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D&D Ideas — Rings

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is rings, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy Live to talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. A Ring of Stoneshielding protects adventurers from the dangerous effect of creatures like basilisks and keeps a hero’s body flexible and limber whenever effects seek to restrain them in place. Originally created for our Garden of Statuary book this ring more recently became one of our monthly Magic Item Cards. Find out more about it here. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

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Delving Dave’s Dungeon

Our parade through 5E D&D magic item categories continues with magical rings. The most popular and well known magic ring has to be the One Ring, which first appeared in The Hobbit and then became the central focus of the Lord of the Ring trilogy by JRR Tolkien. That was one of the first magic items I’ve ever read about and really started my journey into fantasy literature.

Aside from just being a category of magic items in 5E D&D it’s also has had powerful real world symbology in many cultures. For example many people exchange rings during their wedding vows and kissing a monarch’s ring is a sign of submission to their authority.

A couple of other not quite traditional rings spring to mind as well. The Scandinavians wore arm rings as symbols of love to their wives. In kung-fu iron rings are used in training. Magic rings aside in your 5E D&D game you might want to think about the significance of nonmagic rings for their cultural significance, superstitions, and other symbolism.

Do orcs, elves and dwarves all wear them and if they do is it for the same reasons? Wearing a particular style ring on a certain finger might mean something in the orc culture. If an outsider does so it’s a grave insult to be be answered with blood and steel.

What about subcultures? Perhaps the thieves’ guild speaks their cant through rings. They display these signals to each other out in plain sight. The value of the rings might tell you their standing in the guild. A ne’er-do-well wearing wooden rings is just a tough but the head of the guild can be identified by their adamantine rings. Different stones and colors can be incorporated into the hidden language.

Certain humanoids like satyrs, minotaurs, tieflings and others have horns and they might not only wear rings on their fingers but on these horns instead or in addition. Again there might be traditions steeped around these special adornments. What about rings for orc tusks or creatures with tails even? Fantasy worlds mean we need to rethink rings and where our characters and NPCs might wear them.

From Ted’s Head

Boromir said it best: “It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing … such a little thing.” The Father of Fantasy made the rings of power such a large part of the world and D&D has taken this idea and made many powerful rings throughout the editions.

But what if we had rings that did minor things? I can easily see rings being a gift of magical cultures giving the wearer the ability to understand their language. What if you created a ring that gave access to those fun cantrips — prestidigitation, druidcraft or thaumaturgy? Each of these kind of options would be rings that do not require attunement and might be necessary to communicate with important NPCs or solve puzzles in a dungeon. Getting access to a druid’s grove and the protection therein might mean you need to cast druidcraft at a certain tree or location.

If you want to move onto rings requiring attunement, why not add rings to your 5E D&D game granting features the players are already interested in acquiring? There is already a nice assortment of features that could easily fit into a ring. Feats are a great aspect of 5E D&D and some Dungeon Masters do not use them. But whether you use feats or not each character only gets so many. Perhaps a character wants a cool warlock feature without the drawback of having an Otherworldly Patron. Easy! Slap the feature into a ring. Access to low level magic like the Magic Initiate feat provides can equally come from rings. You could even make the item better than the feat.

Another option for rings is to take any of those cool charts based on subclasses and put those flavors into your rings. You put on this ring and you grow deer horns or butterflies are flying around you when you are resting. It offers no power other than the fun and whatever interesting thing a player can do with it. I certainly see a new ring vendor in my 5E D&D games’ future selling rings of amazing abilities that are nothing more than fun visual enhancements.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

While not tied to rings exclusively in 5E D&D the idea of crafting a magic item came up during the live chat with Nerdarchist Ted and one particular magic ring in the game served as an excellent example of this module of rules. Crafting magic items in 5E D&D is a topic I see come up quite often in online discussions. I’ll take the opportunity here to explore it further under the umbrella of magic rings.

Crafting a Magic Item in 5E D&D is considered a downtime activity described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide chapter 6: Between Adventures. Like most modules of content in the core rules the section is quite brief. Nevertheless it addresses several common issues 5E D&D players run into: what to do with wealth, how a player character can create their own magic items (without being an artificer) and what to do between adventures of course.

This came up during the live chat because there’s a particular creature with a stat block that includes a magic ring. Griffon Cavalry Riders from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist wear rings with a one-time use of the feather fall spell enchanted upon them. Despite the size, scope and what I can only assume is a robust economy of the City of Splendors it got me thinking how costly in time and resources it would be for the city to outfit this special branch of the City Guard.

As it turns out it’s not very much in either case!

A consumable magic item like these rings, which produce the spell only once, costs half as much as a persistent item. Since feather fall is a 1st level spell this means these mass produced rings are considered common magic items and brings the cost down from 100 gp to 50 gp. Multiple crafters can contribute the time and money necessary to craft magic items too. The end result? Two 1st level spellcasters can create one of these magic rings in 8 hours for 50 gp, the cost of the ring to be enchanted and a small feather or piece of down.

Pretty simple, right? It’s worth noting these guidelines mention nothing beyond the simple mechanics and resource costs. I often wonder how the folks who most loudly clamored for more robust rules for crafting a magic item feel about the expanding guidelines found in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. In this iteration there is much more collaboration with the DM because the process involves more than mechanics and spending downtime.

Characters need formulae, exotic materials, increased time and gold cost plus face complications even after following all the steps involved. This approach is more clunky and less guaranteed of success plus incorporates gameplay beyond spending downtime. For my taste this is a much more preferable way of crafting magic items because it involves character driven adventuring.

*Featured image — Rings abound in 5E D&D. There’s a lot more than just One Ring! The free Basic Rules include 25 magic rings — more than enough magic rings to keep adventurers busy for quite a while.

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