15 ways to eliminate the eldritch object you need to dispose of.

Written with many contributions from Nick Sunshine

1. Feed it to the gravity dragon at the bottom of the pit
2. Get a nation to recognize the object as its rightful king
3. Team of bards describes the object in such excruciating detail and flowery prose that its existence collapses in on itself
4. Devise a magical mathematical proof of the object's existence that is self-contradictory but verifiably true
5. Find the first flower and impale it on its spines
6. Put it in a vault on the moon
7. Encase it primordial goo
8. Cast enlarge on it thousands of times in rapid succession, causing it to go macro-scale and become unable to interact with our micro-universe
8. Sell it to a god
9. Shrink it and attach it a feral cat’s collar
10. Tell a joke that negates its power by making no one take it seriously
11. Weave it into a sacrificial cloth for the last lamb and burn it
12. Use a were-curse to bind it to someone, so you only have to deal with it once a month when the full moon comes out and they morph into it
13. Display the object in art museum making it irrelevant
14. 9th level spell - LOSE (divination) - target goes away. nobody but the gods know where it is.
15. Assign it a counselor to nod sagely at its abominable whispers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building an Interesting World through NPCs

This old post from 2021 now is resurrected.  I love building NPCs. It gives me great joy. I think the way to build an interesting world isn’t about lore that lives in a campaign Bible(what I think of as the Elder Scrolls lore problem) but is actualized by the characters the players meet. Whether it’s the cabbage man whose business the players destroyed in a battle with a Mimic pretending to be a Market Stall or the French veteran half orc married to a Warforged tower, it’s how you make the world real. Note: this approach is for important NPCs in your campaign but could be used in pieces to give more off the cuff NPCs some additional depth and flavor. Questions that inform how I build NPCs: Ask yourself, why is this NPC here? What does this NPC want? Who are they like in popular fiction? How can they help or hinder the PCs? What do they sound like? Voice/cadence, formal/informal, confident/timid? What aspects might they have? aka sentences that reflect them and their values (this is fro
Read more

The Grinding Wheels of Disorder: A Method for Managing Factions and Their Moves

 I have struggled, and I know I am not alone in this, to maintain the movement of factions in my home campaign. When one plays biweekly, one is focused first on what the players will or could encounter at the table. I tend to prefer building campaigns that way, rushing a bit ahead of my players to hang drywall and slap up paint, creating a strange metallurgist intrigued by hypnotic space metals, what have you. But where this method (or lack of a real method) falls down is managing the various machinations happening "off screen". In my current campaign "Postcards from the Edge" which is based vaguely on Spelljammer 2e, there are four main factions which I have developed with my players during pre-session 0 world and character creation. I also have an intentionally deeply malevolent and authoritarian mindflayer faction, the Dominator Creed, or as they self style, "The Planar Voyagers".  As we are now a year into this campaign, I have found that it's diff
Read more

The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place: Creating Complex Tone In Your Adventures

As a Referee and adventure writer, I wholeheartedly believe that horror and malevolent danger only work in adventures if they are balanced by moments of ease, lighthearted connection, and empathy.   In the movie musical Dancer in the Dark*, possibly the most depressing movie, the moments of viewer escapism are wrapped into the story via imagined musical numbers. They function like Tolkien’s poetry songs in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, creating an alchemical balance that deepens the connection of the viewer/reader. But how do I do this in my elf game? Relentless grim can easily become samey, inducing a kind of numbness in your players that can make them connect less with the world. There are a couple principles I consider and use to balance this in my home game. They are informed by the GMing philosophy of Nate Lumpkin over at Swamp of Monsters. 1.  The world is Not a Cold Dead Place: events do not revolve around your player characters’ actions. Another way of saying this mi
Read more