Can be rubbed before getting into a fight to give 1 bonus +1 AC. For every month you spend without using the earring, it gains another +1, up to a maximum of +3. After each use this bonus is reset to +1.
2. Swapstones
If one of these soft, palm-sized stones is placed in the mouth, swirled around, and spat out again, the two stones trade places. The stones are already covered in layers and layers of writing, in a hundred different hands. Each message you carve will eat away a little more of the rock. Please ensure you don't have both stones in any mouths at the same time - it gets really unpleasant really quickly.
3. Constellation
Stone the size of a thumbnail. If stared at, the image of a strange night sky slowly becomes visible. Continued focus causes the image to distort and twist as the black space behind the moon is brought into focus. When you can see nothing but darkness, save vs death. A successful save means that you have been selected by the horrorterrors. Gain 3 random mutations from a table you don't normally use in this campaign. 1% chance that your intelligence has been replaced by an alien otherness.
4. Wasp Eye Opal
If you scoop out your own eye and replace it with this gem it grants 1 additional critical hit range with any piercing weapon. Looks nothing like a wasp's eye.
5. Trick Pebble
After being swallowed this suspiciously ordinary-looking pebble can be pulled out from behind your ear. While mostly useful for impressing dumb people, anything copper that's tied to the key (with copper wire) will be stored in the negative space behind your ear before it ever hits your stomach.
6. Pietus Ersmagh's Titanic Rock
This fist sized stone cannot be moved except by people that absolutely believe it to be alive. If it's not currently at the bottom of a lake, it's likely to be in the pocket of a 6-year-old somewhere. Telling somebody that it's a very large demon in disguise, etc, will only work if they fail a wisdom test.
7. Cursehome
It's unclear whether this rock has always been a rock, or whether at one point it was someone that got on the wrong side of a witch. Standing a little over five inches tall and looking uncomfortably humanoid, this stone will absorb any curses afflicting those that touch it, and do its best to suffer their effects. Cursehome is currently dragging itself very slowly through all the worst places in the world, with a small thundercloud washing away the constantly topped-up supply of bird-shit covering it. When you look at the stone you will be overcome with the urge to spit on it, though it's considered polite to apologise afterwards.
8. Soapstone
Got some nasty bloodstains in your favourite tunic? Take your dirty clothes, throw them into water and start scrubbing a soapstone over them. Simple stains like sweat, blood and vomit will take only a minute or two. Scrubbing away the entire bowel tract of The Corpulescent Sluglord is probably going to wear your arms out. Regardless, while this stone may seem super boring it's actually probably the most useful thing on the list, and worth not a large fortune, but simply the lifelong appreciation of anyone with more than four kids. I guess if you really want this to be functional it can do like 3d6 damage when absorbed by an ooze or earth elemental. Fuck you though.
9. Shard of Dawn
This golden gemstone glows very faintly at night, and starts small fires when the sun first hits it each day. Sleeping with the shard under your pillow will cause you to wake up at dawn absolutely no matter what. Not currently in a dimension with a sun? The stone will find a way. Feel free to stab this into things that take damage from sunlight, but make sure you have a soapstone on hand.
10. Tremorshell
When tapped this stone sounds distinctly hollow. If broken open, with a sledgehammer and a good investment of time, the rock is clearly one solid piece. Left immobile, a tremorshell will slowly begin to vibrate at the resonant frequency of anything it's touching. Glass will shatter after only a few minutes touching, or very near to, a tremorshell. Bridges may be brought down, though this may take hours or even days to complete. The most impressive feat of a tremorshell is the production of earthquakes. Leave a shell on the bare ground and the earth for a mile around will be noticeably moving within three days. preshocks can be expected within a week, and if these do not shift the stone it will shake until mountains start falling down.
11. Golem's Gullet
Put anything next to a chunk of golem's gullet and it will very, very slowly attempt to eat it. After completely covering whatever object it's trying to devour, golem's gullet will slowly shrink down to the size it previously maintained, waiting for the next meal. As a general rule of thumb, a chunk of golem's gullet can eat objects up to twice its size, though it has a little more greed for iron than wood. If you pull golem's gullet off a meal it's shrinking around you will be able to dig out the object completely undamaged. No-one has yet figured out why the gullet won't try to eat things larger than it, but fortunately not many people think to ask.
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| Don't put it in the same pocket as your keys |
Whoever is holding the talking stone takes priority in conversation. Anyone interrupting or refusing to wait their turn feels a dull, blinding agony in their temples that makes it impossible for them to concentrate enough to talk. Dynasties have been founded with these things. A more prudent society would make a rule that you get five minutes before passing it on and anyone who tries to keep it gets wordlessly stabbed.
13. Meatrock
Looks like an ordinary rock but break it open, there's meat inside! Found on beaches sometimes. Leads to stranded sailors desperately collecting and smashing enormous piles of pebbles. Preserves the meat for as long as it's in the rock, making it a useful emergency snack. The meat is tough, red and slimy, like if a cow could be an oyster, and would be a delicacy if it tasted better but it doesn't. Not - I cannot stress this enough - not just a shellfish. Actually a rock.
Anybody, no matter how savvy, can be convinced this rock is good luck. It's not. Like the talking stone this seems really good until you realize that it will mostly be used against you. The fact that you know the rock is bunkumite is no defense against its properties, so an exchange will often go like this:
A: Like to buy this rock? It's good luck!
B: It does look lucky.
A: It does, doesn't it? On second thought, I'm keeping it.
15. Mapstone
Split it in half, the flat side's a map! Of somewhere. Perhaps a distant delta, perhaps an uninhabited island chain on the world's other side, perhaps the prehistoric continent where the rock was originally forged. No political boundaries, because how would a rock know that, but geographic features ought to be recognizable, if somewhat altered by the passage of time. Microscopic flaws, little more than air-bubbles and calcifications, either mark locations of interest or are just products of chance. Mapstones can be tens of thousands of years old and have a tendency to circulate, as people try to figure out where they refer to and if there's any treasure there. A king might give one to an explorer on the basis that it's not doing anything just sitting in the treasury. A cannibal tribesman might take it from the explorer's delicious corpse and send it as a diplomatic offering to the shaman of the next tribe over, who decides it's a map of the afterlife and places it on the sacrificial canoe with the the body of his mother, about to be dispatched downstream, where Hell is. They are riddles relayed across millennia, unlocked one piece at a time by the endless ingenuity of the human species. Or possibly they just kind of look like maps because the human brain loves tricking itself.
16. Hairy Opal
Opal that, if left to itself for a couple of weeks, sprouts hair. Wigmakers love them. Jewelers hate them. "Yes, I'd like to register a complaint, I was going to wear this brooch to the Duchess' party but apparently it's grown a beard. I'd like my money back please." You can just trim them but unless you're very good at shaving small, hard, irregular surfaces they wind up all stubbly. If you take a hairy opal and put it somewhere very tight, it will slowly build up pressure until it reaches the equilibrium of that particular stone. Sudden shifts in the space around the stone will cause it to burst free like a giant ingrown hair, which it kind of is.
17. Spectral Menhir
Rocks can have ghosts. Actually, anything can have a ghost, it's a universal law, it's just that the vast majority of things are incapable of dying violent deaths and having unfinished business. (Remind me to tell you about Umbra Centauri, the Ghost Sun, sometime.) The spectral menhir was pulverised by iconoclasts or land developers or people who just wanted the gravel. Now on the blackest of nights it will appear in unexpected locations, looming over nobles in their courts and families at their dinnertables, promising dire fortune for those who slew it, but not doing very much more than that since it is, after all, just a rock. The queen has promised a small fortune to anyone who can carve her a statue out of it.
18. Pulsebrick
Red. Oblong. Pulses with the same frequency as the heart of whatever touches it. Good for medical purposes, saves you from having to do that whole thing with the two fingers on the wrist. Not pretty enough to make jewelry out of and anyway the jewelers have sworn off magic rocks after the whole hairy opal incident.
19. Mintimony
Looks likes crystals of dark chocolate. Smells like chocolate, sea salt, peppermint. Texture of aluminium. Dissolves in water very, very slowly, like over a hundred years. Even trace amounts, which are the only kind you'll get because it dissolves so slowly, are deadly poison. Much in demand for garden furniture, candle holders, crowns. Don't wear it against your skin if you plan to sweat at all. For this very reason, often worn by people who want to demonstrate that they never sweat, because they are so cool and collected, and also to smell nice. Huge Giant's Causeway-esque natural formations along spans of storm-drenched coast makes the whole region a lovely walk and a terrible swim.
20. Pride Rock
All seeing this majestic bluff jut from the savannah are overcome by powerful feelings of bittersweet joy. The farming communities surrounding the rock have developed a complicated style of Venetian hat, allowing them to work outside without catching sight of the mountain in their peripheries. Anyone trying to start a fight within two miles of the rock must make a will save or feel like too much of a dick to throw the first punch. Looks absolutely great in the sunset.
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(Okay that was a joke the real 20 is this)
20. Cicardum / Imagolith
The pyroclastic cicada of the Brummard Ranges in Upper Pfelph has the longest known life cycle of any living creature, spending three weeks munching leaves as a larvae, one hundred million years sheltering in its underground cocoon, and two days fluttering about laying eggs in its final winged form before it dies and the whole thing starts again. Obviously the cocoon has to be pretty rigid to survive a hundred million years, which is why the cicada carefully spins it out of stone, squirting a potent acid from special glands on its abdomen that temporarily lends rock the consistency of play-doh. The cocoons wind up about the size of a housebrick and are commonly used for that purpose, with the metamorphosing cicada all curled up inside in a little secret cavity, unbeknownst to the home owners. They're so easy to build with, in fact, so often found just lying around in the wilderness in huge piles all of roughly square shapes, that leading wizards hypothesize the cicadas do it on purpose so that the stones will all be kept together for their eventual emergence and the brief, fervid mating season. But this makes no sense, because cicadas can't see the future, right?
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