{"id":692,"date":"2006-10-16T11:07:03","date_gmt":"2006-10-16T16:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=692"},"modified":"2007-03-11T08:01:45","modified_gmt":"2007-03-11T13:01:45","slug":"dm-of-the-rings-xvii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=692","title":{"rendered":"DM of the Rings XVII:<br>Of Dubious Value"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table width='600'  cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/comic_lotr17.jpg' class='insetimage' width='600' alt='Lord of the Rings, Tentacle monster, player apathy.' title='Lord of the Rings, Tentacle monster, player apathy.'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>One of the things I loved to do in our campaigns was give out magical items which were interesting but mostly useless.  We&#8217;ve been trained by movies that if you find some seemingly unimportant bauble, then the story will later create a situation where it will be the key to solving a problem in an unexpected way.<\/p>\n<p>My favorite was a rope I gave them that untied itself the moment you let go of the knot.  It was pointless, but enough of a novelty that they hung onto it.  Another was a chalice that would purify any water you put into it.  It was sort of a magical water filter which could turn a glass of swamp sludge into mineral water in about five minutes.  Another was a magic staff which had only one property: It could be placed tip-down on the floor and it would keep itself balanced.  <\/p>\n<p>Once in a while they would haul out one of these magical booby prizes and actually put the thing to some unexpected use.  I always loved when they did that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the things I loved to do in our campaigns was give out magical items which were interesting but mostly useless. We&#8217;ve been trained by movies that if you find some seemingly unimportant bauble, then the story will later create a situation where it will be the key to solving a problem in an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}