Beyond handcrafted

I was reading the remastered DM of the Rings the other day and an old line from Shamus Young caught my eye:

It’s not a “small figurine”. It’s a “beautiful, hand-crafted figurine of a water nymph”. Yes, this seems silly. Of course it’s hand-crafted. Everything is in a pre-industrial world. I’m telling you: It doesn’t matter if it’s not worth two coppers and weighs as much as a brick, your players will fight over that figurine if you make it sound exciting.

I agree with the spirit here. It’s more fun for everyone when you breathe some life into mundane things. Describing every little thing like it matters – because it probably matters to someone – can help make it matter to your players too.

It’s great advice for an GM looking to connect their players and their world.

But I feel the urge to quibble here.

(Not that I’m sure the late, great Shamus would hold that against me, I’m sure…)

Everything in a pre-industrialised world is handcrafted?

In our world, yeah, that’s true.

In a high-fantasy setting, though?

There are plenty of alternatives.

In the spirit of the original post, I’m going to talk about low-level and borderline useless items here. Give anything a strange origin and it’s easy to be the sort of thing destined kings carry into battle.

God-forged

Sometimes the gods seek to intervene by gifting their champions with their mightiest weapons. Every god-forged weapon is powerful and imbued with a mandate from heaven.

But what happens after the hero of legend uses the sword of destiny to slay the looming evil?

God-forged weapons or armour, once they’ve fulfilled their purpose, might lose some of their spark. People might repurpose the fragments of these shattered relics. A sword’s shard becomes a butterknife or a shield turns into a table.

It still carries some of that original mandate from heaven. It might not be a sentient artefact, but you might find your backscratcher loathes thieves or the undead. It can’t do much about that, but maybe it can express its feelings in small and amusing ways.

Trick-traded

This simple trinket came from a deal with demons or fae. Thanks to clever thinking, the mortal won it by exploiting the wording of the deal.

How will the creators of that artefact react to you using the most ancient statuette to scrape muck off your boots?

Maybe they’re happy for the story of their defeat to spread. “Oh, yes, it’s possible to trick us and gain riches, I’m sure you can make a deal just like that too!”

Perhaps they think less fondly of it. They couldn’t steal the artefact back from the mortal who tricked them – that would violate rules and etiquette – but you’re not that mortal. Be warned. The otherworldly agents might be keen to retrieve what they see as rightly theirs.

Line-shifted

This rope seems like any other, until an arcane researcher sees how it’s displaced time. It might be from the past, the future or an alternate timeline. Either way, it doesn’t belong now.

It works fine until the paradoxes start. What if you tie up a horse… which keeps it from bolting… which allows a soldier to arrive at the battlefield on time… who kills an enemy… whose descendants were destined to weave that rope one day…

Now you have a grandfather’s paradox on your hands.

Or maybe that rope – not being part of the strands of destiny – is steadily unravelling the plans of the gods.

Those are three origins a simple, common item can have. What are some others? I’d love to hear your ideas.