Improving Consumable Magic Items

Musing on consumable items in RPGs

After reading a lot of OSR modules and system if there is one thing that I feel has become somewhat overlooked it’s consumable magic items. I find rarely do you see modules handing out potions or scrolls or OSR rulesets containing lists of consumable magic items.

To some extent, I kind of get it. Most OSR play tends to be focused on lower level ‘gritty’ play where the characters are more everyday people trying to be adventurers than fantasy themed super-heroes. I also think that this is probably a reaction towards the proliferation of videogames in our culture. Where getting healing potions or such things kind of feels videogamey. There is also much more of an emphasis on unique magic items to aid in problem solving in OSR play. To not have a magic item economy, where magical items should feel unique, mysterious, and the application of them help prompt outside the box thinking.

The main problem I find with the lack of consumable magic items in OSR games is that well…consumable magic items are fun. Yes, they may make the game feel a bit gamey and break the verisimilitude of the setting, yes they may create the sense of a magic item economy, but players tend to like getting them.

When you’re all out of options, or backed into a corner, or presented with an obstacle that’s hard to overcome, it feels very satisfying to go, hey, wait a sec! I have an idea! And come up with a plan involving that potion or scroll you’ve been lugging around for the past 3 sessions.

To a large extent I think this type of behaviour should be encouraged in OSR games. To do this I find it’s helpful to reframe and rework how consumable magic items work in your game.

Worldbuilding through Consumable Magic Items

If there is one thing that I found Dolmenwood did exceptionally well when I first started flipping through it, was it used it’s various consumable item and item lists to help build a sense of the setting.

Now these items aren’t always magical, don’t always impart a crazy benefit for the players, but even still, my players enjoyed learning about them, buying them, and using them to roleplay and engage with the setting. Items are often an overlooked interface between the party and the setting. You can learn a lot about a society by it’s material culture.

Consumable magic items can be used to great effect this way simply by reskinning them. You don’t have to have generic red coloured healing potions in glass containers. You could have blood red moss that helps to close wounds when pressed against them, bottled songs of light and healing which reknit broken bones, adamic mud which repairs the body like the original clay it was sculpted out of, or just simple battlefield bandages and twine to stitch up wounds and distilled alcohol to ward off infection.

The form the consumable magic item can go a long way to granting a particular feel to the setting, even if they’re all doing the same thing.

Problem Solving through Consumable Items

To some end I think consumable magic items lend themselves more towards problem solving and an OSR playstyle then individual unique magic items. The very fact that they’re consumed after use tends to solve a lot of problems. If someone has a unique magic item like gloves that let you climb like a spider, it’s going to make solving a lot of problems trivial.

Unique magic items tend to get around this through imposing limitations on the magic items like you can only use them once per day, or only use them under moonlight, or drawbacks like sometimes the gloves are too sticky and will get stuck causing your hand to slip out.

This isn’t necessarily a bad approach but limitations can often feel a bit arbitrary and workarounds be found for drawbacks. Instead, simply make them consumable. You have sticky climbing sap that when applied to your hands makes it so you can easily climb a surface before it wears off; this solves the problem and feels a bit more intuitive.

The form of a consumable magic item following its function can also help lend itself towards intuitive thought on how it can be used. For example if a player has a heavenly harp that causes them to fly once per day, they can play it to fly. There’s not a lot of intuitive experimentation you can do with this or that it’s form suggests besides maybe different songs cause you to fly higher or faster.

However, you have an oil that when applied to then body causes one to fly, it gets a bit more interesting because the form the function is taking is much more suggestive to use. Do you need to disrobe to slather enough of it all over your body to fly? If you slather it on an item will the item float? If you smear it on an enemy will the enemy float up? These are all interesting questions that can lead to interesting experimentation.

The Role of Magic Items

In my current game I’m going to change the role of magic items. More permanent magic items I’m going to essentially treat more like artifacts. Very powerful mysterious items with their own backstory and which the players learn about and which are likely going to need to become the focus of several sessions of adventure if they are to be obtained.

They should be character defining things that have a backstory of their own and once obtained become part of the players backstory (or they part of it’s backstory).

Each player should only obtain one or so of these at a time and they’ll either have a bit of a mind of their own, or obtaining them will ensnare the players in a complicated web of other people who want the item.

That whole ‘middle’, magic items unique magic items that aren’t super powerful yet aren’t consumable, I think I’ll just do away with and make consumable. Sword of +1? Now a oil of sharpness that grants +1 for a day until the blade becomes dull again. Helm of telepathy? Hallucinogenic mushroom that lets you read others thoughts and communicates with them for several hours as long as you don’t mind the shadow people at the edges of your vision.