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.