Chris Perkins on Using Spells and Magic Items August 31, 2017Zoltar magical items and spells can add a lot of flavor to any Dean B campaign so I talked to Chris Perkins about some of his favorites it has occurred to me recently that there are certain spells that I like from a story point of view because they encourage player creativity spells like they’re not they don’t have a loc’d effect so there are things like press the digitation where you can do all kinds of things with the spell or polymorph where you can make all kinds of choices about what to turn something into those are the spells that I typically find the most interesting and and possibly the most interesting from a story point of view like for instance you could go into a dungeon and maybe there’s a very hungry bear there trying to eat you it’s much more interesting encounter if somehow you learn that there is a polymorphed person so using spells against the characters and interesting ways like that is also kind of fun as for magic items the same thing some of the most fun adventures that I’ve ever read and/or run used magic items in odd off-the-wall ways there was one adventure back in the early days of dungeon Magazine I think it was called juggernaut and in the adventure a tribe of goblins find a figurine of wondrous power that’s the marble elephant and so the whole premise of the adventure is you have to take you have to get this item away from the goblins because they’re all running around on this gigantic elephant stomping things into the ground and that’s kind of fun there was another adventure that had a sentient rope of climbing or something like that that you had to fight you I remember there was an adventure in dungeon called deadly treasure where all the traps in the dungeon were basically activated by magic items like a decanter of endless water that would flood a room that kind of thing I loved I loved using magic items against the characters and giving them magic items that have dimensionality to them in in dice camera action Holly’s character Strix was being accosted by a broom of animated attack and she was able to threaten and tame it into submission so now she has this broom following her around and she can ride it Jarrod’s character d/f has a short magical short sword that’s sentient and has the personality of the Hal 9000 in sort of goading him into backstabbing things paltin got a severed hand a crawling claw essentially that has a backstory most of which hasn’t been revealed yet but we’ll probably be revealed to some extent in Tomb of annihilation and yes it’s been following him around I think that that creates interesting role-playing opportunities and actually adds a new dimension to the characters it’s not simply something they’re carrying around it has become part of their identity D&D's Chris Perkins on Using Spells and Magic Items https://t.co/7Y6tSwA4Nw — D&D Beyond (@DnDBeyond) August 30, 2017 Share this:TweetWhatsAppTelegramEmail