D&D Ideas — Wondrous Items

D&D Ideas — Wondrous Items

July 11, 2021

Dungeons & Dragons/ Editorial/ Game Master Tips/ Player tips/ Roleplaying/ YouTube

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is wondrous items, 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. The Clockwork Frog is one of our own most wondrous items, which functions as a vehicle for up to two creatures. Originally created for our Muckwuggle the Frog God book this wondrous item 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.

Nerdy News

Pay attention to the week that was! Captivate players, make the most of your surroundings and study strange Arcane Traditions plus new live chats with creative folks and industry pros and live game plays round out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

Today we’ve got the most populous of the magic items in 5E D&D — wondrous items. By the numbers on D&D Beyond wondrous items account for 22 pages out of the 37 pages of magic items throughout official sources. This equates to about 429 wondrous items. That is a lot of magic items! Don’t even get me started on third party products. Soooo many magic items exist out there but hey — you can never have too many magic items.

There are quite a few iconic wondrous items throughout the editions of D&D. I’m sure we’ve all got our own favorites. Here’s some of my favorite wondrous items:

Ioun Stones
Deck of Many Things
Cloak of Invisibility
Boots of Elvenkind
Cloak Elvenkind
Figurine of Wondrous Power

Some of these magic items have become so iconic they’ve crept into pop culture and fantasy literature. Think about Harry Potter and the cloak of invisibility or R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt and his boon companion Guenhwyvar. Gwen has made the Figurine of Wondrous Power a much more popular magic item I suspect.

In one of the videos we did, we talked about turning the Deck of Many Things into a whole campaign. The first part of the video is about using the Deck of Many Things and not having it wreck your campaign and there’s a post on the website to go along with the video too. Any magic item can be turned into a focal point of a 5E D&D campaign with a little creativity from a Dungeon Master.

Magic Item Plot Ideas

Figurine of Wondrous Power. A wizard or artificer hires the adventuring party to acquire beasts and creatures to turn into Figurines of Wondrous Power.
Deck of Illusions. You could do the same with a Deck of Illusions but maybe the adventurers don’t need to capture all the creatures. They can convince them through bribery, persuasion or whatever other else the adventurers can come up with.
Cloak of Displacement. Pretty simple– the adventurers are hired to bring back a displaced beast dead or alive. Alternatively a druid takes interest in missing displacer beasts. They are being hunted into extinction and they need an advocate.
Amulet of the Planes. A wizard or artificer hires the adventuring party to travel the planes to gather items from each plane. These items are components for creating an Amulet of the Planes.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. Another great source for plots is the magic items the players want for their characters and magic items characters in your campaign want to create. Creating a magic item might take several adventures.

From Ted’s Head

Wondrous items are the most prevalent type of 5E D&D magic items and therefore cover all the ground the other items in the game cannot do. These are things offering unique and fun powers as well as abilities covering a lot of ground — figuratively and literally if you put on boots of speed.

Most of the sentient magic items you’ll see in official 5E D&D content are weapons but what if a sentient item was a wondrous item like a cloak or bracers? Years ago Nerdarchist Dave made a cloak that adored chaos and had a bunch of abilities. It fit very well with the bugbear barbarian I played in his game. The longer we played the more it asked for and the more abilities it seemed to gain. It was truly a lot of fun.

In another line of thought, my son has pet snakes and last night as it coiled around my arm the thought of a bracer that was a snake really intrigued me. What would it be and what could it do?

Bracer of the Serpent

Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement)

When you place this heavy brass bracer shaped like a coiled snake upon your forearm, the snake seeks the ideal position and slithers until it fits comfortably. When you attune to the bracer you learn of its power and the presence of the snake. While attuned, you have resistance to poison damage and immunity to the poisoned condition. If you already have resistance, you gain immunity instead. The snake communicates with you telepathically and gives you advantage on any Intelligence checks you make related to information about snakes and snake-like creatures. The DM will tell if you the check applies.

You can command the snake to come alive. The snake becomes a giant constrictor snake. The abilities of the bracer remain active even when the snake is animated. The snake is friendly to you and your companions, and it acts on your turn. You can use a bonus action to command how the snake moves and what action it takes on its next turn, or to give it general orders, such as to attack your enemies. In the absence of such orders, the snake acts in a fashion appropriate to its nature. The snake can remain animate for up to one hour or until it dies or you command it to return to your wrist as a bonus action. If the snake dies its body immediately vanishes and the bracer magically appears on your wrist. Once the snake has been animated you cannot do so again for 7 days.

The snake spirit of this bracer prefers users with scales and if you are a creature who already possess scales there is no further issue. If you do not have scales, while attuned, when you finish a long rest you must succeed on a DC 16 Constitution saving throw or you begin to grow small patches of scales on your skin. You can choose to fail if you desire. A remove curse spell cast upon you removes any scales that have grown and simultaneously breaks your attunement. If you pass the saving throw 5 days in a row the DC increases by one. After 5 failed saving throws your skin is completely covered in scales.

This is a bit of a weird wondrous item. I just let the idea grow. If you use this in your 5E D&D game please let me know how it goes.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

Wondrous Items in 5E D&D are so varied in scope and scale it’s kinda challenging to focus on any shared quality among them. I keep coming back to the artificer class for inspiration and after looking over all the Artificer Infusions I hit upon something particularly useful for the Nerdarchy community. Since you’re reading this I can only assume this includes you (unless you signed up for the newsletter purely for the benefits and store credit).

Replicate Magic Item is without a doubt the most versatile of the Artificer Infusions. The possibilities for this one single infusion option provides access to more items than all the other infusions combined. A tally of the Replicable Items shows there’s 43 possible wondrous items alone spread across four lists separated by minimum artificer level required to replicate. There’s level splits at 2nd, 6th, 10th and 14th and all of the items are uncommon except those on the ultimate list, which are rare.

According to my records here at Nerdarchy we’ve created at least 112 wondrous items so I thought it could be very useful for artificers out there to expand on the wondrous items they can replicate with our own stuff. Check out this curated list of expanded wondrous items to replicate along with where to find them.

Replicable Nerdarchy Items (2nd-Level Artificer)

Torc of Alighting (Mage Forge Vol. 1)
Circlet of Bones (Death Pit)
Treads of the Secret Path (Dark Paths: Forbidden Library)
Ring of Appraisal (Forgotten Oasis)
Cloak of the Gargoyle (Garden of Statuary)
Twine of Wayfinding (Hairable Ideas)
Cloak of Misdirection (Dark Paths: Pool of Bliss)
Mirror of Vanity (Dark Paths: Pool of Bliss)
Conch of Warning (Wizard’s Wake)

Replicable Nerdarchy Items (6th-Level Artificer)

Collar of Dire Growth (Dark Paths: The Chained One)
Feral Pelt (Dark Paths: The Chained One)
Spectacles of the Traveler (Forgotten Oasis)
Caged Eye (Order of the Wizened)
Bloodshot Lenses (Order of the Wizened)
Watcher’s Pendant (Wizard’s Wake)

Replicable Nerdarchy Items (10th-Level Artificer)

Hourglass of Black Sand (Forgotten Oasis)
Frogskull Helm (Muckwuggle the Frog God)
Mantle of the Predator (Order of the Wizened)

Replicable Nerdarchy Items (14th-Level Artificer)

Bracers of the Duelist (Mage Forge Vol. 1)
Spectacles of Spellcasting (Dark Paths: Forbidden Library)
Bracelets of Trading (Forgotten Oasis)
Aurora Cloak (Frost King)
Lens of Statuary (Garden of Statuary)
Crown of Eyes (Gaze of the Void Eye)
Shadow Cloak (Gaze of the Void Eye)
Crystal Talhund (Mage Forge Vol. 2)
Eyes of the Hunted (Order of the Wizened)
Orb of Ice Spires (Dark Paths: Encounters with the Winter Lord)
Flute of the Danse Macabre (Dark Paths: Winter Lord’s Throne)

Here are the sources for this selection of Nerdarchy’s wondrous items. Pretty much all of our products begin life as monthly rewards for our Patreon supporters. Since we publish these rewards directly on the Patreon page new supporters get instant access to all of them (your scrolling finger might get a heck of a workout though!). You can learn more about these rewards and how to get them at Nerdarchy the Website here.

*Featured image — Wondrous items are the most abundant variety of magic items in 5E D&D. The free Basic Rules alone include a whopping 125 wondrous items — more than enough wondrous items to keep adventurers busy for quite a while. [Images courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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