can be reached from the current one (either by overland or magical travel) so that you can start writing rumors to entice your players to travel to them.

I've been doing a lot of mind-mapping, interweaving all the settings and factions. Consider this more of a victory lap than something set in stone.

Far Off Lands

Most of the worthwhile setting stuff is inside the dungeons, under the valley. TBH the rest of the world is still recovering from the last apocalypse, but there's at least three places worth mentioning:

Gnosc. To the north. Dark wizard military. Their artilleromancers have artificially elongated skulls, and long brains to match. The "menhir" shape aligns their neurons, magnifying sorcerous output like a psychic railgun (see: forehead lasers).

1. Trepaning Dart: as dagger, +1. +1d2 psychic damage, save vs mental mutation. For each point of psychic damage dealt, the target gets +5% chance to miscast.
"The tools of dragon hunters long outlasted their empire. These crystal daggers were designed to subvert the dragon's most potent weapon; their minds."

2. Monologue: spell for wizards, copied from long stone tablets. 1d6 radiant damage in a 60ft beam of screaming light, +1d6/turn up to a cap. (Gnomen start at 3d6) For as long as you concentrate, you can spend your turn sustaining the beam, only turning your head up to 90 degrees at a time.
"Throughout history, the shape of power has been singular; a straight line, unbroken. The Gnomen are aware of this, and have learned to shape the mind into a rod of sovereignty."

Nemea. To the east. Merchant-berserker empire. They wear ward-mail, an interlocking pattern of protective runes painted directly on the body. Their wizards often fight in the nude, in close quarters, bare-fisted.

3. Imperial Howdah: sized for an elephant, can be carried as a palanquin. Seats 2. Those seated within are protected from the elements.
"Commissioned by the Carmine Lord on his campaign to the City of Mirrors. The second seat was reserved for his future wife, and is decorated with chains of red brass."

4. Four-Point Nemean Rune: ritual for clerics. 160gp of golden paints in a 10-inch radius runic circle. Everything inside the circle is invulnerable. The paint flakes away after four hours, or after twelve minutes of vigorous combat.
"The Isles of Nemea bleed gold. Nemean warmages do not fear copycats, as no other school boasts the funds to reduplicate their methods." 

Lands of Ashen Rain. To the west. Nascent warlords and their gunmetal.

5. Rustic Handcannon: tool of a stalwart defender. 3d6, 3 rounds/reload, blows up in your face on double damage dice. The spiked handle is designed to be driven into the earth and absorb recoil.
"The oldest of these weapons were forged in starlight, which soothed the fearsome temper of black powder. Today, the tradition is shirked by desperate smiths."

And the countless ruins. Old Paradise. Spagyros. The Moon. Traces of these remain, but the greater halls have vanished into the earth.

To expand on last week's base-building thingy, representatives of the Sorcerer Kingdoms will make contact with the valley as Irontown's prosperity makes it harder to ignore [some sort of town HP related "heat" mechanic]. I envision players bribing scouts to keep their iron trade a secret, at least until they've amassed the man/firepower to withstand a proper army.

I don't have a hexmap for the region outside the valley (yet), but if I did it would have a nearby asshole faction led by a minor warlord who wants to snatch the valley for himself. Like defend-your-town training wheels.

I'm probably overthinking this.

The White Tiger's guns are one defensive option; plutonium is another. The Dungeon provides.

Long Dead Gods

Also here's a few gods. I named four in the last post:

The Lion Sun. God of prosperity, the civilized world, and restrained ferocity, patron to serfs and bankers. "To shade the sun" means to hold back one's emotions. A popular fable details how the Old Sun chose his heir, and what became of the Lion's many siblings. 

The Old King. God of stone, the body, and language, patron to surgeons and miners. The Old King owns everything beneath the surface world; thus, all excavation is barter. His names are Hazog, and Kanek, and Burmanon II, and others.

The Black River. God of understanding, drinking, and death, patron to thieves and poets. If you drop something into a river, you have relinquished it, and anyone who fishes it out is its rightful owner. All rivers can speak; the Black River speaks like an explosion. "Everything ends up downstream."

The Moon. God of traveling at night, the natural world, and secrets. Actually two gods, the Nemesis and the Lover, worshipped as one. Mentioning one to the other is taboo. More than one fable begins with the Moon fooling a creature into calling it by the wrong name, as an excuse to punish them.

Here's some more, all dead, buried, or worshipped secretly.

The Pilgrim Tree and The Beast Tree. Rivalrous sisters cut from the same branch. Both fear the Gray Saint.
Hal'i, The Scaleless Mother. Mother of the second generation of dragons.
The Wyrm. Last metastasized in ancient times.
The Unspeakable Corpus, also called Ur-Lich. Fragments of the Corpus litter the world like scraps of ash.
Leviathan. Ghost-devouring whale, Lord of the Eternal Sea.
The High Warden, also called Belos, Askadion, and Eyoch. King of Hell.
The Line. Yet unbroken.
The Iron God. Worshiped by the depraved: first demons, then the Centipede Lord.
The Frog Pope of Spagyros.
The Dragon At The End Of Time. Foretold. Forewarned.

Long Lost Relics

I wrote 5 item/spell descriptions above. Here's 15 more:

6. Constellant Blade: a blacksnake weapon made of glass and stars. As glaive, +1d6 radiant damage, save vs mutation on 6s.
"The original architects of the Stellar Furnace were a race of noble giants, who could pluck the stars directly from the sky."

7. Flensing Sword: a long, curved sword of bone. +2 vs ghosts.
"Whales once ruled the surface world's seas, but departed. The sailing tradition of paying tolls to the sea continues to this day."

8. Ghost-Rotting Pot: a large urn of debased ghosts; scraps of former scraps. When smashed or imbibed, 2d4+2 cold damage in the splash radius (heals undead).
"The dead must be managed, lest decay set in. Bodies may be burned, but spirits must first be reduced."
("Yes, very good, but how does it taste?")

9. Syncretize: golden city sorcery, encoded in florid poetry. For 1 hour, two creatures understand one another and only one another.
"Thousands gathered amongst the roots of the Capital Tree. Dreams flowed like water beneath its arcing boughs, and the barriers between men eroded until they stood as empire."

10. Dark Sun Knight's Set: blackest plate eclipsing golden trim. +1/piece to save vs gravity. As a complete set, grants resistance to all forms of gravity damage.
"Mad Knight Narn surrendered his humanity to walk with the stars. The Dark Sun knights worship his new form as heretics."

11. Ring of Crawling Cruelties: an iron ring depicting a centipede. Restore 1 HP when you harm someone who trusts you.
"The phoenix centipede bursts into flame at century's end, only to emerge anew from its ashes. Through observation of this cycle, the Carmine Lord learned the secrets of life and death."

12. Chain of the Arena Beast: worn by the morningstar manticore, made of cold iron. You have an edge while riding or being ridden by a creature that despises you.
"Mad Knight Narn is widely credited with taming the sun, shackling it such that it marched across the sky."

13. Clot: blood sorcery, written in rags. 1d6 piercing to yourself and target, ignores iron armor, no Save.
"Ancient sorcerers were confounded by the properties of iron, which their magicks could not affect. The first blood sorceries were developed to subvert those properties."

14. Flagellation: blood sorcery, carved flesh tome. 2d6 piercing to yourself and everything nearby, ignores iron armor, no Save.
"Iron and Hell were alloyed in the earliest ages, when dragons yet ruled. Thus, many blood sorceries originate from demonkind."

15. Plutonium Shard: scavenged by glass giants on the Eternal Sea. Socketed item deals +2d6 necrotic. On crit fail, everyone nearby saves vs mutation.
"When too many spirits occupy the same space, they condense into a dark, howling stone. The ancients witlessly harnessed this haunted stone for its sorcerous potency."

16. Azure Missile: firmament sorcery, taught by the old red sage. Loudly declare the law; the first three creatures to break the law take 1d6 force, no save.
"Once, a philosopher thought the stars might grasp the keys to absolute morality. Thankfully, the law of stars is utterly alien to that of men, and is thus-wise soundly ignored."

17. Corpus Fragment: a scrap of the Unspeakable Corpus. Burn it: on your next roll, 1-16 = crit fail, 17-20 = crit success. Read it: save vs mental mutation.
"A lich's madness, blackened indelibly. The Order of Censures will pay any price to keep these pages apart."

18. Moonjuice: a jug of drug. Drink to surface an alternate personality, or create one if none exists. (A new alter has only as many memories as you wish.)
"The enigmatic Moon is actually two gods worshipped as one. Its highest priests, so often neglected, follow suit."

19. Dragonscale Set: heavy stone plate reinforced with steel. +2 AC/piece. As a complete set, grants immunity to lightning damage.
"When told of the dragon's extinction, the Old King dismayed. 'What,' he cried, 'will we serve to the guests?'"

20. Lens of the Giants: spotless black glass, two yards across, found in the deepest Giant Lookout. 1 HP. Reveals secrets unerringly.
"Having mapped and quartered the skies, astrologers turned their eyes to the earth, and found it rich with prophecies."

And that's the Gygax 75! My purpose fulfilled, I retreat beneath the waves from whence I came.

GLOGtober Day 3: Metauniversal Texts

Dmitry Khrapovitsky

These are slim paperbacks, some nearly pamphlets. Each varies wildly in content and print quality. Some are utilitarian arrangements in sensible fonts. Others appear to have been illustrated by six-year-old child suffering night terrors. They are always found in dungeons, still crisp and warm to the touch as if freshly transcribed.

Each tome describes a reality that DOES NOT EXIST. They detail FICTIONAL realms with NO BASIS IN TRUTH, where spells cannot speak and magic tastes like blood. Few themes are shared among the larger body of literature: the four-fold life cycle of Man; the near-obsessive tabulation of Wizardly Cubes.

For all intents and purposes, they should be harmless speculative fiction, but the Church confiscates every copy they come across. This is reason enough for everyone else to value them highly.

THE WRETCHED TEXTS

PCs can use a metauniversal text to literally change the rules of the game. This takes as much time in-game as it takes you to identify the rules you want to change irl. Small tweaks (like removing fall damage) can be made on the fly. Significant changes (i.e. anything that takes more than 20 seconds to figure out as a table) don’t occur until the party gets a few minutes to breathe.

Each text comes with a coupon for the Fundamentum (a metauniversal text containing your original ruleset). You’ll need it to reverse any changes you make. Copies are sold by gretchlings.

Oh yeah, gretchlings.

Ripping a hole in reality has consequences, and they are one of them. Whenever you use a metauniversal text, more gretchlings stumble into the world. They invariably live in the deepest dungeons, where they subsist on pity and blogposts. They’ll sell you metauniversal texts, some of their own creation.

You should probably kill them on sight. If enough accumulate in one place, they’ll gnaw thru your campaign’s suspension of disbelief and drop you into Phlox’s Discord.

It is trivially easy to write a metauniversal text. Encourage players to do so.

The Dream Nail (the only magic item you will ever need)

charging up

The Dream Nail. This forum post explains why it’s awesome in Hollow Knight. I’ll elaborate on why it works just as well in D&D.

---

The Dream Nail is a magic sword. It does not cut the physical; instead, the Nail is used to carve one’s way into dreams.
The depth of the cut dictates the depth of access. A scratch reveals surface-level thoughts. A deep cut lays the conscious mind bare. Drive the Nail hilt-deep into the forebrain, and one can cross the threshold into dream.
The Dream Nail cuts the spirit, and thus works on the living and dead in equal measure.

---

On the face of it, the Dream Nail is like a Zone of Truth/Speak with Dead that you stab people with, which is already fantastic. However, it gets even better because it opens

DREAM DUNGEONS

In a world rife with mind-readers and truth serums, those who bear great secrets must hide them from even themselves. They accomplish this by constructing Dream Dungeons; hostile dreamscapes designed to rebuff attempts at recollection OR infiltration.
These are dungeons! You can crawl them, meet people from the host’s memory, and fight monsters! You can use them to pry information out of those driven mad, those long dead, and wizards. You can pull an inception and influence them outside their dreams.
You can even dream-delve therapeutically, assisting the host by actually physically fighting their repressed trauma or unlocking their memories.

More things to do with Dream Dungeons:

• Explore an extinct civilization in its prime, as depicted in the interwoven dreams of the king’s mummified advisors.
• Undo an imperial sleeper agent’s brainwashing.
• Rescue a prince who has been spirited away in the dreams of a Grey Maiden.
• Defeat a memetic parasite in the mind of a mad paladin.
• Dive 5 dreams deep to incept the evil overlord’s downfall.
• Dungeon-delve through your own repressed memories.

Basically, the Dream Nail can nestle dungeons within dungeons, turn emotional challenges into dungeon crawls, and inject fantastical set pieces into temporally/physically/genre-ifically distant locales.

It’s a good idea. Steal it.

1d11 magic things in the magic man’s tower

I stopped posting for a month. It wasn’t fun. So from now on, I’m going to try to make one post a week, even if I don’t think its perfect, preferably publishing on Sundays.

...

(1) Trollseeds: tiny pieces of troll in tiny sealed glass bottles. When the bottles are opened, the trolls grow out the top, awake and hungry. Used by terrorists and assassins.

(2) Honey Cage: a little golden bird cage. Anything entirely contained by the cage is definitionally happy, well fed, and reluctant to leave the cage. A gnome named Nic is inside it

(3) Clown Eggs: three of them, painted with smiling faces. They hatch fully grown where others do not; in sharp places, cold places, in the company of despicable men. do not allow them to hatch.

(4) Wizard trap: an endless fractal textile or interminable equation. Wizard brains are easily fixated by patterns, and compulsively unravel at the sight of certain ones as they try to perceive the end. Has no effect on the illiterate, unquestioning, and simple minds of non-wizards

(5) Toddlebobs: Short, animated, tripedal piles of sticks with a weighty stone body. Used by wizards to clear minefields on the cheap. Prone to accidental sentience.

(6) The Great and Powerful OSC: A petri dish of immortal, telepathic stem cells. Will trade secrets in exchange for his other cell populations, which are hidden throughout the world as treasure. His telepathic range is enough to eavesdrop on the next room, which would be useful if you could get the honest truth out of the bastard.

(7) Hungry wastebasket: like a bag of holding, but it doesn’t give things back. If it vomits, it fills the room with a few centuries worth of garbage, 1d4 weird magic trinkets, and anything else you fed it.

(8) Automagic weapon: like a mini-gun with crystals and shit. Load it with four scrolls, roll Nd6 (N = # wizard templates) to fire. 1-4 -> cast the scroll spell; 5 -> cast nothing; 6 -> horrible mishap.

(9) Sword tabs: a jar of 24 (just use usage dice). Pop one with a swig of water. In 1d6 rounds, you vomit up a sword. 1-in-20 chance to give yourself a tonsillectomy.

(10) High-mass, weightless bullets: they’re magic, so they fit any model of firearm i guess. Instead of rolling damage, launch yourself in the opposite direction up to [damage]x10 feet.

(11) Donut Rat: a rat with no beginning or end. Moves by rolling on 8 legs. It’s alive and generally amiable. Other rats respect and fear it. Anything that passes through the hole in the center becomes extremely dirty, and anything that passes through the other way becomes extremely clean.

DEMON COUTURE

 

by Marko Mitanovski

The party meets an 8-to-18-foot-tall agent of chaos in the dungeon. What are they wearing? (Roll 2d6 once/twice)

(Sidenote: Demons are gender- and sex-fluid by default.)

11 - Gilded corpses with fused arms, worn as ear/lip/noserings.
12 - Haunted bone wind chimes hanging from neck-skin piercing. Sound incurs Save vs. above-ground drowning.
13 - Literally frosted tips.
14 - Chimeric leather skirt (blend of human and animal skin) that bleeds mercury when damaged.
15 - Torso piercing you can crawl through. Carries around a faithful, nude manservant inside.
16 - Skulls everywhere. You can never go wrong with skulls.

21 - Costume caricature of a Lawful Good-aligned god. Looks homemade.
22 - Billowing gown made of twitching feathers. Bleeds black and cheeps intermittently.
23 - Vorpal heels.
24 - Dress shirt composed of 1001 spell scrolls. Entire outfit has 1 in 216 chance of exploding. (Triple boxcars)
25 - Tasteful sunglasses.
26 - Rings made of other creatures’ fingers. Has a beholder’s array of touch attacks.

31 - Octuple-helmet-brassiere covering their rows of breasts. Harvested souls briefly inhabit the helmets and scream.
32 - Devilishly anachronistic suit and tie.
33 - Sewn lips. Speaks through corpulent avian familiar (1d4): lord emu; giant parrot; dire hummingbird; goose.
34 - Sentient ooze neck-pillow/seat-cushion. Demon is acid-immune.
35 - Subdermal implants the size of railway spikes. The demon is in pain, but that’s the price of fashion.
36 - Mammoth-head belt buckle. Primarily used for opening bottles.

 

by theDURRRRIAN

41 - Choking perfume. Smells like old people and sleep paralysis. Save vs. hallucinations.
42 - Beard and mane flowing like a solar halo, radiating heat and light.
43 - Additional, seemingly sentient, extremely conventionally attractive human faces sculpted onto various body parts (2d4): center of chest, back of head, forehead, elbow.
44 - Sword through the neck. Demon doesn’t breathe or need their head to live.
45 - Is actually a tongue-shaped parasite wearing an entire other demon.
46 - Armless dress resembling an upside-down rose. If the dress is damaged, the demon’s arms are freed.

51 - Cranial bifurcation from the mouth up. Split is lined with teeth; adds a bite attack.
52 - Cloak of severed hands clasped in prayer (“moral camouflage”). Demon appears as Lawful Good for purposes of alignment-detecting magic.
53 - Bite shoes.
54 - Headdress depicting half of an epic blasphemy in bones. (It’s a couple’s costume. A demon on the floor below is wearing the other half.)
55 - Tryptophobia holes in the forearms containing (1d4): blacksteel spears; undead thralls; alcohol; BEES.
56 - Titanite horn-tips; protect the horns from wearing down against the ceiling.

61 - Medusa-head tongue piercing. Save vs. Petrifying Gaze whenever they open their mouth.
62 - Different crown on each of its spiraling horns.
63 - Angel-steel iron maiden around the head. (Only a Lawful Good creature can open the mechanism.)
64 - Delicate gossamer veil gliding across the floor. Creatures caught in the veil are stuck fast and consumed faster.
65 - Fractal wizard-trap robes. Spellcasters who see it Save vs. eating their own fingers.
66 - This shit. (See below.)

This shit

 

Sword Plagues & Plague Swords

 

by Inoue Takehiko

Plague Sword

There is a certain kind of sword, found at the sites of recent battles or the ruins of subterranean dungeons. They protrude upright from decayed corpses, sometimes two or three blades clustered together in the ribcage of a never-buried soldier. The hilt twists skyward invitingly, inviting the bold to take up arms. These are the plague swords.

A plague sword is supernaturally sharp (+1 magic sword) yet brittle, losing its edge to the point of worthlessness after only a few cuts. When a plague sword breaks, slivers of the blade fly everywhere like tiny glass splinters, burrowing into any exposed skin within 5’. This deals no damage, at first.

Those cut by the sword collect metal slivers in their skin, only perceptible as a slight subdermal itching sensation. These slivers migrate along the nervous system to the host’s spinal cord, where they coalesce and form a tumor. The tumor then grows over the course of months, becoming hard and raised from the skin, accompanied by a sharp pain in the chest. Most hosts die from punctured lungs or an impaled heart. A rare few wake up one morning to find the blade poking through their chest.

If you cut open the tumor, you’ll find the hilt of a blade. At first, it’s little more than a runty dagger, something a trained surgeon or wizard could excise with time and caution, but with time it will grow into a full-fledged broadsword.

Plague swords feed on their host(’s corpse) until they attain full length. They grow hilt-first towards the sun, like iron flowers with glinting leaves. Then, they go dormant, waiting to be drawn in battle by a desperate knave and spread their seed once more.

 

by Pavel Kolomeyets

Sword Plague

Metal can get sick, which usually manifests as rust. Just as animals can catch many different kinds of diseases, so too can metal contract many different types of rust.

Common or lesser rust is not very contagious, and most commonly spread through water. It’s a slow killer which can degrade metal over many years, but can generally be cured with proper treatment.

Blue rust is to normal rust what the bubonic plague is to a really slow-acting cancer. Highly contagious and fast acting, blue rust can eat through a sword in seconds and spreads from item to item by touch (it’s also mildly airborne). When a patch of blue rust eats enough magic items, a blue ooze may form, and then you’re really fucked. 

Blue Ooze
HD 7  Armor none  Pseudopod 1d6
Move 6  Int 0  Morale 12
Special Oozy, Blue Rust, Feared by metal

Ooze creatures can crawl up smooth walls and through gaps as small as 1” wide. They take half damage from piercing attacks. They are immune to acid, but salt burns them as acid.

Any metal object a blue ooze comes into contact with contracts blue rust (magic items get a Save). Each round of combat, blue rust spreads from an item you are holding to the nearest item in your inventory. Items afflicted with blue rust break after one use, or after dealing/receiving any damage. A magic item consumed by blue rust transforms into a 1 HD blue ooze.

Metal fears the blue ooze the way human beings fear tigers. All attacks by metal weapons are made with disadvantage; swords will swing wide to evade the ooze, arrows will veer to safety, and ball bearings/caltrops will roll away from it as fast as they can.

Metal sings, albeit at a frequency we cannot perceive, and when it does it sings not for itself, but for its immortal God-alloys. The voice of metal echoes hymns of an ancient era before the sword plagues. Metal sings because it is praying for forgiveness, deliverance from a world of pain and suffering and rust.

better ditch that sword y'all
Sir Bedevere y e e t s Excalibur into a lake

 

1d12 Magic Items That Encourage Teamwork

Try these out in your game if you find yourself/your players forgetting about their +1 swords or whatever.

1d12	Sweet Loot
1	Slingin' Buckler - A circular bronze shield with two crossed swords on its face. The subject of legend among the pirates of Naga’s Choke Bay. Well-balanced for projectile applications (as throwing hammer). When thrown, the wielder may name an ally for the buckler to ricochet towards, regardless of whether it hits its target. The ally can catch the buckler with ease unless their hands are full. If they fail to catch the buckler, it hits them without fail.
2	Brothers of Tempest - A hammer and short sword that crackle with blue lightning. Said to have been forged instantaneously when two lightning bolts struck the peak of Mt. Tyrem. The weapons are paired, dealing bonus lightning damage if a single creature is struck with both weapons at the same time. If both weapons are being held by a single wielder, they’ll deal the same damage to them. Can also be used to light fires/power electrical circuits (if your setting allows for that).
3	Collars of the Faithful - Twin silver collars worn around the neck. Traditionally used by the moonfolk to spirit-link with blinkdogs. The items are paired; when one collared creature takes damage, the other is instantaneously teleported to a random unoccupied nearby location.
4	Hythria’s Splinters - Two wands carved from a dark, near indestructible wood. When activated, the wand/s emit a faint red beam indicating the location of the nearest inactive Hythria’s Splinter. If the wands are used to cast spells simultaneously, one spell (chosen at random) will consume the other and gain its spell levels (i.e. a level 5 fireball and a level 4 magic missile could become a level 9 fireball). When seven Splinters are gathered, something crazy happens.
5	Mason’s Belt of Becoming - A heavy belt lined with basilisk scales. Stolen centuries ago from the Etched Tomb of Eternity. When activated (command word chosen upon attunement), transforms the wearer into a perfect diamond surrounded by a 10ft cube of inanimate stone. The wearer has some control over the shape of the stone, and may add stairs or engravings as they wish. Touching the diamond reverses the transformation and dispels the stone.
6	Peluah, the Wooden Quiver - A thick disk of ringed wood on a cord with a target painted on its face. Designed by some sick elvish fuck. Any arrow fired with the intention of striking Peluah will strike it without fail, curving in midair if necessary. If a creature is wearing or carrying Peluah, the arrow will critically strike the creature instead.
7	Windswept Tower Gate - A tower shield emblazoned with three arrows pointing skyward. A holy weapon once wielded by the siege-knights of Tusikk. Once activated by its wielder (command word chosen upon attunement), the shield accelerates objects in contact with its front face in the direction of the arrows. With a running start, allies can use it to leap great distances.
8	Quill of Dimensionality Reduction - A brilliant blue quill that writes without ink. Made from the feather of a fourth-dimensional raptor. When a certain glyph (chosen upon attunement) is drawn, the wielder becomes an appropriately-sized two-dimensional ink figure on any surface they can touch with the quill. They can hear and see the outside world perfectly well, but can only move in two dimensions  (see: A Link Between Worlds). They return to the physical world once the glyph is erased by another person.
9	Veil of Enormous Illusion - A bejeweled headdress made of gossamer golden thread. Originally woven by the giants of Hagra Sha. Disguises its wearer as anything so long as both the wearer and desired disguise are 8 feet tall or taller. The veil does not discriminate between a single very tall adventurer and two adventurers on each other’s shoulders.
10	The Music Cow - A four-chambered nightmare bagpipe from hell. Said to have belonged to Demogorgon himself. It has two mouthpieces, and requires simultaneous checks and a lot of practice to play “well”. Songs written for the Music Cow have spell-like properties. The sound carries for miles over open land and is literally poisonous to angels/devils.
11	Bands of Fate Intertwined - Two rings made of red thread and identical sapphire teardrops. Worn by shadeling lovers on the steppes of Ravenna. When two players make simultaneous attacks or skill checks, they may agree to exchange d20 values (after the roll but before hit confirmation). If one player rolls either 20 or 1, both players take that value. If both 20 and 1 are rolled, the rings disintegrate.
12	Light of Day - A marble-white longsword which glows like the sun. Wielded by three generations of deva royalty in the forgotten age, only to be lost in a feud for inheritance. Its so juiced up with magic that it cuts just as well as a mundane sword from inside the scabbard. Deals a shit-ton of damage, but drawing it from the scabbard blinds the wielder to all living things.

btw i stole this formatting from Grindstone Games. Go check them out.

"dammit, another fucking +1 sword"
by Denman Rooke

1d20 Pseudo-Fictional Plants

hanging man orchid

1d20	Pseudo-Fictional Plants
1	Monkey Flower. A yellow, five-petaled flower, said to look like the face of a laughing monkey. Grows around hot springs and volcanic plains. The stems can be stewed to increase one’s heat tolerance for a few hours. Tastes bitter and musky.
2	Bleeding Tooth. An off-white, asymmetrical fungus that grows on the temperate forest floor. Secretes a dark red, bitter fluid easily mistaken for blood. Can be “““milked””” for its pigment, which acts as a human/animal blood substitute in certain rituals (devils and outsiders can’t tell the difference, but animals can).
3	Rockrose. Evergreen plants with pink and white flowers native to chaparral regions. When pressed, the fruit bursts violently, emitting tiny sparks capable of lighting small fires. The seeds grow best in wet ash.
4	Touch-me-not. A shade-loving creeper with pink and white flowers. When touched, it retracts into a bud, then signals nearby flowers to do the same. Distance of signal travel is based on force of impact. Used by hunters and fae alike to pinpoint activity in the forest. Sometimes cultivated by eccentrics as short-range noiseless communication systems.
5	Corpsevine. A hanging creeper with a heavy ballast-like fruit. The vine contains a fluid which smells of decomposing meat, attracting seed-spreading scavengers when the fruit falls (or a machete cleaves the vine). This fluid can be drained and bottled as an insect/wandering monster attractant.
6	Miracle Berry. A red berry found in warmer climes. Chewing these berries makes everything taste like the sickly sweet berry for 1d4 hours.
7	Sandbox Tree. A jungle tree bearing fist-sized brown seed pods. The pods explode with a loud crack when ripe (or thrown), sending seeds ricocheting at high velocity in all directions. Functions mostly as a noisemaker, but could deal damage per DM fiat.
8	Gympie-Gympie. A plant with broad, serrated leaves and magenta berries. Covered entirely in tiny hairs containing a potent neurotoxin, except for a few stiletto-like red thorns at its base. The toxin causes intense, debilitating pain at the point of contact, lasting 1d4 years if untreated. 1d4 rodent corpses are impaled on the thorns, driven in agony to fertilize the plant.
9	Mirror Orchids. A nearly translucent five-petaled orchid, but you’ll never see them like that. Smell like oranges or apples. Grow near pools of clear water and mimic the shape/color of the last living creature reflected in the water after 1d4 hours. Taste like glass.
10	Bat Flower. A dark purple flower with many long, hanging filaments that exclusively grows on dungeon ceilings. The flower and its seeds fall upwards rather than towards the floor. Small objects wrapped in its filaments do the same.

a bat flower
it even looks like an OD&D monster

1d20	Pseudo-Fictional Plants
11	Well Moss. A thick, scratchy green moss often found clinging to wet stone. It sticks to everything except metal, and can be used to scrub metal objects clean. It does, however, stick to human hands (gross), as well as silver and other outsider metals.
12	Skeleton Flower. Tiny, six-petaled white flowers with huge green leaves the size of buckler shields. All parts of the plant turn translucent when wet and revert when dry. Entirely odorless and tasteless.
13	Bladderwort. A carnivorous yellow flower which floats above water. Traps and digests prey in fist-sized “bladders”, which can be harvested and filled with air (after being cleaned of organic debris). Half as effective as normal air bladders.
14	Rusty Duckweed. Tiny green plants that quickly grow over water and metal. Edible, but you’d need to skim a small pond for a decent ration. Proliferates quickly (1 ration/hour) if you “feed” it silver (1 sp -> 1 ration). Dies when it dries out.
15	Bear’s Head Tooth. A rare white fungus that grows on the sides of dead trees. Extremely delicious if cooked properly, a delicacy wherever you find it. Serves as a catch-all offering to anyone with a sense of taste: nobles, faeries, infernal patrons, etc. all love the stuff.
16	Victoria Lily. A giant water lily which can grow up to 10 feet in diameter. Can support one small, unarmored humanoid, but anything more will plunge right through. The red underside of the lily is covered in small spikes to dissuade fish from eating it. Holds its shape enough to be a great hat but a crappy shield.
17	Butterwort. A fist-sized, carnivorous plant with sticky leaves for catching small insects. Once stuck to a surface, the butterwort sticks until it dries out and dies. Easily uprooted. Occasionally blooms into a delicate purple flower.
18	Sloth Moss. An unassuming green algae which readily clings to animal hair and skin. Completely harmless. If properly cared for and allowed to flourish, sloth moss will disguise its host as a plant with its chemical language, protecting them from the ire of Shambling Mounds and Snapdragons.
19	Strangler Fig. A parasitic plant with broad pointed leaves and necromantic origins. Uses its roots to drain nutrients from its organic host (tree trunks/plant roots/corpses), enveloping them in a wooden husk. The roots are stiff and lightweight, even after the host has long since decomposed. Its fruit are large, gummy, and full of tiny seeds, one of which will grow into a close approximation of the host organism. Smart adventurers won’t allow corpse seeds to grow.
20	Walking Palm. A palm tree standing on spear-like roots. Moves at a glacial pace, or at a walk if no sighted creatures are looking directly at it. Can be guided with fertilizer and rich loam. Capable of galloping when infuriated, goring anything in its path with its roots.

Sidenote: Plants don’t like being stepped on or chopped for lumber, but they don’t get mad either. To infuriate a plant so much that it uproots itself, you need to really get vulgar and personal, speak their language, and present an existential threat to everything the plant loves and holds dear.

monkey orchid

Use these plants to add dynamic environments to a dungeon, spice up your travel time, or give the tree-hugger herbologist player something to get excited over.

 

Oh, and if you have flowers in your dungeon, you’ll probably want some pollinators.

Melhemeret’s Mole
HD 0 (HP 1)  Defense unarmored  Claws 1d4
Move 5  Dig 10  Int 2  Morale 2
Special can smell color

A furry, fist-sized mole with paws like shovel blades. It is nearly blind, but can “smell” brightly colored objects through the earth. It consumes its own weight in grubs and beetles each day, but has a particular taste for flower nectar. Often accidentally digs into dungeons, lured by colorful gems and the belongings of fallen adventurers. Named after the infamous illusionist who bankrupted the Dashiran military with counterfeit gold.

Burrowbees
HD 2 (swarm)  Defense as leather  Sting 1dX (where X is the swarm’s current HP)
Move 2  Dig 1  Fly 15  Int 8  Morale -
Special blindsense

White bees with red eyes. They burrow through dungeon walls at half speed by spitting up acid and digging with their overdeveloped mandibles. They dig sprawling hives in dungeons with flowering vegetation and supplement their diet with anything that wanders into their thousands of tunnels. The queen is huge, about the size of a small dog, and buried behind 10 feet of rock. If you manage to avoid getting stung to death she might be willing to barter (of course she speaks Common, why wouldn’t she).

No morale; they’ll die for their hive. Their intelligence is their queen’s intelligence. A wooden door might stop 1 bee, but it won’t stop a swarm for more than 2 rounds.

1d4	Burrowbee Queen Loot (roll twice)
1	Royal Jelly. A month’s supply for 10 gp (doesn’t count as a full meal). Consuming Royal Jelly every day leads to the development of various facial features common to the region’s nobility (at least 3 elements that fit your setting, e.g. blue eyes/attached earlobes/Hapsburg chin). +1 Cha if eaten every day for a month, +2 Cha if eaten every day for a year (doesn’t stack). The people will be more likely to believe your claim to the throne.
2	A yellow leather-bound spell book. Contains Grease and Grow Beard. She’s not sure where she got it from, but she’s sure she doesn’t need it. The inside cover says that it’s 15 years overdue at Our Lady Sorrow’s Library.
3	The Maguffin Rose. An extremely rare and delicate flower in a glass vase. It’s worth 60 gp aboveground, but she’ll give it to you for 5g or a favor. Doesn’t need sunlight, but must be watered every 2 hours. Refracts light like a prism through its crystal leaves. Try not to drop it, you clumsy clod, or the stem will shatter and it will be worthless.
4	An Apiomancer’s Monocle. It’s a little sticky. Plant buds viewed through the hexagonal lens will bloom in 2 days time with no ill effect on the plant.

a male digger bee