Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Magic Items for Rogues by a Factor of Three

February 24, 2020

Dungeons & Dragons/ Game Master Tips/ Homebrew/ Previews/ Roleplaying/ YouTube

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted carefully consider the best magic items for a rogue in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. In some respects this is an unusual conversation topic. Characters rarely get an opportunity to choose magic items. But it’s worthwhile to have goals and keep an eye out for particular magic items during the course of adventures. There’s two other situations I can think of when players have control over their characters’ magic items. In Adventurers League play items can be traded on a one-for-one basis for items with the same rarity. Making a trade costs each player involved 15 downtime days unless they’re playing at the same table. The other scenario is games beginning beyond 1st level. In our own monthly fan one shots we give players an option to choose magic item(s) for their characters this way, and I’ve played in many games with the same guidelines. Protip: for a tier 1 adventure or campaign try letting players choose one rare magic item to start and see what happens. For now, I had so much fun looking through homebrew Otherworldly Patrons on D&D Beyond that I’m going to do the same thing here and see what interesting magic items I can find for 5E D&D rogues.

Magic items for rogue at D&D Beyond

It’s worth noting you can create homebrew content for private use and share your homebrew content publicly at DDB at no cost — there’s no subscription required to access these services. However if you want to add any of the homebrew magic items mentioned below or any other homebrew content you come across to your collection you must subscribe at the Hero Tier or above. There’s a lot you can do at DDB for free. Check out what you can do here.

The DDB homebrew collection uses several statistics to track entries. Views shows how many people looked at any particular homebrew creation, Adds shows how many times a creation was added to someone’s collection and Rating is an upvote/downvote system. Since there are over 82,000 magic items in the collection I’m going to share the top 10 highest rated, most viewed and most added selections that also make particularly good magic items for rogues. We’ll have a little objectivity and a little subjectively, so let’s get to it.

Top 10 highest rating magic items

Boots of the Vigilant. A bump to your initiative you can choose to use after you roll. Not only No.1 for for rogues this is the No. 1 highest rating magic item in the collection. The creator? Matt Mercer.
Belt of Returning. A rogue can keep a safe distance and zing throwing weapons like daggers at enemies all day, because they return to this magical belt at the end of your turn.
Pocket Sand. As the description says, “No thief worth his leathers is caught without a pocketful of this gritty mixture of finely ground glass and banshee pepper extract.” I’m not sure what’s magical about it but there it is.
Duggers Tome. When you set this magic book on another book it transforms into a copy. From then on, any changes to either book’s contents are reflected in the other.
Coin Storing Ring. You touch gold coins and they disappear into the ring, which can store up to 1000 gp and dispense them with a word. I’ve got a feeling this would make a rogue of anyone wearing such a magic item.
Deck of Certain Things. Once all the cards have been drawn and the effects dealt with, a pair of gloves of thievery appear in the box. Those are on Dave and Ted’s list, and also the card effects are fun.
Earring of Whisper. So…there’s a lot of homebrew magic items inspired by Critical Role (or created by one of their team!). But there’s no denying this is a fantastic item for a rogue who often finds themselves scouting ahead or unable to communicate with companions without revealing themselves.
Faceless Cloak. There’s Expertise in Stealth and then there’s another level where even the most shadowy hooded cloak can’t conceal your features to the point where only truesight or other magical means of seeing through illusions can penetrate the hood’s darkness.
Coin of Darkness. An inexhaustible supply of 15 foot radius darkness that eats light could might be a stealthy rogue’s best friend!
Blindfold of the Beggar. Blindsight out to 60 feet, knowing the location of all creatures within 100 feet and all coins within 150 feet offers great utility to a rogue and no attunement required makes this even more useful.

Disguise self is a terrific trick to have up any rogue’s sleeve for infiltrating, escaping and keeping your identity secret.

Top 10 most viewed magic items

Mask of Many Faces. Disguise self is a terrific trick to have up any rogue’s sleeve for infiltrating, escaping and keeping your identity secret.
Belt of Returning
Boots of the Vigilant
Cloak of Shadow. Advantage on Stealth in dim light and resistance to necrotic damage is where this item gets started, and goes on to provide several shadowy powers a rogue can use to become a master of shadows.
Earring of Whisper
Belt of Elvenkind. You’ve got the cloak and the boots, might as well complete the ensemble with a Dexterity bump and a few elven features along the same lines as a belt of dwarvenkind.
Xorn’s Eye. An eyepatch granting darkvision and more lucratively the ability to locate precious metals and gems. You are not required to consume them once found, either. Score!
Duggers Tome
Assassin’s Dagger. This one couldn’t be more on brand for any sort of rogue, dealing even more damage with a Sneak Attack.
Short Sword of the Rogue. The double Sneak Attack damage is nice and helping to find secret doors and compartments places this one firmly on the list.

Top 10 most added magic items

Magic items for rogues rising to the top

Using the same highly scientific method as the Otherworldly Patrons analysis, taking into account ratings, views and adds here’s all of these DDB homebrew magic items a rogue ought to find useful in order from highest scoring to lowest.

Clearly boots of the vigilant are the big winner here. I’m happy to see it did not result in a list of a bunch of items meant for combat though. Like we discussed during planning and that Dave and Ted cover in the video, 5E D&D rogues are generally stealthy, skillful and dish out single target damage and most of the magic items on these lists speak to one of those aspects.

Browsing the homebrew collection at DDB makes for a fun time. Certainly there are some unbalanced items there and I tried to avoid the ones I felt are poorly designed. But I didn’t breakdown all the math or playtest anything and instead went with my instincts. Interestingly every single item wound up on the final list. This was mostly due to tied scores but it is noteworthy how so many of them hit all three marks so highly. High ratings, views and adds pushed boots of the vigilant and belt of returning far ahead of everything else so I’d say those are the most solid choices. I really like Duggers Tome, coin storing ring and deck of certain things myself. Fun fact: Duggers Tome was created by Zee Bashew! Zee is a Nerdarchy friend whose videos are super fun and informative. One of his recent videos even inspired one of our own, plus a post with 5E D&D content that found its way into our Nerdarchy team game!