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10-23-2020, 07:17 PM | #1 |
Ceci n'est pas une tag.
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Vancouver, WA (Portland Metro)
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Best objets d'art found in adventures?
I think this is system-agnostic...
So many adventures have generic two- or three-word names (gold/ivory chess set, for instance). But every once in a while, the adventure includes a really fine piece of art that makes you say, "forget the selling price, this is going into our headquarters!" One I remember (vaguely, don't remember where it was listed...) was a painting of elves hunting animals, and the scene was animated (like a Hogswart portrait).
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I'm a collector, not a gamer. =) |
10-24-2020, 03:03 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Best objets d'art found in adventures?
An elephant made of finest wood with ivory inlays. We kept it and promptly renamed our adventuring party "Company of the Elephant".
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius |
10-24-2020, 05:38 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Sep 2013
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Re: Best objets d'art found in adventures?
Well, in our Shadowrun campaign it's not a single object. It is more that the rigger suffers from some kind of "hamster-instinct" (?) and keeps every vehicle the group "finds" for himself. No matter what size or kind, he keeps it because "we maybe could use it".
His backyard must look like a used-car dealership.
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""The origin of everything good is due to games." - Friedrich August Wilhelm Froebel, creator of the kindergarten. |
10-25-2020, 10:08 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
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Re: Best objets d'art found in adventures?
Definitely the shield (it never had a name as such everybody knew what you meant), an outsized buckler with a polished bronze face and a blackened boss forming a very detailed bulls head. Not in anyway magical or, as a working shield, particularly well made but very striking.
It turned up in a collection of junk piled up in a cultists shrine and triggered a bit of an 'It must be mine!' response amongst the PC's, a group of exiled soldiers going by the title of the Company of the Black Bull. After several PC deaths and much cultist slaughtering it passed into our hands, or more accurately into the hands of our almost completely ineffectual NPC leader (a deposed civic leader we had, unwillingly, followed into exile) where it served as a standard for the company throughout their almost successful quest to restore him to power. The big joke is that it was created as a throwaway detail in the description of a room by the GM before the campaign derailment that left us exiled and before we chose the name. Last edited by Frost; 10-25-2020 at 10:16 AM. |
10-26-2020, 12:12 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Chatham, Kent, England
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Re: Best objets d'art found in adventures?
In our fantasy campaign, the cosmology include the forces of Destiny, Fate and Luck as personified, not Gods, but definitely Involved Forces.
So, when it came time to reduce a long-established and successful island of pirates in the Neva river, the infiltration phase included an attack on the Pirate King's stash. Some gold, a few jewels, numerous quality weapons, and at the bottom among the bric-a-brac, a dirty-grey ivory piece carved like a wolf, his head and tail up as if howling. Since the Grey Wolf is the chooser of paths, and the Pirates had a choice of sides of the island to attack passing ships, I kept it, thinking I'd broken the Pirate's run of 'luck'. They were finished that day. Since then, PC and pals have gained enormously, but mine is visited by a wolf (eyes as big as millstones!) who seems to stick his head into the room from another dimension, who asks 'So which way? Die today or die tomorrow?' So far it's always been 'Die tomorrow'. Feels like the Chinese proverb: 'Who rides the Tiger's back should take care not to fall off'. |
10-26-2020, 12:28 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Best objets d'art found in adventures?
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10-26-2020, 12:33 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Best objets d'art found in adventures?
Is an armoire an objets d'art? The thing my group will never forget (and they prove this by reminding me at every opportunity) is a bronzewood armoire found in an Eberron module.
It was a throwaway detail in a room at an abandoned magical research base and I'd bet pretty much anything that the module writer thought "bronzewood" was like double-special oak and only worth 2 or 3 times as much as regular wood. Instead it is a magical substance unique to Eberon and so tough that incredibly affluent but clumsy Druids are supposed to make plate armor with. It costs 500 GP pe rlb. So that was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how much this piece of furniture weighed. It might not have mattered if the PCs had not had a wagon but the writer gave the bad guys a wagon and guess where that wound up? This also enabled them to take the adamantine doors and the 2000 sunrods. No, they haven't forgotten the sunrods either.
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Fred Brackin |
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