A handful of random tables about magical whatzits

d6x6 Random Mundane Materials

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1	Dirt	Tin	Stone	Ethanol	Chitin	Hair
2	Silk	Copper	Sand	Soap	Rope	Skin
3	Water	Silver	Diamond	Nacre	Pykrete	Bone
4	Grass	Gold	Glass	Grease	Graphite	Giblets
5	Shellac	Iron	Rust	Treacle	Cement	Blood
6	Mold	Lead	Mud	Honey	Rubber	Meat

d20 Random Magical Materials with Impossible Properties

1. Dirt
2. Skywood: Dense, hard wood which resists the pull of gravity. Grows as trees which float through the air, carrying along clumps of earth tangled in their roots. Wicker panels of the stuff are used to craft flying ships.
3. Adamant Glass: Cloudy gray glass, impossible to sully or scratch. Impervious and impenetrable to all forms of chemical or magic, meaning it can be used to entrap ghosts, spells, and other spirits. Really easy to melt, though, and can shatter violently.
4. Vermillion Ichor: Like red-tinged quicksilver. Constantly jitters in place. Imbues anything it’s placed into with elan vital, compelling it into motion and imbuing it with will.
5. Magnets
6. Shimmersilk: Lightweight fluttering cloth of indeterminate form. Appearance changes based on the viewers’ expecations
7. Alkahest: Universal perfect solvent, seperates things into their constituent components without otherwise damaging or changing them.
8. Tomberstone: Stone which hates the heavens. Dark violet with streaks of iridescent yellow. When directly under an open sky, it pushes downwards with immense force. When covered, behaves like normal stone.
9. Chornolyst: Magical kudzu. Thick sticky pitch-black sheets which grow rapidly over surfaces in the presence of mana and bright light. Rapidly dies and rots in their absence. Tough but flexible. Highly flammable. Technically edible.
10. True Vitriol: Green-Red crystal with a greasy lustre. Eternally burns with an unquenchable putrid flame. Powerful heat, but irritating headache-causing flickering light.
11. Ectoplasm: A versatile stringy substance that can be regurgitated by skilled experts. A sort of physical manifestation of the soul which responds to the emitter’s will. Is capable of fine manipulation and interaction with a wide variety of magical phenomena. The main drawback is that any damage to the substance has drastic psychic health consequences for the person who squeezed it out.
12. Philosopher’s stone: Turns mercury into silver on contact, lead into gold, reverses aging, frags trolls, etc.
13. Slarmbe: Insulates from time. Kind of a salty amber-tinted jelly. Kind of just a zone of shimmering air. Kind of makes you go cross-eyed to look at it. The thicker it covers an object, the more slowly that thing advances through time. Can be arduously moved by prodding it with a long stick.
14. Solidified Nimbus: Like the cartoon version of a cloud. Soft and moldable. Cold to the touch. Drips water out of the bottom when squeezed. Accumulates static electricity.
15. Null: Absorbs energy practically without bound. Unworkable and immovable in its pure form. Can be dissolved and alloyed to produce immovable rods and similar wonders.
16. Impressionable Flesh: Raw animal matter in its most magically pure state. Often mistaken for a species of pale grey ooze. Assimilates small bits of detritus and small clumps of organic matter. When it comes into contact with a larger body of living flesh, it merges into and assumes the form of that flesh. Potent for healing, and can even restore lost limbs. Contraindicated for head and spinal injuries, under penalty of execution.
17. Demoncore: Densely malevolent metal, brimming with alchemical power. Capable of poisoning those who merely stand near it, or providing a near limitless source of arcane energy.
18. Voidmetal: Sticks to shadows and vice versa
19. Pureglass: Perfectly invisible stone.
20. Song-glass: Frost that dissolves into radio static whispers divine secrets.

Universal Magical Object Classification Guide

After witnessing an argument about the difference between artefacts and regular magical items, I've devised a foolproof and universal classification system:

I hope that this answers all of your questions.

Rpg Mechanics Stolen from Clearance Rack Boardgames

Here are a couple board games I picked up from clearance bins. They each have interesting mechanics which can be stolen and incorporated into tabletop rpg encounters.

Attack on Titan

BGG link. One-versus-all boss battle. Based on a show about fighting giant monsters called titans. 

I picked this one up because I like the designer's other work. The main problem it has as a board game is that the titan's side of things isn't very engaging. If the titan was automated, then it could be a satisfying cooperative dice-rolling puzzle thingy. 

But it had some really fun little ideas:

Climbing on the Beast:

First of all, the human characters move up and down these little cardboard standees. The ground counts as a space, as does each layer of the tower, and about half of the locations represent the humans climbing up the titan, shadow of colossus style. Some spaces allow you to do special actions, like firing the cannons from the tower, while others are places you need to maneuver to accomplish certain objectives.

This is just good fun.  And you don't really need a 3d prop to accomplish this effect. Just lay up some index cards indicating certain points-of-interest atop whatever giant monster is being fought.

The Deck of ̶M̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ Just One Thing, (and That Thing is Bees.)

The Deck of Just One Thing, and That Thing is Bees.

This powerful relic takes the appearance of a deck of cards. Once per day, you may take a draw from the deck. Before you draw a card, you must declare how many cards you wish to draw. Then randomly draw exactly that many. Each card causes some magical effect to immediately occur. The magical effect is always bees.

If an effect refers to "[cards]", that means the number of cards you drew. So if you drew 7 cards, then "[cards] minutes" means "7 minutes".

Unless otherwise mentioned, any summoned creatures or items last until dawn (or 0 hp) before vanishing.

To use this in a game, draw cards from a deck of Tarot cards and consult the tables below.

If you are using a poker deck, then just ignore the knight cards and trumps. And treat the red/black jokers as The Fool and the Pagat, respectively.

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Clubs - Carpenter Bees

Ace: Summon Xylie, the jumbo sized carpenter bee. 

    About the size of a beachball. Really good at chewing through wood. Can burrow a passage large enough for a human to crawl through at a rate of 1 foot per minute.

    Loves to imagine herself as a master thief and will volunteer to help with heists, but terribly clumsy and makes lots of noise. Enjoys chatting about food and carpentry, spitting out pulped wood as she talks. Terrified of birds.

   (2 HD, no armor, 1 damage sting, flies at half normal speed.)

2-10: Summon a swarm of 2-10 regular carpenter bees.

X normal blue carpenter bees appear, where X is the number of pips on the card you drew. 

- They don't speak your language, but you can magically order them around. 

- They move as a unit, and have X hp. Each bee that dies reduces the swarm's hp by 1 and vice versa.  

- The swarm can attack for dX damage. (Carpenter bees  don't die when they sting; that's a honeybee thing.)

Massive Community Hexcrawl - Interactive Map

This is a janky interactive implementation of the Massive Community Hexcrawl, orchestrated by Skerples. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, etc.

Click on a hex, and its description will appear down below.

A standalone version of this map can be found here. You can save the html file, and then easily edit the hex descriptions in a text editor. That version should also look nicer on larger screens.

Click on a hex.

Platescape: Outer Plates of Cuisine

Once again, my deepest apologies to Zeb Cook.

In the Planescape setting, the Inner Planes are worlds each comprised purely of some classical element. In the totally unrelated Platescape setting, the Inner Plates are each comprised purely of some food group. You can read more about that here.

In Planescape, there's also a great wheel of Outer Planes, corresponding to the standard D&D alignments of Good vs. Evil and Lawful vs. Chaotic. In Platescape, the Outer Plates correspond to the different kinds of dining experiences.

On one axis, we have Delicious vs. Repulsive. Delicious cuisine aims to evoke gustatory pleasure, satisfying the desires of the diner. Repulsive cuisine eschews these desires as irrelevant, or actively seeks to create an unpleasant dining experience.

On the other axis, we have Healthy vs. Unhealthy. Healthy cuisine aims to provide the diner with the optimal profile of macro and micronutrients. Unhealthy doesn't give a hoot.

Behold! The Great Smörgåsbord Cosmology:

The Outer Plates
The Iron Heavens	The Test Kitchens	Grillysium	Hunting Grounds	Party Mountain
Grandmarcadia		↑Delicious↑		Valhalunch
Dietus, the Fitness Nirvana	←Healthy	Everything Bagel	Unhealthy→	LIMBO
The March		↓Repulsive↓		The Empty Pan
Super-food Hell	Ghhhhgh	Compost Bin	Cosmic Supermax	The Abyss

——=== 🥪 ===—— 

Doors, Shores, and Parallel Zones: a guide to the boundaries between worlds

So you're jumping around between parallel dimensions.  But what's the crossover like?

Here's a quick taxonomy, sorted in increasing order of smoothness.

 

Doors 

(Also known as gates, portals, wormholes, cosmic glory holes, or rifts. )

An enclosed frame holding a flat region of warped space which is connected to a paired surface elsewhere in the cosmos. Any particle which passes through the frame is transported to the other world. (Some doors connect to an intermediary demiplane, and so resemble a tunnel.)

These are the most common and easiest-to-understand type of planar boundary, and most cross-dimensional spells work by opening these doors.

The defining characteristic of this kind of boundary is that local space is entirely normal close to the boundary and then experiences a discontinuity.

d6 doors found in the Plates of Flavor:

1. A small pond of cream found in the Plate of Sweets. Jump in and you'll pop out of a similar pond in the Plate of Meats. Unfortunately, the pond has a tendency to move around when no one is paying attention to it.
2. An elephant-sized peach pit lays in the deserts of the Plate of Seed. Small tunnels dot its surface, just large enough to crawl through. Most of the tunnels are shelter to vermin, but one opens out into a giant half-eaten peach in the valley of unripened fruit. 
3. The city of Everything Bagel, found at the center of the Great Buffet of the outer plates, is just riddled with doors. Nobody actually lives there except for the Lady of Propane. All the other people bustling about were just unfortunate enough to have a random portal open up connected to their refrigerator or shower drain or something like that.
4. If you dig deep into the crust of the pastry plains, sometimes you'll find a pocket of filling connecting to some other world. A custard pocket connecting to the plain of sweets. A pocket of garbage connecting to the prime material. Etc.
5. Dionysus has a big inter-dimensional portal that he just uses to dump half-eaten chicken wings.  No clue where the other end opens up.
6. Dump enough fish sauce into any whirlpool and it will briefly transform into a portal to the shallow sea.

Hyperbolic Shores

A transition into another world with noticeable spatial distortions, but no discontinuities.

For example, you're in the Boiling Oil Ocean, cruising around on your turnip barge. You see an island made of meat off in the distance, giant billowing fingers dressing its shores. After cruising around a bit, the island doesn't seem too large. But when you land and go to explore its interior, you find that it's infinitely large and in fact contains the entire Elemental Plate of Meat.

Meanwhile, from the Meat side of things, you approach a lake of oil. You can easily walk around the entire thing in a matter of hours, but can't see across to the shore on the other side. The lake, is in fact, the entirety of the infinite Plate of Oil.

Another common kind of shore are the ones that form in large book collections. As we all know, a dense enough concentration of knowledge can cause spacial distortions, making libraries and bookstores bigger on the inside or even connecting them to L-space. Because such distortions are noticeable, but locally continuous, they count as Shores.

Parallel Zones

Characterized by a transition to another world despite the lack of absolutely any sort of spatial distortion.

You know, that crazy fairy kind of stuff where you're walking in the woods down a path you've travelled many times before, but it's unusually spooky this time and then somehow you find yourself trapped in an endless twilight forest. And it turns out it's because the vice-archduchess of the fey or whomever wanted to look at your hat was lined with beaver pelt from a particular magical beaver is seeking its revenge. Okay, we're back. It's fine.