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I'm excited. Are you excited? I'm like literally I'm part of a rocker. How the fuck up, John?
So guys, do you believe in Magic? Well, yeah. Do you? Do you really?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like our friendship is magical. I believe in the heart of the dice. The dice, the side of the dice magic or the magic guys. Some people do have magic guys.
That's true. Some people like Cody have cursed dice. Who actually? He's not even here to defend himself.
No, he wouldn't. He would. He'd be like, yeah, he knows it's true. Yep.
His dice are always fucked. Yeah, he knows it's true. You always use the same dice. Mostly, yeah.
I mean, where my location is. You have three attacks. You don't roll 3D 20s roll the same D23 times. Is there because you believe your dice are special?
What's the winner? Probably. If the dice lands on a lower number, I feel like that is taken out of the pool. Mathematically, it's unlikely to roll the same number again.
So I'm more likely to roll a different number, but in our 3D 20s, then that's only one notch per dice. So you're driven by mathematics? I mean, theoretical mathematics. Somebody with a math.
That's bullshit. But over here in this kid. I'm going to call that superstition. But I did roll eight 20s last time.
So hey, I was banking those. You were banking. When your side for sure. No, he's not even flexing on everybody right now.
He rolled like eight D20s. It was unbelievable. Hey, so welcome to do a legend Lord. To you.
New world's productions. We've been talking for 10 minutes. We're all loosey-euc today. So we're running a shy couple of our members today, but we do have the great.
The Amos one. God damn, I literally set you up with the great Diamos one. Well, I'll know it. No, don't do it.
And then also with us, we have the fantastic, the stupendous, the miraculous, the wonderful. Fium Rob Fizz. Alright. Shout out, mom!
So today we are going to be talking about magic items. Yeah. Well, we've talked about magic. And then we've talked about monsters.
We talked about a lot of stuff this season. This is episode 23. Crazy. Crazy.
Two more at the end of season one. Yeah, stupendous. I'm proud of us. I think we really put a lot of heart into this and appreciate all of our patrons.
We appreciate all of our supporters. It's just awesome. A level of support that's out there. We talked about a lot of stuff.
We're gonna talk about magic items. I'm also proud of us too. Well, I'm proud of Keenan. I'm proud of myself.
I'm proud of Cody I'm definitely proud of Matt. Yeah for sure Matt. John, we've been meaning to talk to you for a while. You really need to step up your game.
Oh, right. Well, nobody's proud of me. No man. I think that magic items are obviously a really important part of D&D.
Really important part of any tip. I'm really proud of playing D&D, but I think in D&D especially, you know, mechanically a magic item is a way to add something to your character that is not part of your class, your race, it's not part of your build per se, and it's a way to differentiate yourself, right? Especially because a lot of times it's tied to the story, right? So like I remember when Chud got his throw in axe that could return to his hand and like how that became such a part of his personality and just like everything he did in combat was around that.
Then he had a relinquisher and then Mike took it away from me towards the end of the campaign. And gave me a better hammer eventually, and I'm like, I don't want this dirty hammer on my boomerang axe. Kurt's going through something similar to that too. He lost an item when he got captured by a...
Oh, we got a character dude's name. Oh yeah, so he lost an item. So he wasn't happy about losing an item. Isn't that funny though how you can become so attached to a magic item?
And so like we're just gonna kind of free, you know, I say free ball. Let's go free ball it tonight. Talk about magic items. You know, I'm going to command it.
Take our pants off. It's gonna be a great podcast. Really sad. I couldn't be here for this one.
I think that from now on when we just spit ball, we free ball. I'm not gonna go there. Wait, wait, so we're not supposed to be doing these podcast panels? You know, it is a free country and it is your house.
Okay, because you've never said anything to me about that. That was supposed to be the finale of season one surprise reveal all past. Yeah, they don't know. They don't have a camera in here.
I like my podcast mates like my mamosas bottomless. Oh, you guys are in for a tree with this episode. It turns out Matt and Cody were the maturing force. This can happen when we had Tommy on two for the the metal episode.
It was less you mean Tommy and it kind of got off the rich. It's really, really quick. Oh, Lord. If you didn't know, today's episode is going to be about magic.
That's not a bunch of balls. You know, balls and no pants. Yeah, we're here to talk about magic items. So let's start with this question in all the different campaigns you've played as a player.
What's been your favorite magic item that your character got to have? How about top three? Sure. Oh, yeah.
Oh, man. Okay. I mean, you start. Okay.
I can go with one. Okay. Really mundane. Clocal protection.
Really. It's effective. It's uncommon or uncommon. It's a plus one.
You're AC. Any classic and use it super useful. It doesn't require too much. For me, though, it's always been a fashion accessory because you can have a big cloak of whatever color you want with a sigil on the back or tattered or not tattered.
It really can like help fill out your character. You're looking like a hero or villain. And I think that that's really powerful plus plus one AC is super useful. And if you play like Mike does, you can sack it.
It's like a ring of protection plus that. Now plus two, you might see and a shield, you know, huge bump. That's a really like cloak ring cloak prediction. I think the fashion accessory, the cloak part is really cool though.
I think it's great. And I think it's great. And I think it's a plus one to save and throw us to. And we just always forget to add that.
I think pretty much every, well, every protection item gets you. I think they do. Plus your same throws. Yeah.
And we're just really, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. We ever remember that.
Oh, there's things that we forget all the time. Oh, absolutely. Well, it's not big spawn fan. And he has a super badass.
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, what about you, Mikey? So I obviously I don't get to play well until the last five years.
I haven't got to play as much as I have DM'd. I'm going to have to say probably my number one favorite magic item that I've had so far. It's been the staff of power. Oh, yeah.
Let me tell you the staff of power came in handy so many times in Realms of the Dragon. Because it's what it really did is not just that it did cool things, but what it did was it allowed me to save my spell slots. And since I already had the extra spell slot per level for the deep magic spells, when we were going through that dungeon grind of forever that took like 22 sessions and we were going through and we were like using everything using up their abilities. And you wouldn't let us rest.
We could rest. I still had full spell slots almost by the time we got to the end for that final fight. Yeah, that was super important because I was just using everything. You're using all your magic items.
I had a staff of fire. I had staff fire. I was I think I was the name for it. But it was basically fire.
It was like fireballs. And then I had that stuff of power and it just allowed me to conserve all my spell slots for the final battle. So that's definitely my number one. Yeah, for me, it was Chud's Echo Fish and not because the item itself was in any way like helpful to my work barbarian because if I remember like the Echo Fish had like random abilities like you could speak with fish.
Yeah, you could create water. I think a little bit of healing. It wasn't so random. It was just all water based.
It was a lot of it. It was a lot of it. It was a lot of it. It was a lot of it.
It was a lot of it. You could travel by water. You could literally take in all you guys like. I think we did that one time.
I think we did that one time. It was really not set up for you. It really wasn't. But Chud loved that item and protected it so fiercely and it became part of his personality was tied to that Echo Fish.
You existed into the universe actually by your first to the first session as you've all heard into Mario where he made up the Echo Fish. So we had to make one. It was like a riddle. If you get our quest to reduce adventure on our website, there's a riddle in there and Chud interpreted that riddle the way it dumbed half work barbarian.
Well, the answer is some kind of echo fish. And then my clear on is like there actually is an echo fish artifact out there. That's great. I can't believe Keenan didn't pick the challenge.
That's my number one. I said three. I was turning off the top. You're going to go in.
I'm going to go in. I'm going to go in. No, no, of course. My second one, I might say the nine life stealer.
It's a cool sword. It's got like up to nine rubies in the hilt of it. And then I think that if you kill something with it, you can heal like three to eight. And it's just a plus one or plus two sword.
But I read something at one time. Someone did it where at the head it set up. So once the player got all nine kills, it was going to do something. And then that made me think that like you could have it like summon a demon or like unlock another power or do something interesting to it.
I think of that when they give you a little bit of room or items, do something or kill counts or use counts that aren't just coming down to emptiness. That's really fun to play with because you might need to save a charge or maybe it's going to unlock something different in that item. Yeah. What else?
I literally at this moment cannot think of three favorite magic items that I've had as a player. I'm going home. I'm just like, I mean, obviously there are protections. I kind of like, like, Keenan said, they're very handy because you're safe.
But I can't think of the thing personally that has a character. I mean, I talked about a little bit how I had my one magic item from my original Sam Rijon that I played that I played that was basically like Saber. Oh, yeah. But it had limited charges.
Well, yeah, but let me tell you, I was like, it was great pulling that thing out. So one of my favorite of all time, I actually have, I don't know that I've ever actually been able to use as a player, but I love the deck of many things. Or I should say I like the idea. I was going to get them with their list.
I was going to get, I wanted to move on to this. To talk about items that are already out there that sometimes aren't necessarily benefit. I don't know how they're not combat related. Yeah.
You know, I'm telling you, I don't, you tell the items role playing items, basically. Okay. So, yeah. All right.
We're doing that. Back to me. Back to me. Yeah.
Okay. Then it's the Chal-Seboos. The typical boost fashion, the Chal-Seboos was completely broken by game standards. But if you were to fight with Mike's Rettus, you literally had to have it.
So my character, Seriel, was a cleric who I'm kind of kind of kidding about just be the best healing machine possible. And I really like healing. I like playing the healer. So with this, I was able to cast, or any spell I had that had healing rolling dice to heal was always maxed.
It had a number of spells already in it. It had a couple of other features too. Oh, I could cast, even though I was like fifth or seventh level when I got it, I was able to cast, was that feast called Heroes of Thieves, which removed, you couldn't be feared for 24 hours and poisoned, I think too. I circumvented the entire part of Mike's campaign by doing that.
He was like, oh, yeah, Heroes of Thieves plus HP heal, and you're not, you're mean to fear him. It just ruined part of his campaign. That was DM Mike early on learning fifth edition and screwing himself. It was quite funny.
The power level really made us competitive with what Mike can throw at us. It really upped the playing field because there were times where you would get down so low and I'd do a full heal on the party, which required a couple of turns. But then we would immediately get battered back down. It wasn't like, oh, now we just win.
He could throw incredible threats at us and make us fight and be terrified multiple times in the counter. Well, that's one of the things that, like I embrace it with the way I like to play things. I like to make the stakes pretty high. I know sometimes Cody has looked at me funny a couple of times.
I'm like, no, it's not if you think about it in the terms of the way I run my games. And that's the same thing like else. But yeah, it seems like there's some broken shit in Hell Squad. It's crazy.
Yeah, by fifth edition standards, it's broken. But not the way I run games. It fits perfectly. I think there's a powerful principle in there, right?
Like, as a DM, you need to understand what you're throwing at your players and then magic items are a great way to power up your players in order to meet what you're throwing at them. And reward them. Yeah. For exploration, for defeating big bads, this area is like looting things, exploring things and fighting a sacred relic on a path you don't think they would take.
I think of narrative things you could do, like, side with a shady character, but he's going to give you an item that helps make the big fight easier. And like, now as the player, you got to decide, oh my gosh, do I do the slightly not heroic thing here and have an easier fight? Or do you know, it's cool stuff you can do with that. There's a ton of great things about the magic items that you can use within the story itself.
And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about a little bit about them more. I don't want to call them mundane items because I don't think mundane is the right word. Like, utility? Utility?
Rol playing items that work in that way. Some of my favorites actually came out of second edition. And I've replicated some of those actually 4.5e because they were nowhere in the, well, we'll get to the magic items in 5e in a second here. At least the ones that, you know, were came out in the first books.
So two of my favorites were the warp marble. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which is basically this marble sized marble that you can command to basically capture somebody.
And if you were successfully capture someone, they're trapped inside the marble. And they don't need air, water, food, and you can keep them in there. And that's cool, right? Eventually, you know, if you're trying to defeat somebody, you got to let them back out.
So it is a good way to like, just to trap somebody for a moment. And it had some interesting features like if, obviously, if you've tried to put somebody else in there, that other person popped back out and stuff. But what happened with my players characters is they got very creative on how they use that. It wasn't just about capturing somebody because it was always hard to do anyways, right?
They had their saves and maybe they'd make their save and they didn't get sucked in. But they would use it to gather information sometimes. Like they'd leave the warp marble like on a table and, you know, go out and be with them, command range, do the command and capture somebody. So they could talk to them without getting, you know, without having to fight to talk to them because they get prepared.
They let the person out. Boom. Then their surrounding person obviously just like a good fight. They can talk to this guy.
The other thing they did very creatively is they took, they took Charlie's half-oger fighter slash the gillion. And they would put him in the warp marble. Okay. And then they would take that warp marble and either slingshot it or throw it behind enemy lines or over whatever.
And basically getting him into places where- He's basically a Pokemon. Yeah, he's basically a Pokemon. He's a Pokemon for the first- He's a Pokemon for the first- And that was just a super creative use of that. And that came out of the Tomb of Magic, I believe.
Oh, it was all magic. It was a great second edition. Yeah, another great one that came out of the Tomb. So this is what I'm saying about demonstrating a utility item, right?
And the other one that came out of that too that really demonstrated utility item was, no, no, it wasn't out of that. Maybe it was out of the Sea of Fallen Stars book. It was called the Crystal Parrot. And the Crystal Parrot can basically be put anywhere, right?
And it could either record things that it sees within a certain range or could be used as an alarm system. So it was a great way if they needed a room guard if they're not going to be in it. They set it off. Somebody set that trap, or the alarm off and they know shit somebody's in that room.
And or to have it as a backup when you had somebody on a watch. Yeah. So there's just items like that. I love that, man.
Like I could imagine like recording a corrupt town official, you know, and then playing it for the citizens. And like, that's cool. And I think you bring up a good point. Like Magic items don't always have to be about combat.
No, they don't have to be super powerful to be useful. And they can actually change things or really think about it. They can change narratives in a lot of ways. Yeah.
Well, absolutely they can. Well, how do you guys feel about like you were talking earlier about having a cloak of protection and ring protection? Like, how do you feel about, you know, 5e caps you right on the amount of the two Magic items you can have? I don't think we've ever played that way.
I think we've always just allowed within reason. I mean, obviously, some of it's like, well, more entangling is a protection like we did now. But I also always go off the one Magic ring when he chained rules. I think that's actually how it might be because in certain things aren't a tunable.
Like cloak of protection, or tunable items. It's only like higher power level items required to be a tunable. Right. So how do you decide when there's too much Magic items or not enough?
You know, I don't know. It depends on the campaign you're playing. You know, I love running high Magic stuff. I mean, really do.
It's the best to play. I mean, I've always done the same thing you did. Like, okay, you never ring on each finger, you know, or, you know, but I would let you expand. Oh, you can have an earring.
You have an earring. Nothing one stroke ring. You have a stroke ring. I don't care.
Full circle. Full circle. You know, things like that. You know, like one cloak, obviously.
You know, one piece of armor, obviously that kind of stuff. If you played long enough that you got a plus two, you know, a superior and you got a plus one dagger and you have a crossbow and a plus two or whatever, you know, whatever you have, that's fine. I don't think you should limit that stuff because they're only going to use the weapon at the time. As long as they have a reason to sort it.
So like if you had like an arsenal like that, they had a bag of holding. Yeah, you're a walking around. Or if it was like a large fighter, maybe you can have three swords on it, something like that. Wasn't really common.
But if you look at like Japan, you always had a walk in a katana. You had to have both. Like having dual weapons and multiple weapons on you. It's fair.
So it's not like a cumbrance. Yeah, I think so. As far as the attunement thing goes, the only thing I've really enforced in Tumen on is the very high level items. Like the artifacts.
Like the artifacts that you guys went after and got like Chausaboos and Echofish and Silver Arm, a core and all that stuff. But like the low level items, even some of the ones they say you have to attune to them, it's like, you know, not why. Yeah, I don't agree. It's funny to bring up artifacts because when I was a teenager when PSR released the book of artifacts.
That was one of the first supplements I bought on my own, or I got my dad to buy for me. And like I was in study hall and I remember really opening this thing and having no idea what I was about to read. Just like, had a cool cover. I think it had like the hand around that there's something on the front.
So you start reading this thing and they did a great job of explaining how an artifact is more than just a magic item. It's like this really. It's a history. Yeah.
So like what do you guys is an artifact what separates another magic item? I think it's just that personally. I think it's the lore behind it. It's not just the cloaks that made it imbued magic to it's like this was the sword that a thousand kings have used over a hundred thousand years.
Like as this artifact quality, it's something that's ancient or immense power or something that's I would consider game-changing both in the story and in the, or either in combat or story reasons is game-changing for the player or even the story. Yeah, I'd take you back on that and say that yes the lore is very important with that, right? And an artifact should also, if you're bringing an artifact into your game, it should be a story element. Yeah.
It shouldn't just be, I am going to bring this powerful artifact in here. The character used, it should impact the story in some way, shape, or form. And I think also to me what differentiates a artifact from a regular magic item is that if an artifact has that lore about it and often the power is tying into that lore. They're very purposeful.
Yeah. Yes, for sure. You know, they're very powerful, but it's very powerful for a purpose. Yeah.
I remember them saying like, you know, basically what you guys just said, it's tied to some major event. It's tied to some huge power thing. One of the things they said that was interesting that I think you broke the rule on Mike, but it worked perfectly in your campaign was you really should never have more than one artifact in a campaign. Well, Mike made a campaign where there was like six artifacts.
So how do you, I mean, were you worried that that would break the campaign? No, I wasn't because the artifacts truly were the MacGuffin of the Quest. They were the MacGuffin for the Quest. The true story was really about the Los Elsotheim and about what they were doing.
But when you guys started out, you didn't know that. Right. And you basically, you won the challenge to go find the Chalice of Boos. You found the Chalice of Boos.
And then you found out about the Zekofish and that the cult of the Black Goat was involved and all the stuff you didn't. So you didn't know anything about the overall story that was going on. The bigger picture that was going on. And then suddenly you find yourself kind of getting drawn into this bigger story, finding out about the alignment of 10,000 spheres or as Chut liked to call it.
The alignment of the 10,000. The line of the 10,000. The line of the 10,000. The line of the 10,000.
And then each item was part of that story to drive you forward. And as you gathered each item, you became more powerful, but sometimes it cost, right? There was definitely cost for everything. And some of the items, you had the paradox.
Yeah, it was not like a really easy. You were like, we can't even wield this thing. The Codex of Infinite Plains. You were like, we used it twice because you guys were fucking frightened.
You should because it had such detrimental effects. Yeah, every time you used it, you were risking somebody in a torskin to the round. Yeah, so many things you were risking your sanity doing all these things. So I wasn't worried about that because it was incremental.
So by the time you got to the point where you were going after that final item, so you could basically bring them together as a unity and make sure that the 10,000, the alignment didn't happen and all that stuff. Right. It was never a fear because you were getting incrementally more powerful to things that I was throwing out. You were getting more and more insane beyond just the astral dreadnought of the stuff that you guys were fighting.
It was insane. So as long as you were planning ahead for that, I thought I'd find ahead for that stuff. I knew bringing those artifacts in. It would be like, oh, do you think it's really powerful to shake and really change things?
So I made it slow, progression. Yeah. I would say as a rookie DM or even an intermediate DM, I wouldn't try it. No, no, I'd be nervous to do it.
I'll also say that Mikey did early job making sure each item was super unique. There wasn't anything. There wasn't just a bunch of super powerful weapons. We all had to just kill everything really quickly.
We had a healing item. We had the book of teleportation, a teleportation, a huge risk for the boost, which is a healing item. The only weapon was the sword slumbering. The silver arm of the rata definitely gave David's character some more combat ability.
The only weapon was Black Razor. They were things that most of the abilities affected, maybe 50-50, but they affected out of combat as much as in combat. That was what made them not destroy the story. Yeah.
I think that's important. If you're going to bring artifact, you have to integrate it into the story. You can't let it overpower the story. You can't let the characters become too powerful with it.
If they get it, you have to know that. That means you have to be as a DM thinking about, okay, how do I still make this a threat when they encounter the back guys? Yeah, absolutely. It might take a session to figure that out.
I don't pop the floor or something. You have to go, okay, cool. Next time I can throw something way tougher. Yeah, I mean, there were times we talked about that in the mid-levels.
That's why I brought up the Astra-Dead Red Knot because you guys were kind of walking over. Like, you had probably two or three sessions in a row where you guys just... Clobbered something. ...mashed everybody down in like no time at all.
I went, okay, I'm still learning if I be at that point too. Even though you guys are pretty high level, that's when I went, oh, you know what? I need to just hire now. I need to re-look at the action of an economy of a combined group of this with a match items, everything.
I took all that in account. I said, okay, no, they can't take this creature. They can take this combination of things. Yeah.
So when you look at fighting enemies, sorry, I'm going to just be thinking about this. We're going to go to the task industry. I think normally I would edit that out, but I'm going to leave that. I'm going to leave that one.
I mean, they hear the cigars getting lit up and the pouring of the whiskey. So one thing that I think about, maybe you guys can tell me that I'm overthinking it, but like, sometimes in these campaigns, especially as we get higher level, we're fighting very powerful enemies. Right. And one of the things I notice is that we have an arsenal of magic items, potions, scrolls, all this other stuff.
And a lot of times, big bad is the exception because he usually does have a couple of magic items, but a lot of times we're not seeing magic items. And I know when I'm writing a campaign, I'm almost doing that on purpose. Like, I'm like, well, I don't want every time you guys kill this, you know, cult cell or whatever. Like, they're going to drop five plus one daggers and, you know, like everyone else got a bag holding and they all got a bunch of potions.
Like, so, but is that disingenuous to play it that way? That's a good question. I'll just add this up because this is something that I change between my second edition DMing and my fifth edition DMing. I often use to give the bad guys magic items, like more often than I do now.
And the reason was is because five E and the spikes of power and even the powers that the NPCs and the bad guys get kind of almost negate magic items in a lot of ways. And then the use of the power of magic items and the use of magic items. So back in second edition, are you in advance of the deviant? No, I didn't really DM that.
I just DM second edition. Yeah, you guys might have some magic weapons, but you literally have to give the bad guys magic weapons to compete with the party to make them actually be able to stand toe to toe with the party. But now a lot of bad guys, they have a lot of, they have some pretty powerful, cool special features. What's the right about legendary action?
Legendary action, all kinds of different things. And even the minions, some of the tougher smaller guys in there are actually pretty powerful compared to like the old monsters of old. And what they can do. So also remember CR doesn't factor in any weapons, any magic items at all.
So if you do have one or have your player has one, it'll affect your CR, maybe effectively one or two levels higher. Yeah. That's a good point. And when you talk about second edition, one of the things that I remember is that the actual classes themselves were not nearly as powerful as F.
Oh no. Like you could be a level 15 fighter, which was, you know, Look, Ivy is the most player friendly version of D&D that's ever been. Yeah. It is character friendly.
It is literally, it gives you guys so much more power and freedom of what you can do with your action economy than any other version of D&Ds ever done. Yeah. As far as I can, sir. It's also the one edition that's really hard to actually kill a character.
Yeah. It really is. Unless you're totally overpowering your characters with whatever you're throwing them up, throwing against them. Yeah.
So, yeah, so to me, that's one of the reasons why I don't actually give a lot of, or give my guys a lot of magic items. I do have my big, big guys. You've seen that. Right.
What about loot tables? Random loot tables. How do you feel about that? Okay.
So if you were to go to like an abandoned fortress, that would be a place for one. Right. Like, okay, we're exploring a bunch of different rooms and like maybe it's loot, maybe it's not a role for that. Like, and have maybe a table that you make or find one, but something that's got maybe something really interesting and then some miscellaneous stuffs or maybe just descriptions of the room even like you find a room full of barrels looks like it would be a food supply room and being through there, you feel like there's not going to be anything worth the value.
Like you can add some ambiance to it. As far as like, if you're doing a scripted fight in the game, I would avoid that. I think that's lame. If you want to give them something, give it to them.
They shouldn't have to like hope that your dice are going to provide them with any sort of boon. Right. I agree with getting 100% on that. I think if it's a dungeon crawl, yeah, sure.
That's great. Random tables are awesome. If you are using random encounters in your game and you randomly encounter a group of bandits, sure, that's great. But I agree totally.
It needs to kind of, it's kind of fit the storyline and fit with character, you know, with the characters a little bit and also fit with the group that maybe you just fought to. So just having rolling random shit. Yeah. You want to play a realism game.
Maybe it's fun to roll that. But like if all your characters use short swords and bows and they just keep finding plus one halberds because you roll that. Yeah, they could switch, but if they're character is like, oh, I'm a swordsmaster. Like them to have a take a weapon just goes better than what they want to use is kind of lame.
Well, it's kind of the Warcraft approach. Yeah. Like you just hope your item drops that you've been before. Well, I guess we could put a caveat on that too.
That's maybe if you are not a very experienced DM, then the random tables could be very helpful for you. Right. If you're not really sure what kind of magic items should be part of the loot, then definitely could be very helpful. Or if you're doing a very, very high magic campaign, then you can either encounter or there's magic items, which would be crazy.
Well, I think there's probably a player type out there too in DM for that matter that likes random rolls. Just in general, like random stuff. Like, I don't know what you're going to get in the dragon's treasure trove. Let's see what that I say.
See, that'd be a good opportunity though, because it's a treasure trove. Right. Like there could be some weird wacky stuff in there you wouldn't expect. Yeah.
Yeah. He's got the loot, the magical loot because he killed a bar at 100 years ago. Yeah. You know, stuff like that.
You mentioned that you wanted to talk about like how 5v can ruin magic items. No, actually John was saying that, but I agreed with that. I agree with that. I don't think I said they ruined them.
I just, I feel like magic items in 5v, at least as they are in the dungeon masters guide, which is really the magic kind of books. So, so, so actually what you said is that they didn't ruin them. You said Wizards of the Coast ruined Indy? No, no, no.
My future Lords of Masters. No. I didn't say that. Once I get out of this DM startup company and go to the big boys.
Okay. Well, we take a quick break here and let one of our boys do a little talk into the audience and then we will kind of come back to that and we'll talk a little bit about 5v and the magic items in it that we've encountered, what we've encountered, what we've read about. Maybe talk about some of the home groups you've seen online too, because actually I'm finding some of my most interesting magic items. I'm actually finding online.
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Boblin! Alright, so yeah, continue about the whole match got in. Okay, so I forgot what we were talking about for a second apparently. Well, so did they not do a good job with Magic Artem's Inferi?
Let's just ask it like that. Yes. Okay. Yes, they did.
They did a bad job. It looks like an afterthought. It's all crammed into the DM's guide. The items are really uninspired.
Give them some classics. It's great, but it's like super boring. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm not sure if you're going to your point earlier in my classes are so powerful. Yeah. But I think that there's just something about Magic Artem's in players are always going to on.
Yeah. Yeah. So I know it powers them to claim as your own and to incorporate into who you are in your fighting style or your appearance or anything like that. Yeah.
No, I mean, I think I think I think you're right. I think that I think Magic Artem's do feel like an afterthought. Just like I think what were we talking about the other day that was kind of that felt like an afterthought we were just talking about in 5e. Uh, I don't remember.
I don't remember. I don't remember. That's not. That's not.
We were talking about it. I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why, like honestly, if I don't have an idea for Magic Artem's myself, I'll go to Homebrew Stuff online and look, because I found some really neat items there. Yeah.
I mean, paradox came from there. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.
I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I wasn't the only item out of the Uniblock erasers technically mine except where I made it actually more like Stormbringer. Yeah.
Yeah. That's what it's based on. Yeah. And I made it more.
I mean like there's power. So I changed what it was. I changed what the Codex and Infinite planes did. But paradise wasn't mine.
shops themed, way to put them in your campaign story hooks and then entirely original items. Wait, wait, is it like a series? It is. It's called steal your shops.
Well, our shops, excuse me. So that would have to be a very expensive set of supplements to purchase. They're actually extremely affordable. Oh, so I don't have to roll a slide of hand checks to steal them.
You don't just download them on the website. Well, that was true. It was almost like we practiced that and we didn't. No, no, it didn't.
So much you practiced at all, actually. But for real, though, I would like to be the guy who comes out and says, we don't talk about our company enough. We do this podcast in our team and educate. But honestly, we have a amazing company full of people who really care and understand the ND as well as what it's like to be a player and a DM.
Yeah. Quality products, a lot of times at free or very little expense, like a dollar or less for a supplement. They can really add a lot of more and flavor your campaigns. Our most expensive venture we have is like $59 or $4.99.
Yeah. Yeah. So but no, I agree. I think that is something that we've embraced, at least I know, keen and I'm definitely very embraced.
And I think now I'm kind of getting cody to embrace it a little bit, too, since we're working on a shop together based off the thieves like us adventure. There's a shop in there where the guy that kind of starts the adventure for the party is a fence, basically, right? So we're creating a fence and within the fence shop itself, we have a list of mundane items, right? It's not published yet, by the way, but coming up this month, we have a list of mundane items.
Like all our magic shops, you can get mundane items. And what that means is that the DM can decide, OK, there's going to be a plus one sorter plus one dagger or whatever. And then we list out some very unique items. All original.
All the original. And that's the one thing I really feel that we've embraced is I think we have taken what 5e had did not do in the original publications with magic items. And we've embraced that uniqueness and they're not all about combat. And I would say they're not all over powered and said.
They're not overpowered. I think you can insert them in just about any campaign. I mean, some might be more powerful than the others. And then we have to decide, oh, yeah, I'm not going to let my character buy that kind of thing.
But I think that we've embraced that whole ideal of making these things unique, making these things utilitarian at times. Are you totalitarian? I guess it would be the proper way to say that at times. It doesn't make them fun, too.
We got a lot of fun magic items in there. Well, a lot of times the items are very thematic to the shop. Like I just wrote Halfling's Leaf, which is a magic shop where Halfling has basically curated a bunch of herbs and tobacco leaves and different things like that that are enchanted. And when you can smoke them, you can make a tea out of them, you can just ingest them.
You know, basically you can take them however you want. Where was the magic? Where was the magic? I mean, I was like, I'm a tea.
I'm a tea. I mean, a lot of us in the company are a cigar smoker. So it was kind of started with that idea. And then I went on to just be for cigar smokers or people like smoke.
I want to be for anybody. It makes out out of the area. Exactly. And what I liked about that challenge as I was creating that was like it really let me do something that's not in the game, not in 5DS written, right?
Consumables. It's a consumable, but it's a consumable that follows like some special rules. And so like if you know, you want to, for example, there's a herb that makes you resistant to cold damage, right? Like if you take that an hour before, you know, you're going into the ice dragons or the white dragons, say your butt.
So it's like cool stuff like that. And there's some really creative stuff in all of our shops that we've made that I think we'll have comes to be proud of. Yeah, absolutely. I think so.
I think one of the things I like is too is so talk about magic items. A lot of them like there's the whole curse to magic item thing. What we did kind of unique, I think, to that I had not seen before is and the weird thing was is that John and I did this at the same time without even knowing it because he was working on his shop with the tobacco and all that stuff. And I was working on a shop with the fungi.
Oh, yeah. And we basically were both doing the same thing where we had a detriment to using this magic that this kind of magic. So there is the bonus you get, there's a detriment. And the detriment is not necessarily really bad.
It's nothing that's going to be game breaking. It's nothing that's going to make your character not want to use this item. And I thought that was kind of cool because we've never I've never seen that before. Absolutely.