The twisted wish is nothing new, but the details written up here make it a worthy read.
(As a completely random aside, the "I wish that I could hover" wish made me think of the hover CSS attribute... so in some weird modern fantasy campaign, you would get the answer: "You already can hover - your mouse over a website". Sorry, there are surely better ways to piss off your players. :-> ) Go to Comment
Actually, I'm running this exact scenario right now. It is based on another scenario where I decided to see what happened if I gave one of the players a set of armor that is WAAAAAAAAAAY out of their league. It basically turns them into a semi-divine being. Part of it was the ability to make three wishes every day, but because the character isn't in tune with the armor, they have to be careful with the wording.
I'm taking the armor away next session when a few high level clerics own the group and take the armor, along with any outrageous wealth that they may have gotten. Until then, it has been lots of fun. Go to Comment
I think the part that got me was imagining a player trying to coax a wish out of the Amulet, telling it that it was prettier than the jewel necklace the PC already had, and that the amulet was more than just a magical wish in a box for said character to use when they wanted. Go to Comment
One other possibility, although perhaps more long-term in its effects, is that the amulet has a strongly chaotic bent, and is semi-sentient. It "listens" to any wish made around it (basically anything beginning with the words "I wish...") and already comes with a number of "stored" wishes. Then, whenever someone wishes for something nearby, the amulet "stores" that wish and in exchange it fulfills one of the wishes it already had stored. So for instance if the amulet stored "I wish I had a million gold pieces", "I wish I could sing like a nightingale" and "I wish I knew what is going on", and it comes into the possession of a character who at some point expresses a wish such as "I wish I could fly", the amulet would fulfill one of the three previous wishes instead, "delete" it from its memory and replace it with the wish to fly. This would make it even more complicated to figure out what is going on, because there would be no clear link between the wish a character just made and the weird event that follows... although it would require the GM to keep track of wishes spoken around the amulet, and possibly to create a few that come with the amulet when it is first found. Go to Comment
The thing about the Monkey's Paw wish is that it honestly wasn't evil, per se. It was just a very literal interpretation of the wish, much like this amulet would do. In that case, though, the paw wasn't at fault, the man was, for his ambiguous wish of, "I want my son back." He forgot that his son had been run through a meat-grinder, but the monkey's paw certainly gave him his wish. This could certainly be adapted for this plot, spawning a subplot of minor horror, depending on how you interpret things, and what wishes were made. Go to Comment
man this sub is waaaay good, im definatley gonna use it in my next campaign, ill finally have a new toy i can get the players fooling around with for a bit, nice 1 man Go to Comment
Thats a matter of interperation - a literal interpretation would be simply for the inanimate mouldering corpse to fall down in front of him. For it to be unnaturally alive in my opinion was a level of malignancy above a simple misinterpretation.
From the opposite direction, one could have his son newly reborn and dropped off by a stork, but then that would not have been as good a story :) Go to Comment
NPCs (Major) (Combative)