The topic for this month's contest was:

"Best... magic item... ever."

Email your entries to: contest@animalball.com.

The winner of these beautiful prizes is:

Me and Lucky Strike!

But Lucky Strike will get them all to himself because part of the functions of these contests is to clear out my box of junk... uh, I mean prizes.

Congratulations, Lucky Strike!

Here are the results (as always, spelling errors are the fault of the authors):

10. "Can a Brother Get a Rimshot?" by Toa

Ring of Inivisiblity. Its power? It was invisible.

9. "What's Important is Winning." by Cazmonster

Back a lot of years now, I wanted to play Mage with a passion, but I wanted to play a mage with cybernetic augmentations, a lot like the Mages in the book. Luckily, after a lot of cajoling, the one guy willing to be a Mage Storyteller said "Sure, you can be a cybermage, go ahead and get him written up and we'll get going! As it was me, I went completely gorilla shit when deciding how many "cyber widgets" to cram into this guy. Sure, I had to say that he had been surgically crippled when it came to doing innate magic, but it didn't matter, not when I had 12 levels of Talismans to play with.

Of all the high-voltage, experimental, potentially lethal cybernetic upgrades I gave him, the piece I loved most of all was the Nascent Matrix. Buried deep in his chest was a talisman that would have eventually transmogrified into a living node of possibly unimaginable power. The Storyteller said "Okay, Fine" and seemed to be totally comfortable with my possibly game-shattering collection of hardware and weapons. Once again, I had read the rules a lot more often than my Storyteller and knew exactly what I was going to get away with having this thing. And here's the deal to the uninitiated (Ha! I kill myself), a talisman gets to have five separate abilities. Three of which, node creation, regeneration and Prime transference were all unmentionably awesome to have. My guy could regenerate just about as fast as a Werewolf and call on huge stores of Quintessence throughout game sessions. Where the other mages were worrying about Paradox and getting shot at, I had my cyber goodies to keep my guy in the thick of the fighting. And so, we gamed­ and by the powers, I made a mockery of everything that even closely resembled combat. The Nascent Matrix let me absorb the primal patterns of spells and convert them into power for my Forces Cannon (a talisman). I cut loose on Void Engineer astronauts and Syndicate hitters with abandon, reveling in unmatched power. For many sessions, it was great fun to kick Technocratic ass (especially considering my character was an escaped Technocracy experiment). But all good things eventually come to an end, the Storyteller, in a turn to this day I still don't understand, decided my character was actually a werewolf. Yeah, a guy that's been running around with sixty or seventy kilos of Technomancer experiments and a Node-To-Be becomes a fuzzhead. I guess the Storyteller really wanted all of my characters to be werewolves. Me, I was waiting to have a Node in my character's chest.

8. "Pointless, but Cool." by Qusoor

The Cloak of Impressiveness. When activated, if would billow out like the hero's always do in a movie, even if there is no wind. Everyone watching you had to make a save or be impressed.

7. "Urban Legend #1" by Tasmonicus

My favorite was canned troll. In first edition d&d any piece of a troll could become an entire troll if allowed to regenerate long enough. The can was a stasis generator ie anything put in was kept out of time and thus fresh. It was meant to be a rations preserver but another use was found when troll bits were put inside. It wasn't really a can at all being glass with a meson jar type lid. Thus they broke real easy releasing the contents. During the siege of a city the party threw no less than 137 of these things over the wall. The resulting troll infestation made the area uninhabitable for centuries following the siege. There were no survivors from either army.

6. "The Game is Afoot." by Lucky Strike

Boots of Varied Tracks.

My dwarf would just change them randomly every hour or so. Tracking our party? Hey! There's a dwarf and two humans! Wait, it's a chicken and two humans? No, it's a bugbear and two humans? No, it's a troll and two humans? No, it's a catoblepas and two humans???WTF???

5. "Urban Legend #2" by DoctheWeasel

The HEAD of Vecna it wasn't really an artifact, but...

This DM I knew was running two parties at different times, and one went snuck into a dungeon without killing anything and put this severed head in the treasure room. They snuck back out and started spreading rumors of "The Head of Vecna," which resided at the bottom of this dungeon.

The second party heard the rumors and decided to investigate. They fought their way to the central chamber and came upon the head. After some confusion as to what to do with it, it was finally agreed that you had to replace your head with it to gain it's power (much like the Hand). Someone volenteers, off goes his head and the Head is placed on the bloody stump. When nothing happens, someone gets the idea that they are doing something wrong. They wrangle some ideas around and decide that they need to put the Head on faster. Doesn't work. Maybe they need to say something before being decapitated. Doesn't work. They got a fourth variation off before the DM finally broke down laughing.

4. "For the Jackass That Has Everything." by Lautrec

The Offensive Shirt, from an UA campaign I played in recently.

It's a normal, somewhat washed-out black T-shirt, with a print on it. The print varies depending on who's looking at it at the moment, so that when a person looks at the text and/or picture printed on the shirt, he will see the what is to him the most offensive message ever. A homosexual, for instance, would see big, red letters spell out the words "GOD HATES FAGS". A feminist would see the message "RAPE IS JUST A FORM OF LOVE". An Islamic insurgent might see an American flag and a picture of G.W.B. A Black Bloc protester would probably see the McDonalds logo, or something like it. And so on. The best thing is, the shirt appears to be totally harmless to the one wearing it. To him or her, it just looks like a plain 'ol black t-shirt.

The perfect gift for your worst enemy.

3. "With Friends Like These..." by Ryan Samuelson

Sword of the Wargod

For the past 10 years I've played in a friends Sword and Sorcery D&D game and my character had this interesting magic item. For the most part the sword wasn't that unusual +2 Broadsword (magic weapons are extremely rare in the setting) with a few other powers it: raised my charisma and when we switched to 3rd edition the GM gave it a nasty crit multiplier.

But the real catch was that, like all magic items in his world, it had a major flaw. The flaw in this case was that any warrior who saw the sword wished to possess it. Neadless to say my character got into numerous fights and duels that only let up when word got arround that my character was a badass (that crit multipiler came in handy).

Any way, the during the last adventure of the character the GM outlined a few other hidden benefits.

Me: "Wow! so you are saying that, as long as I have the sword, my warband companions will NEVER fail a morale check and on top of that they get to ignore any enchantment of compulsion spell that would force them to leave my pressence?"

GM: "Yeah but that's only because they are waiting for you to die so they can claim the sword for themselves."

Needless so say that when that character finally did die, half the party turned on one another.

2. "The Set Up." By Mike

The Everfull Flagon

This one's cheap and simple... alcohol on tap. Sometimes it's wine, sometimes it's mead, sometimes it's some unrecognizable moonshine, but it always makes you the life of the party. Amazing how many times this thing came in handy.

1. "The Pay Off." By Kyle and Lucky Strike

Lucky Strike [In response to Mike's Everfull Flagon, see above]: "And, in the same vein, The Everburning Cigar. For the Dwarf who has everything."

Kyle: "This is sheer genious. But when you think about it, it could be a cursed item. I mean- where do you put it down when you sleep?"

Lucky Strike: "In your Everfull Flagon ! Remember, this is for the dwarf that already has everything."

Kyle: "Be careful, if your Everfull Flagon is ever full of moonshine, and you put your Everburning Cigar in it, you may just create an Everfull Molotov Cocktail!"