5 Magic Items for Magic Users!

I’ve always felt that magic users tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to magic items. I mean, they have Pearls of Power and Staves of the Magi and Rings of Spell Storing and Wands and Scrolls of varying effectiveness, but mages always seem to lug around the same five or six magic items, and they all seem to do the same thing: give the mage more spells to cast. There’s no variety there.

It’s boring.

And so, like with my axes, I present 5 unique magic items for magic users!

Honestly? I just want to know what the pickled monkey head is for.

  

Note that some of these names are kind of goofy. They felt right in the moment, and you should change them if you don’t have a light-hearted campaign going.

Regarding Loot The Body, and a Few Magic Items

So, I’ve started spreading my wings, as it were, and surveying the vastness of D&D podcasts, articles, and websites; and I learned something…

There’s about 400 BILLION blogs, columns, and podcasts that use some variation of “Behind the DM Screen” as their moniker. Seriously! There’s anofficial D&D Column, a podcast under the Tome Show, and that column on Tribality! Why did nobody tell me!? And I thought I was being clever…

Well, shit. Guess it’s time for a change.

The Curious Case of Detect Magic in D&D 5e

NOTE: This blog post was intended to go up several days ago. However, I had to go into surgery, and therefore had to delay the posting of this entry. It also prevented me from properly editing it...there aren't any images, clever captions, and it might come off choppy. That said, I hope you all enjoy.

I think my last post betrayed the fact that I have a deep and abiding love for cool magic items. I love peppering enemies' inventories and weapons-stores with neat little trinkets.

I think the designers of D&D 5e love them, as well, based on some of their design decisions. Traditionally, you see, discovering and identifying magic items boiled down to, mostly, a single spell. Detect Magic. This was the case all the way back in AD&D, and remains the case in modern games like Pathfinder. A group of adventurers comes across a chest full of treasure, and they immediately cast detect magic to see if any of it glows with the light of potentially-cool powers. D&D 5e changed this. In 5e, everyone knows that a magic item is magic as soon as they pick it up. It radiates an aura that can be felt by anyone, like a magical sixth sense.

So, then...what's the point of detect magic? Why does it still exist?

Regarding Magic Item Glut

I am currently suffering Magic Item glut in my 5e campaign. I would blame the fact that I've been running a modified Pathfinder module (Pathfinder being a game where magic items are not just prevalent, but necessary for character power), but really it comes down to me and some poor choices I've made. I've over-powered certain items, under-emphasized others, and overall kicked myself in the ass on this.

Before I talk about how I plan to solve the problem of Magic Item Glut in my current campaign, and a few methods to avoid it in other campaigns, let me define what I mean by Magic Item Glut in general.