Have the party be kidnapped! They wake up, wearing commoner clothes, and all of their items gone.
They only have an empty waterskin and 2 days worth of rations.
They are then hunted by the people who captured them (a small party of nobles with a 1-2 level advantage on the players).
A flail-axe?
By @jacobwitzling on TikTok
At the end of character creation, have every player roll a d100 for “plot reasons”. When the game begins, reveal that the result is how many miles in the air the characters start the campaign at.
Owners of my old ‘Jungle Stream’ battle map can now download an additional 'Snow’ map variant for free!
→ Find it on 2-Minute Tabletop
Some fun ideas for warlock pacts. You can see the rest of this series on my Kofi! I appreciate all tips.
Scrimshawed Sawfish sword with Sailor’s Rights and a whale, America, 19th century
In Dungeon Crawl Classics, there’s a chapter on magic items that briefly mentions that magic items are rare and powerful to the point that any one magic item is probably quite famous. That fame usually comes with a name.
So a particular flame tongue sword might be called “Hellfire” or “The Sword of Durageddon’s Bane”. A particular bag of holding might be “Kingslocks” or “The Blinding of the Gorgon”. These items get their names from the adventures they were involved in, which to me is a lot more interesting than a name that is purely functional.
Those functional names make the items feel less magical and more mechanical to me. If a bag of holding is recognisable as such, it must be fairly unremarkable to just have a generic name - implying that a great many people own one. It’s like owning a Ferrari racecar (impressive, but you’re hardly the only one) versus owning “The Carriage of the Ninth Angel” that is famed for being blessed by three angels with three heads in preparation for its death race against Satan himself.
I bought a zine recently (Through Ultan’s Door: Downtime in Zyon) that has a simple system for making magic items:
Commission a master artisan to make you a masterwork (a sword, armour, or book)
Use that item in a quest in an interesting way (such as slaying a particularly powerful foe)
That item, by becoming part of a spectacular story, then takes on magical properties once given a suitable name
Lots of players find it boring to find a generic +1 sword or what have you in dungeons, so I think this is a good solution to make it more interesting. And suitably mythic!
Last of the location plot hooks. Support or commission me here!