Magic Items From Scribblenauts

  

In a recent post, the Bad Doctor included this table entry:
33. a fat round bomb with a long fuse; once it goes off, it never stops exploding, forming a permanent static hellstorm of explosions.

This item is near to my heart. It has a name (it's a "resurrective bomb"), and in certain Scribblenauts games you can create it exactly as written.

If you're not already familiar, scribblenauts is a game that lets you conjure objects by writing their names. You can also include adjectives, which give the object properties such as redness, explosiveness, or indestructibility.

In this case, "resurrective" is an adjective that makes an object respawn after it's destroyed. If you apply it to an explosive, each newly-spawned bomb will get caught in its predecessor's blast radius and explode in turn, forming the permanent hellstorm Ms. Screwhead describes. Here is a crappy video of the phenomenon that I found online.

Scribblenauts is nominally about word puzzles suitable for a third grader, but the actual point of playing is to see what kinds of weird artifacts you can create. Many of my TTRPG settings are attempts to recapture this magic.

  

More relevantly to this post, I have an ancient Scribblenauts Unlimited save file that can be mined for magic item content:

1. haunted blowgun: upon striking their target, the darts fired by this gun transform into ghosts. There are rumored to be alternate (talismanic) versions which summon dragons instead.

2. spacious enveloping penny: A coin with a large internal space; maybe the objects stored inside it appear on the head side in place of Lincoln. Can swallow a whole person if you press it to their forehead, and they'll remain in suspended animation until the coin is emptied or destroyed.

3. petrified froggy @backequipment spring boots / sonic shoes: A pair of mobility aids which simultaneously allow their user to run much faster and jump much higher. The frog jump thingy uses an illegal adjective accessible only via glitch.

4. lightweight rideable sonic rainstick: Once per day, it can summon a solid but very fragile raincloud for the user to ride upon. It also hides the secret to an ancient weapon: lightweight rideable sonic acid rain, a version of the raincloud which corrodes anything beneath it.

    

5. enveloping glass throwing knife: A hollow throwing knife designed to shatter upon impact, releasing the payload inside.

6. cloned potion: A transparent, slightly viscous potion. If you pour a few drops onto something it will conjure a magical duplicate. It is theoretically possible to create a potion that applies any adjective; normal potions are the simplest form of antimagic; absent potions can vanish even objects that are otherwise indestructible.

7. tiny grey sasquatch: A short, furry homunculus that can be trained to apply a potion to any creature it sees.

8. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECT - "inverse potion": Using extremely esoteric techniques, it is possible to create potions that remove an arbitrary set of adjectives from whatever they're used on.

9. fountainlike ring: A ring with a nozzle instead of a stone, which spews massive volumes of water when twisted open.

10. molecular immovable diamond trampoline: A floor tile which sends anything that steps on it hurtling upwards.

11. petrified lava: A flat rock which immolates anything that touches it. Since wearing a fireproof amulet makes you immune, these can act as a rudimentary security system.

12. tiny bouncy spiked steel ball: A sharp projectile that ricochets unpredictably. Release several in a confined space and they'll make a pretty good meatgrinder.

13. orcish indestructible petrified tiki mask: A snarling jade mask that terrifies most non-monstrous creatures.

14. flaming sword / hatlike fictional invisible haetae: A two-part weapon - a sword that sets fire to anything it hits, and a bound spirit that devours burning things.

15. spiky fish-shooting minigun: A machine gun that fires spiny, metallic fish instead of bullets. The fish function as caltrops; unfortunately the gun itself is also spiky and painful to hold.

16. fictional rifle: The idea of a gun. Can't be noticed by anyone who doesn't already know it's there, and the bullets phase through everything but their intended target. If fictional beings walked among us, who could tell?

17. tiny handheld throwable earthbound sun: A handheld sun, typically used to neutralize the powers of vampires and werewolves. However, the lycanthropes have invented a countermeasure, a hatlike lightweight full moon that can be worn as a mask.

18. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECT - "dimensional bridge": A disk-shaped device that can be expended to insert a single 4D pathway into reality. These passages are short, look a bit like transparent ladders, and are usually best used to bypass a wall. 

     

19. resurrective portal - a portal to the dungeon dimensions, stabilized so that instead of collapsing it spits out an endless series of monsters.

20. ?disabled person?: Somewhat insensitively, this adjective-noun combination results in an undifferentiated ? symbol. If the ? is cloned, the 'duplicate' will instead be a human with random traits.

21. tiny petrified war: A figurine of a hooded skeleton. When it is unveiled, all nearby creatures are compelled to fight each other to the death. famine, pestilence, and pollution figures also exist, but death is strangely useless.

22. tiny petrified djinn: A figurine filled with chaotic magic. This power has random effects when unleashed, most commonly summoning random people and animals or shuffling the color and size of nearby objects. If the figurine is used for the fourth time in one day it makes fireballs rain from the sky and then vanishes.

23. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECTS - "@a / ø$ø": A pair of cursed tablets whose existence makes it possible to invoke forbidden objects and adjectives using spellcheck.

24. dark nonliving evil @friendlytomaxwell unnoticeable (armor/ greaves / vambrace / boots / samurai helmet / evil eyes) - each part of this armor set contorts itself to attack nearby beings. They are only very narrowly prevented from directing their malice at the wearer or each other.

25. metempsychic laser demonic crystal shiv: A relic that summons self-replicating demons shaped like random creatures and objects. Once unleashed, these beings are extraordinarily difficult to contain; they infest seams in the world from which they cannot be rooted out.

Remembering ideas on the go

Writing is indisputably the best way to remember things, but sometimes you're taking a walk or brushing your teeth and it'd be inconvenient to take notes. This is a quick way to lock ideas down until you're able to record them.

The premise is to plug stuff you want to remember into a bidirectional linked list. This provides structure - items are arranged in a sequence, you can recall them by following that sequence instead of dredging them from your intermediate-term memory. Each item also references the items before/after it, which provides redundancy and helps the information stick.

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The method:
For each thing you want to remember, come up with some image that represents it. For example, if I wanted to remember the first item of this table:

• open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

I might use the image of a brain. Try to make sure it has a strong relation to the thing you want to remember; the biggest risk when using this method is that you'll recall the image but not the thing it's supposed to represent.

For the first item in the sequence, I like to imagine holding the image in my left hand. It can help to come up with tactile details - what does this thing feel like? My brain-image is squishy and wet. I can imagine squeezing it like a sponge.

OK, now we'll add the next item.

• turn drops of blood into swords.

For this one, let's say our image is a red sword. Now we start to construct our linked list, by coming up with a way to connect the sword to the brain and vice-versa. This one's pretty easy - the sword is piercing the brain straight through.

Next item!

• when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

OK, our image for this one is a spiral staircase. We've gotta connect this to the previous image in our list, the red sword, so let's say that the spiral staircase is wrapped around the sword's handle.

We'll do one more:

• exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

Our image can be a pocketwatch frozen at midnight. To connect it with the previous item, we'll say it's rolling down the staircase.

Every now and then you might want to reinforce your memory by going backwards or forwards through the list, image by image. There's never any need to visualize the entire sequence at once, just the current image and the connections it has with the images before and after it.

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I find these image-chains surprisingly durable and extensible. If you're so inclined, you can remember 40 things at once or reconstruct the whole sequence days after you last thought about it. Still, do yourself a favor and WRITE THINGS DOWN as soon as you can.

Memory tricks all get a bit grody if you use them many times in rapid succession. When I no longer need a sequence, I like to hold out my left arm, where I was keeping that first image, and brush it off with my other hand as if I'm scattering the whole thing into dust. I don't know if this has any practical value, but I enjoy it as a little re-centering ritual.

15 powers that came to me late at night

1. open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

2. turn drops of blood into swords.

3. when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

4. exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

5. put your hand on someone's shoulder to walk them around like a puppet.

6. taste the history of things you eat in exquisite detail.

7. your tongue is sharp. If you cut someone with it they'll believe one thing you tell them, but they'll also probably remember that you went up to them and stabbed them with your tongue. subtler if you do it while you kiss them.

8. your shadow comes to life and strangles people who step on it.

9. if you eat a book and concentrate very hard on not throwing up, nobody can remember any of the information inside. when you lose focus you puke your guts out and people remember again.

10. fold paper animals so intricate that they are inhabited by real actual angels. If one gets smushed everyone responsible turns into salt.

11. your hands are replaced with porcelain doll hands that have retractable buzzsaws inside.

12. if you move in the direction opposite the earth's rotation you go back in time. If you move alongside it you go forward.

13. if you squint at someone with one eye you can dream of what their reign would have been like if they were a roman emperor.

14. when you speak or write it's in a different language every time and only you and the person you're addressing can understand it.

15. if you play charades with someone and act out their mannerisms, and they correctly guess that they're the thing you're miming, you can kill them and nobody will do anything about it.

after that was something about toy snakes, but before it coalesced into anything I fell asleep and knew no more.

Setting: Institute of Occult Sciences

There's no such thing as a surface. Instead we have the Underground: a world made of negative space, the kind of subterranean locale you're probably familiar with from many prior sources. The Underground borrows heavily from these sources and from other classic science fiction. It has its Morlocks, its ichthyosaurs, its Newts and Lemurians.

It's also undergoing a technological revolution. Clockwork devices proliferate; train tracks connect the known world; natural philosophy has started to bear strange and alarming fruit. All of it is driven by Weird Science, and most of the science is produced by an Institute that is a little anarchist and very mad.

Players are students at the Institute of Occult Sciences, or at least part of its ecosystem.

My plan is really to run this as a set of parallel duet games and furnish everyone with their own personal subplots, but here are some more generic ambitions, if you're into that:
~ Become something more-than-human.
~ Be recognized as a professor.
~ Establish yourself as a regional superpower.
~ Found or revolutionize a Science.

For extra credit: Prevent the world from being destroyed by superintelligent cuttlefish, or whatever else is metastasizing this week.

This setting is built on Laws, when I feel like it.

The Institute

• All the rules are informal. Professorship is a social construct; there are lectures and labs but you enroll in them by showing up.
• More advanced courses may be available only by invitation. They meet at odd times or in odd places.
• Everyone is obsessed with something, and probably eager to talk about it.
• Many people have sinister motives.
• Academic disagreements are serious business.

The Weird Parts

• "Exchange students" have no distinguishing characteristics and can only be seen in your peripheral vision. They make up about half the Institute's population.
• We have invented messenger lizards and pneumatic tubes but not the intercom.
• The library has many sub-levels and is full of strange objects. It tends not to be actively dangerous unless you take risks, disturb something, or break rules.
• Tall buildings are perpetually wreathed in lightning.
• The groundskeepers don't speak and never leave any skin exposed.

Student Life

• Students must find a place to stay and deal with the practicalities of living there.
• Currency exists, but most people trade favors.
• People are always willing to show you around. They might ask for a small favor in return.
• There are lots of extracurricular activities.

The Sciences:

There are five major Sciences. Each is a magic system made up of a bundle of interrelated techniques and setting details. If you've seen GLOG deltas (Inadvisable Decisions is my favorite) or Stolen World lifepaths it's a bit like those. More of a focus on crafting, since that is my group's particular genre of madness.

Corporeal Science: Study of biological materials. Think Victor Frankenstein or the Darwinists from Leviathan.

Galvanic Science: Study of electricity and magnetism. Nikola Tesla in a universe where the death ray actually works.

Motive Science: Study of motion, including perpetual motion. Produces clockworks, automata, terrible engines, etc.

Lucid Science: Study of information. Can facilitate remote viewing, telepathy, and SCP-esque anti/memetics.

Empty Science: Study of the nonexistent and unreal. Deeply esoteric but has practical applications in necromancy, dream-manipulation, and summoning invisible Presences.

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There are also 'secondary' magic systems which are smaller in scope or less recognized by the Institute. If I think of something cool that meshes with the Underground's aesthetics it can probably be thrown in.

d4 lesser Sciences:

1. Verdant science. Creating Audrey II through cross-pollination, speculating wildly about why anything grows underground.
2. Worm language. Communing with chasm-creatures via drumming and exchange of blood.
3. Transmutative arts. Metallurgy and chemical synthesis, extracting useful substances from tidal effluvium.
4. Aberrant cartography. Mapping the Underground, navigating non-euclidean space, dowsing for ores and ichor.

Backgrounds:

Each comes with two ~things, one functional and another that can be either fluff or a plot hook. In the race/class binary they're more race than class, but there should probably be another 1-2 that are additional flavors of human. 

Dodger: Member of an itinerant subculture that travels the underground by stowing away aboard cargo trains.
~ An old wound. If it impairs a limb or vital organ you might have a mechanical prosthetic.
~ A knack for hiding, evading pursuit, knifework, or another practical skill.

Neo-Promethean: A humanlike being assembled from salts and humours by a student of Corporeal Science.
~ A physiological defect which might be an advantage if viewed from the right angle.
~ A creator elsewhere in the Institute, now disinterested or deceased.

Morlock: An offshoot of humanity adapted to existence in lightless chasms.
~ Complicated mouthparts, customarily hidden with a scarf or a half-mask in public.
~ Lean muscle and an excellent sense of smell.

Illuminated: A person with a sliver of something unreal embedded in their mind.
~ Chronic insomnia. When you do sleep you have surreal nightmares.
~ The ability to clearly perceive things which are only half-there.

Guest: A corpse animated by sentient slime mold.
~ Extreme resilience, owing to your unreliance on human organs or metabolic processes.
~ Fragments of your host body's memories, absorbed when you ate its brain.

Cryonaut: Someone from an ancient era, entombed in a cryogenic corpse-city for hundreds or thousands of years.
~ A deep-time artifact. It might be a possession of yours or an oddity from the Necropolis.
~ A rich personal history which is now basically irrelevant.

Foundling: A lost child adopted by Lemurians. Left behind when the colony vanished.
~ Glowing eyes with complex nictitating membranes for modulating color and intensity.
~ Projective telepathy. You can transmit thoughts to anyone who meets your eyes.

Skittering: An intelligent monster that has integrated into society, typically unique.
~ A totally inhuman body-plan, and probably an alien mindset too. You might lack a social instinct or experience odd cravings.
~ An eccentric wardrobe. Clothing is a way to signal personhood and lack of hostility.

Book Reviews, Part 1

I find new reading material mainly by lurking on discord servers, skimming blogs, and seeking out recommendation lists. So I appreciate projects like Paperback Picnic or Throne of Salt's book reviews. They're like a box of chocolates, except instead of sweets I'm being provided with new stories.

Anyway, I'm not a big review-writer myself, but I keep a log, and for purely self-interested reasons I think more people like me should share what they've been reading. So I'm going to be the change I want to see in the world by posting stuff I've enjoyed in the last 3-ish years.

If you have books you would like to recommend, or a lead on review archives yet untapped, maybe consider posting a comment. Or pinging me over discord, sending a carrier pigeon, making words appear in the dust on my windowsill, whatever floats your boat.

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Adrian Tchaikovsky:

Sometimes it feels like this guy is phoning it in, and sometimes he's great. Here I include only the ones I liked.

- Children of Time &c

Extremely good. Look it up; if the premise seems the least bit appealing to you, you should stop bothering with my dumb blogpost and read this instead.

- City of Last Chances &c

Has a lot of multithreaded plots, such that it's really more about the city as a whole than about any individual character, but IMO all the threads were interesting in their own right.

In City of Last Chances it feels very much like Tchaikovsky is taking notes from TTRPGs, probably by way of LARP, which is mentioned in his author bio. I'm not really an OSR person, just stuck here forever, but in OSR jargon I think it'd be called a powderkeg.

There are currently two sequels, which are set in different places and have a more linear feel. The second book is pretty good, if not quite up to the standard set by the first. The third is once again good, but slightly less good than its predecessor, and at this point I think the series might be starting to outstay its welcome.

- Cage of Souls

Mediocre plot-wise but the world it takes place in is cool. It's set at the end of time, where the planet is polluted and desiccated, there's one known human city, and everyone lives in the shadow of sci-fi technology they know very little about. One running theme is that life will continue to exist in some form even post-human-extinction, and there are some alien and not-so-alien creatures which are positioned as 'successors.'

I've only just started Alien Clay, and I suspect I won't like it as much, but there seems to be a lot of shared subject matter? It might be a rehash, or maybe Tchaikovsky just has a thing for heterodox academics sent to prison in a hellish environment.

- Elder Race

The best of the novellas. Short and sweet. Expert System's Brother is also decent.

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The Zahir, Borges

Borges is good in general, but this one Got me, maybe because I'm very prone to hyperfocusing, developing obsessions, making objectively small and inconsequential things into my entire world. For Borges I think this story might be about love, maybe of the unrequited parasocial variety? But for me it's about things which have permanently reshaped my brain. Fantasy novels, TTRPGs, video games, a friend's intensely elaborate paracosm that I've been gaming in since high school.

I don't know if others would find the same significance in it, but it's so short that you might as well read it and find out.

A Deadly Education (just the first one), Naomi Novik

I feel kind of weird about including this one, because it's extremely YA, and if you look at online reviews it seems the attempt at internationalism has holes large enough to drive a bus through. But when I read it I did in fact enjoy it. It feels dense, conceptually, like there's a lot of setting per page. It's also in conversation with Harry Potter, which I found fun, YMMV.

The sequels are Fine, but they lose most of these qualities, and in doing so they retroactively make it feel like the first book had less depth. Also, the romance is better when it might plausibly not be a romance, and in the second and third books that headcanon is no longer tenable.

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Susanna Clarke:

- Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell

Very, very slow. But compelling once you've dug into it, and also quite substantial. I tend to tear through books in an a day or two once I've hit my stride, but this one kept me going for at least a week, maybe more.

Anyway! This is sort of noted in-story, but being surrounded by one's own fragment of timeless and eternal night is not really a curse. If you're a fey being with the power to immure people in darkness, please consider doing that to me, it'd be rad.

- Piranesi

This has become the book I recommend to acquaintances who aren't really into fantasy or sci-fi. It's unique, well-told, and much faster than Strange & Norrell, but still rich with delicious delicious Themes.

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Zelazny:

- Chronicles of Amber

The classic. This series is a product of its era, and it's obvious that Zelazny was writing it by the seat of his pants. If you're willing to overlook those faults, it's pretty good. Might be worth reading the first few just to take inspiration from the politics-and-feuding-amongst-a-family-of-magical-immortals, if you're into that sort of thing.

- A Night in Lonesome October

A novella about a bunch of archetypal gothic horror characters trying to prevent or facilitate the unsealing of the great old ones, told from the perspective of an animal familiar. Much like City of Last Chances above, this one feels like a TTRPG scenario, and part of the reason I'm so fond of it is that it seems like the mechanics would actually be pretty solid.

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The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, &c, Catherine Valente

Yes, it's in theory a children's book, but it's genuinely amazing even as an adult. Charming, whimsical, ideas you get the urge to steal, the works. The sequels are also very good, albeit in the samey, watered-down way that sequels so often are, up until the first part of The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, which stabbed me in the heart.

I want to like Valente's other stuff, but I tried Radiance and couldn't stand it, so maybe the children's fiction nature of this series is load-bearing. I'll have to give it another go at some point.

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville

Another children's book. Not as good as Circumnavigated Fairyland, but still weird and fun.

The Night-Bird's Feather, Jenna Moran

Great, weird, aesthetic setting, lovely cast of characters, well-written, et cetera. It is maybe a little didactic, which I imagine could be grating, but I enjoyed it and recommend it.

Technically shares a setting with Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine, but honestly, NBF stands on its own, and I wasn't especially satisfied when I went to dig for more.

Exhalation, Stories of Your Life & Others, Ted Chiang

Lumping these together because they're all short stories. They're good, and often manage to immerse you in an interesting world despite being so very brief. Off the top of my head, my favorites were probably... Exhalation itself, Understand, the one about the tower of Babel, and maybe 72 Letters.

Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon

Do you like alien lifeforms? Unusual modes of being? This book has alien lifeforms, and also some transcendental stuff involving alternate physics and the Demiurge at the end. It's about a human narrator psychically projecting into the cosmos, where he hops from planet to planet, follows the history of the universe into the distant future, and joins with other psychic projections to search for God. It's not really a traditional narrative, but it's still very fun.

...also it feels like it's part of a microgenre alongside All Tomorrows. I'm still looking for a third example, maybe throw me a comment if anything comes to mind.

The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins

This one makes a lot of questionable decisions. A lot. But as is thus far the theme of these reviews, I really like nonstandard fantasy worlds with a lot of conceptual density, and it turns out that I'm willing to look past some flaws if you give me one of those to toy with. Library at Mount Char is good in that way, even if (spoiler alert) it leaves you wondering why anyone would think "it was necessary to test the worth of my successor" justifies all abuse and forgives all sins.

Neal Stephenson:

- The Diamond Age

- Anathem

The Diamond Age is great so long as you ignore the ending, and maybe all the stuff related to the Drummers. Anathem is also great, and I was only tempted to ignore a few pages of epilogue.

Come to think of it, Anathem reminds me of Norrell & Strange, in that it's long, meaty, and very much a philosophy piece (like how N&S is a period piece). Anyway, rare case where Stephenson mostly sticks the landing.

Permutation City, Greg Egan

Really a philosophical idea dressed up as a story, with a nothingburger ending. It's a cool idea, though.

50 Purchases From the Goblin Market

1. Creature which resembles a telepathic and prehensile wig. It feeds on dandruff.

2. Rag doll which is legally your firstborn child.

3. Goblin coins. Indistinguishable from the real thing except that they have the taste and melting point of chocolate.

4. A foul breeze. The smell is intense enough to cause nausea; it has the personality of a very dumb and very loyal dog.

5. The deed to a bridge, location unspecified.

6. Goblin fruit. Sort of a carrot-ish potato pumpkin thing. If you eat the seeds they start growing in your stomach.

7. An evil kitten.

8. Broken shards of mirror-glass. If you're cut by one you have to put your hands on your head and hop in a circle or it's seven years of bad luck.

9. Stepladder cursed to fail you when you need it most.

10. A homunculus. Knee-height, will follow orders if they're written on a piece of paper and fed to him. Contradictory instructions cause indigestion.

11. Use of a magic chariot for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day it breaks free of all earthly ties and flies into the sun.

12. An unbreakable, unfoolable, unopenable lock.

13. A witch's iron eyeteeth. Wickedly sharp, rattle alarmingly in the presence of bad juju.

14. Coin that always lands on its edge.

15. Novelization of your life up to this moment. The sequel was critically panned and is no longer in print.

16. A stolen bicycle.

17. Cardboard box which holds a very small and gullible angel.

18. Turkish delight.

19. A reanimated snake skull. Very bitey.

20. A perfect skipping stone.

21. Lava lamp with real molten rock inside.

22. Rubber bugs that come to life when you take them out of the tube.

23. A flaming axe, but the handle ignites instead of the blade.

24. Loaf of bread containing three rocks, a razorblade, and a spider.

25. Dead phoenix wrapped in a fire blanket.

26. Loom that weaves gold into straw.

27. A lemon.

28. Realistic fascimille of your own severed head.

29. Matchsticks which produce lots of oily smoke but no flame.

30. Fisheye paint. Distorts the apparent proportions of anything covered with it; has no effect on color.

31. Two-dimensional sword. Very sharp, very brittle, difficult to hold without losing fingers.

32. An ant farm with tunnels shaped like letters. The ants claim to be superhumanly intelligent, want out of the box.

33. Certificate of marriage to Old Man Winter.

34. An eleventh finger.

35. Parrot with an encyclopedic knowledge of swear words.

36. Divisibility cloak. Allows its wearer to harmlessly detach and reattach limbs.

37. A spell whose only function is to remove itself from the caster's memory.

38. Glowstick that emits gamma radiation.

39. Fake vampire teeth that give you the ability to heal by drinking blood. After each use, save or develop a dependence.

40. Scrap of paper which describes your worst enemy's worst sin.

41. A haunted dollhouse.

42. Paper-mache gorgon mask.

43. Indelible ink. Can't be erased, washed off, written over, or scraped away.

44. Bucket of holding filled with 64 cubic feet of molasses.

45. Magnificient robes struck by a curse of selective visibility.

46. A chitinous violin. It can play insect noises (crickets, cicadas, etc) but not any human music.

47. Talking lockpicks. Rude, judgemental, will briefly scream in pain if broken.

48. Violently explosive bubblegum.

49. Nutshell containing an infinitely spacious pocket dimension.

50. Canopic thimbles housing the mummified organs of a pixie queen.

1d20 Invisible Planets

 1. The vulture moon. Circles buzzard-like beneath the horizon and feeds on ghosts. Will trade you the thing you want most for the thing you most need.

2. A gas giant that's slightly out of phase with the known universe, detectable only by the manner in which its gravity distorts other orbits.

3. A star-cinder: It fell into the sea and guttered out. On stormy nights the leviathans dredge its corpse back up and parade it through the western sky.

4. A puzzle-box of planetary scale, now disassembled. The pieces were buried in nearby moons.

5. Hyperhyperborea: An ice giant visible to stargazers only in the uttermost north. It wobbles between past and future pole-stars, carrying the details of their conspiracy to overthrow Polaris.

6. A boltzmann planet that exists for an instant at a time, appearing and discorporating far too quickly to be seen.

7. Chiraldia: A planet made of frozen mercury that only exists in mirrors. To set foot there is to trade places with your reflection.

8. A comet formed from ice so pure and clear that it is undetectable to the naked eye.

9. Euryale: A dim, faraway planet that tutors witches and transforms infants born under its auspices into monsters. Astronomers who examine it too obviously or for too long tend to die in their sleep.

10. A rocky planet that is sending a message in morse code by varying its albedo. This operation is taking place on a geological time scale; the periods of darkness between dots and dashes last centuries.

11. Aculeata: A star that emits no visible light, but which is terrifically bright in the ultraviolet, such that its focused attention can cause sunburns and blindness. Believed to have made an ancient pact with bees.

12. A nameless, ruined world, inhabited only by a starving god. All thought that references it is devoured.

13. The planet that would exist in place of Mars, if a butterfly had flapped its wings five billion years ago. It houses a thriving post-scarcity civilization, observable only through a prism that refracts possibilities.

14. Rorschach: A black moon that creeps through the spaces between stars. People hold impromptu masquerades when it is high in the sky.

15. Passerine: A magnetic planetoid that the Earth swallowed whole in a fit of youthful hunger. When its strength waxes it takes control of birds and forces them to fly straight upwards until they die of exhaustion.

16. A star that wears a veil of dust to hide its beauty. Poets spend months training telescopes on its region of space, hoping that the rings and nebulae will part to afford them a glimpse of its splendor.

17. Chfled: A moon that shines in hell. It illuminates the crossroads and graveyards where devils work, and is seen most clearly by the hubristic, the foolish, and the desperate.

18. Meinong: A planet populated exclusively by impossible things. If something is done for the first time elsewhere, the version of it that exists on Meinong disappears: ergo, it might emerge from hiding if someone were ever to invent a whole-planet invisibility cloak.

19. A star that makes noise instead of light. On quiet nights you can hear it mumbling.

20. Skynest: A rogue planet steered through space by a species of telepathic moths. It stands behind the sun, waiting for the latest generation to emerge from their chrysalises so that they can disassemble and archive the Earth.