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Item: Monster Hunter’s Handbook; If you spend 48 hours over a period of 6 days or fewer studying the book’s contents and practicing its guidelines, you have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track any standard monster, as well as on Intelligence Checks to recall information about them.

Item: the Unabridged Dictionary of Hell: While equipped, the player can speak Abyssal and gains advantage on any speech checks made against demonic entities. However, it is rather heavy, and makes the player look like a total nerd, so while it is in the player’s inventory, they must take a -1 to both dexterity and charisma rolls.

(Twist to be decided by DM before use: it was published by demons and is actually completely and purposely incorrect and the demons go along with it because they think it’s funny; roll d20 with each usage, rolling a 1 has the demon being spoken to reveal the ruse)

Item: “How to Sound Hip for the Unhip”. If you spend 48 hours over a period of 6 days or fewer studying the book’s contents and practicing its guidelines, your Charisma score increases by 2, as does your maximum for that score. Can only be used once per character.

Item: sacred texts of the dumb gods, as distinguished from the cool ones. Myths are plentiful about the powerful and wise gods that created the world and guided its people, but you didn’t think that was all the gods, did you? Learn the rituals and rites of the cult of the God of Biscuits, sing the hymns of the Muse of YouTube Comments, learn the legends of the Elder Shadows’ weird nephew that won’t shut up about slot car racing. The book was compiled by a rogue Cleric that slowly gained access to the halls of the various pantheons to interview the gods that don’t get let out much.

Item: Wands of Piracy (set of 4); when tapped on a scroll, book, VHS tape, ZIP disk, or any other non-magical storage media, it copies all the information contained within it; once loaded with information, it may be tapped on blank media to fill it with that information. The media need not be the same format. A few possible uses

  • Make copies of a scroll to distribute to a wider audience
  • Art forgery
  • Convert your dad’s old 8-tracks onto CDs
  • Extract data from damaged storage media onto paper
  • Transfer music into a book to get the sheet music
  • Transfer the text of a book onto a CD to create an audiobook

Some transformations don’t work: copying video onto paper would create a list of every frame of the video, scaled to fit them all on the available media; taking a painting and putting it onto audio media just makes noise. (Of course, you could do this to disguise it for transportation, then move it back onto canvas once you’ve gotten where you’re going.)