Minor Magic Items

[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play fifth edition D&D.  Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did.  If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog.  So, if you’re not a D&D player, you might want to give this one a pass.]

As part of my ongoing family campaign, the players have accepted a side quest to help out an important NPC in the city they happen to be staying in (temporarily; they’re passing through on a longer journey set for them by their “mysterious benefactor”).¹  Of course I expect them to complete this mission, and thus I have to be prepared to have the NPC reward them for their service.  I could just break out the hard currency, of course—no one ever turns their nose up at gold—but it seems boring.  The characters are not wanting for cash right now, and D&D 5e has a bit of a weird relationship with money anyhow: since the game discourages an active economy in magic items, once you get to a certain level of equipped-ness, you often can’t find much to spend your excess gold on.  But they’re still moderately low level (2nd through 4th, right now), so I also don’t want to drop a bunch of powerful items on them that will raise the overall power level and make me regret my decision later.  What to do?

Obviously the solution is minor magic items.  I’ve now spent a bunch of time combing my books and the Internet for the perfect items to gift my players with, so I thought it might be nice to share some of my findings with other folks: perhaps this info can help your game as well.

First of all, I gather from searching the Internet that there seems to be a some confusion as to what a minor magical item even is.  So perhaps we should start with what it isn’t.

• A minor magical item is not the same as a consumable magic item. A major effect is always a major effect.  Limited use of that effect does not magically (haha) make it a minor effect.
• A minor magical item is not the same as a wondrous item. “Wondrous item” is a term which here means “item we couldn’t fit into any other category.” While it’s true that sometimes a wondrous item may have a minor effect, many (many!) more of them have pretty major effects.  “Minor” does not mean “not a sword or a suit of armor or a staff or a ring or a ...”
• A minor magical item is not the same as a trinket. A trinket is a strange or unusual item which is designed to spark roleplaying opportunities.  It might not even be magical at all.

Let’s dispense with these in order of ease of dispensing.  Wondrous items are a category of magic items; it has absolutely nothing to do with whether it’s a minor item or not.  (To be fair, this is the term least often confused for “minor magical item,” so I think most people already get this.)  Consumable items are, again, a completely orthogonal concept.  A major magical item might be consumable, or it might not.  A minor item could also be consumable, but let’s be honest here: if the effect is already minor, it seems pretty mean to then limit the number of uses on top of that.  The question of trinkets is a bit harder, but not much.

First off, as mentioned above, some trinkets aren’t magical at all.  Here are some examples from the trinkets table (Player’s Handbook, pages 159 – 161):

• A mummified goblin hand
• The deed for a parcel of land in a realm unknown to you
• A small cloth doll skewered with needles
• A tiny silver bell without a clapper
• A l-inch cube, each side painted a different color
• An empty wine bottle bearing a pretty label that says, “The Wizard of Wines Winery, Red Dragon Crush, 331422-W”
• A black pirate flag adorned with a dragon’s skull and crossbones

These are all great, flavorful items, and they can all provide interesting story hooks for clever players.  But no magic.

On the other hand, here are some other examples from that same list:

• A shard of obsidian that always feels warm to the touch
• A small, weightless stone block
• A candle that can’t be lit
• A nightcap that, when worn, gives you pleasant dreams
• A silver teardrop earring made from a real teardrop
• A tiny mechanical crab or spider that moves about when it’s not being observed
• A wooden box with a ceramic bottom that holds a living worm with a head on each end of its body

Also great, flavorful items, but these are all definitely magical.  Not very magical, granted, but then we were looking for minor magic items ... right?

This gets us to the heart of what a minor magical item is.  A major magical item has a major effect.  Whether it’s wondrous or not doesn’t change that; neither does whether it’s consumable or not.  A minor magical item has a minor effect.  So why aren’t magical trinkets minor magic items?  Because a trinket has no effect.  Sure, the nightcap may give you pleasant dreams, and the block may not weigh anything even though it’s made of stone, but none of that actually has any effect on the game.

So what would be an example of an actual minor magic, item?  There are a few in the DMG, but not too many.  Happily, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything gives us a whole mess of ’em.  Here’s one:

• Boots of False Tracks (wondrous item, common): Only humanoids can wear these boots.  While wearing the boots, you can choose to have them leave tracks like those of another kind of humanoid of your size.

A very small effect, granted, but still something that could be useful in a game.  You might have to work pretty hard to come up with a way to use it, but that’s part of the joy of a minor magic item.  It’s real magic, it’s impressive to the common folk, it’s useful in the right situation, and it encourages creative play.  And what it doesn’t do is make the GM’s job harder.

See, as a GM you have be very careful with those major magic items.  Your players might be very excited to get a ring of invisibility, and you might feel quite magnanimous giving them one, but now you have to consider that you’ve got at least one character who’s never going to have to worry about sneaking past your sentries any more, or how to burgle that precious artifact that’s so closely guarded, or how to eavesdrop on crucial NPC conversations.  Oh, sure: you can demand stealth checks anyway, on the grounds that someone might hear them, or claim that your evil genius BBEG obviously would install “anti-invisibility preparations” (even if it’s only something as dirt simple as coating the floor with flour), but you can’t always ignore or override power that you specifically gave your players in the first place: it frustrates them, and why did you even give it to them if you didn’t expect them to use it?  So, every time you contemplate awarding some sort of major magic item, you have to think carefully about what impact it’s going to have on the game, and how it’s going to make your life harder: that is, how it’s going to make it more challenging for you to challenge your players.

But with minor magical items, you have none of these problems.  What plotline do you have planned that could possibly be upset by a pair of boots that can leave confusing tracks?  Or (to use a few more examples from Xanathar’s) a helmet that makes one’s eyes glow red? or a sword that gives off moonlight? or a tankard that allows one to drink as much as they like and never get drunk?  No, the minor magical item is awesome because the player gets to feel cool and special, and the GM never has to worry about being swept up in a magical powers arms race.

As for the creative play aspect, the OSR² proponents are fond of touting old-school D&D as facilitating “item-based problem-solving.” The idea is that modern D&D is all dripping with magic items so no one bothers to come up with uses for simple things such as mirrors, or a box of silver pins, or a pouch of herbs and spices.  But of course this is silly.  You can still encourage your players to use their equipment lists to their full extent; you just have to figure out to make it a bit sexier.  In those old-school days, you wouldn’t dream of going into a dungeon without your ten-foot pole, but that was because your GM would gleefully drop you into a spike pit if you didn’t tap all the floors along the way.  Also, if you didn’t use some sort of ear horn to listen at all the doors, you would eventually acquire ear seekers.  And if you didn’t have a silver mirror, your GM would inevitably spring a medusa or a basilisk on you.  Wasn’t old-school D&D fun?  It taught you to develop complex and bizarre shopping lists if you wanted to live: not exactly sexy swashbuckling adventure.  But that’s how it rolled—there were buttloads of bean-counting built into the game, actually.  Most of it has largely fallen by the wayside in the 3 major rules revisions since then, because most people don’t find detailed resource management all that fun.

But the OSR fans have a point that you really had to get the most out of your equipment list if you wanted to survive.  Figuring out how to make do with limited resources can be fun, as long as it doesn’t devolve into the aforementioned shopping list exercise.  But we can have the best of both worlds: minor magic items give the players something that they really want to use, because it’s all magical and cool, but because it has very limited application, it forces them to work hard to come up with a situation where they can actually put it to good use.  See?  Item-based problem solving and cool magic items as a reward and nice, modern rules with no complex resource tracking.  All your bases are covered.

Now that we know what minor magic items are and why we want to use them, where can we get them from?  Well, as mentioned previously, Xanathar’s is a good place to start.  The section is actually called “common magic items,” and it starts on page 136, but “common” isn’t quite the same as “minor” either.  Oh, many common magic items are minor as well, true, but some are just consumable, and those (while very useful) aren’t the type of thing we’re exploring here.  Happily, the list of items in Xanathar’s are all minor as well as common.³  In fact, some of them border on trinkets: I’m a bit hard-pressed to come up with a creative use for, say, armor of gleaming that would have any actual effect on a game.  But in general it’s a great list.

The DMG is, sadly, slimmer pickings.  Note that page 135 of Xanathar’s gives you a vital clue: anything on tables A through E in the DMG is considered a minor item.  But, looking at those tables (pages 144 – 145 of your Dungeon Master’s Guide), what you see is almost exclusively consumable items.  Still there are a few proper minor magic items to be found:

• On table A, we have the bag of holding (which is right on the edge of tipping into a major item) and the driftglobe, which is a great minor item.
• On table B, the alchemy jug is a fun one, and the cap of water breathing, goggles of night, helm of comprehending languages, mithral armor, ring of swimming, and saddle of the cavalier all qualify.  The mariner’s armor is at the upper end (like the bag of holding), but still pretty safe.  The robe of useful items is, weirdly, consumable, and the lantern of revealing is semi-consumable in that you have to keep putting oil in it.  The two wands have major effects; they’re only considered minor items because of their limited charges.  I would also be cautious with the cloak of the manta ray, the immovable rod and the rope of climbing: they’re not as minor as they might first appear.
• Table C adds Quaal’s feather tokens, most of which are great minor items (watch out for the bird and whip ones though), and the decanter of endless water, eyes of minute seeing, folding boat, horseshoes of speed, periapt of health, and sending stones are all good choices.  Heward’s handy haversack is what you give your players when you feel like a bag of holding is going too far.  The chime of opening and the necklace of fireballs are more of those unexpectedly consumable ones.
• Table D doesn’t add much, but the horseshoes of a zephyr are fun.  Nolzur’s marvelous pigments are technically consumable, but a moderately thrifty player will probably never actually use them all.  Portable holes are another of those more-major-than-they-seem items.  Bag of devouring is a cursed item, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
• Table E is 100% composed of consumable items, although sovreign glue (like Nolzur’s marvelous pigments) is one that you’ll probably never actually use all of.

So, a few good things there, but not as much as we might hope for.  But don’t count the humble DMG out yet!  Look on page 143; see that table marked “What Minor Properties Does It Have”?  The concept here is supposed to be that you have some powerful magic item, and you want to give it a little extra flavor by assigning it an additional, magical effect.  But there’s nothing saying that you can’t just have a magic item that has one of these minor effects and nothing else ... voilà, minor magic item.  In fact, some of the pre-existing minor items seem cut directly from this cloth: a driftglobe is just an item that only has the “beacon” minor effect, while an orb of direction is just an item bearing only the “compass” property.

Another useful trick, if you decide to come up with your own items, is to look at cantrips.  Now, cantrips come in two distinct flavors; they don’t have technical designations, but they’re often referred to as “damage-dealing cantrips” vs “utility cantrips.” You probably don’t want to give your players even more ways to magically create damage.  Besides: it’s boring.  But those utility cantrips can be quite useful to draw inspiriation from.  Again, some of the existing minor items seem to follow this recipe: it seems obvious that clothes of mending are based on the mending cantrip, and an instrument of illusions is just a more flavorful way to cast minor illusion.

But perhaps you don’t want to mess around with creating your own.  Surely there must be someone out there in the big wide world wide web who has done it for you?  Feel free to search for yourself: now that you know to avoid lists that are just consumable items, or trinket lists, you should have better luck.  Here’s a few that I’ve found that I like:

• Goblin Punch has a list of 100
• S. A. Hunt has collected over 100 from around the Internet for you⁴
• Spouting Lore has smaller lists of items, one for rogues, one for rangers, and even one for magical swords that aren’t too overpowered
• Tales of Scheherazade has some introductory text which references the same “item-based problem solving” article that I linked to above—which itself contains a list of items that are very much trinkets, not minor magic items—but then goes on to provide 100 items, the majority of which fall safely into this category

It’s taken some analysis, and some research, and some creativity, but I’ve come up with what I think are some great minor magic items for my party.  Hopefully I’ve short-circuited some of that work so that you can do the same.

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1 By the way, I would be remiss for not giving credit for the bones of this side quest to Justice Arman and his team in their excellent Baldur’s Gate: City Encounters.  My characters are not actually in Baldur’s Gate, but that doesn’t keep many of the encounters from being very useful, including this one, which is #12 (“Little Calimshan”).  Transplanting Rilsa Rael (an NPC from Descent into Avernus) to my city—which happens to be Sammaresh, for the Forgotten-Realms-savvy—was trivial, and the idea that Sammaresh (just across the Shining Sea from Calimshan, and therefore much closer than Baldur’s Gate) would also have a Little Calimshan neighborhood seemed perfectly natural.

2 Remember: “OSR” stands for “old-school revival”; that is, modern offshoots of D&D based on the 1st and 2nd edition rulesets, but updated slightly to make them less confusing.

3 Even the consumable ones, such as beads of nourishment.  But, again, those are really a separate category.

4 Fans of The Adventure Zone will no doubt recognize a few of those.