A Review of 'From Dawn to Decadence' by Jacques Barzun

The War for Humanities

Five Hundred years of Europeans doing cultural stuff! Jacques Barzun was here for nearly a hundred of them and spent ten of those, from 84 to about 94 years of age, writing this book in which he tells us; this is what has been going down.

What the book is, is a slightly deeper question, with no absolute answer, though Barzun does have a crack at it several times.

‘Dawn and Decadence’ is a burning brand for the Humanities. Barzun is against scientism and technocracy, partly even against theory, partly against what he might call the cult of analysis. Neither History or Politics can be called a Science. The do so it a product of a jealousy and envy.

The problem is that Science and the Humanities, though they have many parts in common, are much more different in total than one might think. They are not even different meals made from the same ingredients, one is a meal, the other a useful adhesive employed in building walls.

A mirror universe version of Dawn and Decadence would recount the same events, go over the same writers and ideas, but would be upside down and inside out in comparison. It would begin with an analytical need to understand causes and in doing this, would perform similar deeds of chronicle, expansive view, personal asides, brief summations, lists, events and perhaps small personal digressions. In the full calculation of its substance it would be made of the same things, but it would be a fundamentally different text, fulfilling fundamentally different aims, through a different system.

To argue one must reason and analyse and abstract. To reason, analyse and abstract, one enters the realm of scientific, systematic thought, and so the battle for the humanities always takes place on “enemy” ground. Is always a defensive battle, for it cannot argue in its own tongue in its enemies court. In the jury of sciences, the Humanities have no case. They cannot argue for their lives. They can only be. The mute appeal insensate to the incurious and unread. They are not about attaining goals and only partly about choosing which goals to attain and how. The main and primary essence of the Humanities is the life, colour, emotion, distinctiveness and very texture of human life. It is like a pencil asking a pot of paint; “So, what exactly do you do around here?”

What Barzun is trying to do is to imbue meaning. To do this he must analyse and understand, even argue within himself. But this is not a work of analysis, or argument. His book is personal, human, tragic, as much an intellectual biography of Jacques Barzun as a book of History. It is a pot of paint. It is high art.

High off Barzun’s Supply

This is a book that makes you want to buy more books. (I bought three; in total, nearly equalling its length on my shelves, and that was with active repression of my biblio-Id).

Barzun mentions many of them, not only as events, or parts of a list, but as streams and forests in his vast geography of time – a sense of pastoral exploration and personal connection with this book or that; “oh over here, behind this small war, is a hidden genre not many have seen”.

Tried to control myself but as a direct result of Dawn and Decadence I purchased;

The Book of Common Prayer; its often claimed that the KJV Bible had the greatest single impact on written and spoken English – Not So! Says Barzun. The KJV was always odd and pseudo-archaic, was designed to be so from the start. The book you actually want to read is Cramners Book of Common Prayer – read from the pulpit every Sunday for 400 years, this is the text that really binds and influences modern English Prose.

Hazlitt – Selected Writings; “… out of favour today because it follows no system, lacks a jargon, and affords pleasure when read. How can it be “rigorous”? It is “impressionistic.” These and other strictures must be understood as part of the competition between art and science. To be up-to-date and acceptable nowadays, any mental activity must use principals couched in special abstract terms and forming a system. What is poured into the mould other than impressions drawn from the work is not stated. But one has only to read Hazlitt without preconceptions as to what he ought to do to see that he is both rigorous and exhaustive. His practice is to describe and define and describe again, adding a line, a touch, developing the complete image. You see a draftsman, a painter at work. He persists and insists that you shall see the way he perceives – not that he is trying to persuade you of an idea, only to make you as good a reader as he is. And that means one who not merely knows more than the careless or unguided but enjoys more.” Halzitts was also amongst the best of all the reviews of Spencers ‘The Fairy Queen’, back when I was reading the whole thing.

Flaubert - The Temptation of St Anthony; I knew well of Salambo, thanks to Noisms, but imagine my utter WRATH when I discovered in Dawn that Flaubert had written a hypnogogic dream vision novel about St Anthony in the desert, then his shitty realist friends had dumped on it, so he had burnt it! I nearly threw my soul across the room. Thankfully, a page or so later I discovered that later on he had re-written it, better. I was so happy I bought a copy.

The Upset West

But think of the weight, and of what just happened. I bought Dawn to Decadence, read it, and was so inspired that I bought a handful, a pittance, only a trickle of the huge number of mentioned, reviewed, discussed imagined and considered books in that great meta-book. My shelf of things to read.. did not go down at all.

Barzun straight up spent nearly an hundred years reading and writing, across multiple languages. He has read the European canon. How many other people can or could do the same? Few. The weight of books I will never read, of arguments I will never be able to counter, (as I have not read the source), of ideas I will never share, nooks left unexplored. There is too much and the very weight of such knowledge makes Dawn both a gift and a burden.

Dawn like a solid brick of compressed gold leaf, each leaf inscribed with fine verse, which smacks you right in the head. It hurts, it’s an assault, you may be bleeding, it’s too heavy and will take untold time to unpeel these layers like volcano-baked scrolls and work out what they said, it also seems to have been wrapped around a small core of spite, however, it is ALL GOLD, and now ALL YOURS.

As with Barzun, so with the West. One deep theme of Dawn, is European culture having a fucking meltdown due to how much of it there is. Dawn is both a diagnoses of that but also an expression of it.

Dawn begins around the end of the ‘Middle Ages’ when Luther phones Erasmus and tells him; “Those things in the distance aren’t small, they are very far away. Now start the Renaissance!”

The world made sense. Then we began to investigate it. Our philosophy was already orientated

to a grand source of values outside this world, and sometimes in conflict with it. The rituals and bureaucracy of Confucius were not enough, polytheism was not enough, neither the Hero cult of perceived barbarism. The West slowly put less faith in God, but still sought something outside itself - from then, increasingly, the question in art and science, (originally not far apart), was Nature. Nature delivered, in spades, but not the thing we want; the secret of what is good and bad and how to tell - we had to work it out for ourselves.

The West became upset. At some point, Barzun would probably say the very end of the 19C and definitely by the Great War, the West had become troubled by itself. "Western Civ Has Got to Go" has roots not just in the 60s, but deeper in the birth of modernity. There is a kind of psychic anguish to the Western Mind which no degree of material knowledge or land conquest can fix. We are chasing something. More - we labour under the weight of European achievement. There is a lot. Records have been kept. It’s hard to live. We cannot measure up.

A subdued theme of Dawn, but at the end in its final chapters, the main theme, is the West slowly turning, and then revolting, against its own history and high culture, from which Barzun predicts a bright dark age; lots happening, but death for culture and the soul. He is writing Dawn, not for the present, but for a deep future, long after this bright-dark age, when elements of culture he respects might be born again. This is a book written for the Library in Name of the Rose, (itself written by someone who had ‘read the canon’), though hopefully it wont burn down this time and will be rediscovered later.

Blind Spots

Because this is a book about everything, Barzun may have got a few bits wrong, here and there. Many educated reviewers who know a bit about their subjects remark that they disagree with Barzun, often in implication, sometimes in fact. Well, its unavoidable if you are going to just keep writing, and even necessary, and by Barzun’s standards, good, as it makes the text more human and gives you something to argue against.

A key element is that Jacques is a Pure Boy. He has no dirty mind, he is not a window-creeper or eavesdropper, let alone a pervert, deadbeat dad, race cultist, arms dealer, drug addict or megalomaniac. But he is writing often about people that are these things, and, being pure and decent, he either leaves these elements out or doesn’t know about them at all. This means there is a strand or channel of history he does not discuss, which makes his picture incomplete, and leads to surprises and astoundment.

We hear much of Rousseau, but nothing about the five children the great educator abandoned to the orphanage. We hear of Rimbaud, but not the African gun-running. Barzun reluctantly admits the Dark Ages might have happened if you insist on calling them that. Nietzsche receives a good report but his incel vibe gets no mention.

This perv-blindness makes WW1 more of a surprise than you would expect.

It is only through the eyes of Barzun and as part of this grand story that I see how utterly apocalyptic, transformative, unusual and disastrous the Great War was, along with the Second World war, here even more evidently, just a savage sequel. It’s so much worse when you are directly involved in the story of Europe and have seen all these little nations grow up and fight a bit - from a cultural perspective it is annihilation and the death of a World, and madness, a derangement of the intellectuals seemingly coming out of nowhere.

But it would take Barzun to find this such a genuine surprise- for he is a pure boy. There is (relatively) little here about the growing race cults, Germanys low self-esteem meltdown, (the Kaiser “worked for peace”??), nothing about the savage little wars, sometimes of extermination, which had marked the borders of the European diaspora, and little about the transportation, mutilation, rape and murder of several millions of Africans.

True, from the perspective of a history of European high culture, maybe there is little to say about these things, but only by not thinking about them can you genuinely be surprised by the Great War. Tell a Nigerian prisoner, or a Native American, or a Balinese lord, or a Tasmanian Aboriginal or Australian Aboriginal, or an Emu, that the whites have started machine-gunning and massacring each other in great heard. I doubt they would be very shocked to hear it.

Barzun is not stupid, weak or deluded, but he is fine, and crucially, not a creep or a weirdo. Creeps and weirdos are not surprised when the dark self gets its dick out and starts ejaculating bullets.

He is a child of the Church and the haves to the bone. Genetically French-Catholic, even if not that French. The one things he kept in common with the French 20C pederast-left is a deep disenchantment with Anglo supremacy and especially the effects of Demotic Life on cultural life. In its aesthetic, its structures of power, the art it encourages, its fashion, relationships, the feel and texture of society, he really does not vibe with it at all. The leftists react with Marxism and wokery, two things that have little in common apart from their anguished superior alienation. Barzun goes deep into reaction.

More on this later

The Garden Stroll

One of the greatest pleasures in Dawn is the wandering, strolling pointing out and interest in themes and genres, writers and artists, otherwise ignored, or just utterly forgotten, except for Barzun. There is much, of which, nine fragments here;

1.     Burning Instruments

"It is only fair to add that music in the Renaissance had its enemies, some merely censorious, some radical. Among the latter, Savonarola was prince. His bonfire reduced to ashes all the instruments he could collect."

2.     The Commonwealth Of Oceania By James Harrington

"Oceania is a republic whose instigator resigns after he sees it well established. it has a written constitution, a legislature of two houses, rotation in office, and a president elected indirectly, as in the later Constitution of the United States, by a secret ballot of all citizens."

3.     Cartouche

"An innovation, an idea with a very great future, made its appearance at this time. A very young man named Cartouche, trained as a soldier, gained immediate renown for his daring and success as a thief. He was arrested, escaped, and next invented the role of mastermind in crime. He organised bands of fellow professionals, male and female, recruiting even young noblemen who had talent and inclination. At a dinner party, a man who had been robbed on the way recognised the pair of practitioners among the guests. Cartouche was soon a hero to the populace. Adept at disguise, he was able to hold his own in good society. He headed a delegation to greet the Turkish ambassador and relieved hi of the gifts intended for the court. While one band was working in Paris on the foreigners about to invest in the Mississippi scheme, another robbed the mail coach from Lyon that carried treasure."

4.     On The Romance

"One of the attractions of the genre was its length, which guaranteed pleasure. The most highly prized in the mid-17C were the narratives of Madeleine de Scudery, two of which were 20 volumes each; her trifling ones ranged from four to eight."  ....... "But to enjoy them now one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases."

5.     Political Ability

"To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. Anyone who has served open-eyed on a committee knows how many "good ideas" are proposed by well-meaning members that could not possibly be carried out, because what is proposed consists only of results, with no means in sight for getting from here to there. After serving on a local government body, Bernard Shaw guessed that perhaps 5 percent of mankind possess political ability."

6.     Equality

"There is but one conclusion: human beings are unmeasurable. It follows that equality is a social assumption independent of fact. It is made for the sake of civil peace, of approximating justice, and of bolstering self-respect. it prevents servility, lessens arrogant oppression, and reduces envy - just a little. Equality begins at home, where members of the family enjoy the same privileges and guests receive equal hospitality without taking a test or showing credentials. Businesses, government, and the profession assume equality for identical reasons: all junior clerks, all second lieutenants, earn so much. In other situations, as in sports and the rearing of children, equivalence based on age, weight, handicap, or other standard is computed so as to equalise chances. That is as far as the principal can stretch."

7.     Imagination

What links myth with literature is the Romanticist faculty par excellence, the Imagination. As we saw, the faculty regained resect, but the world remains ambiguous. Coleridge pointed out that it is not mere fancy; little effort is needed to put together in thought bits and pieces of experience - say, a talking animal. To imagine is not to fashion charming make-believe. But it takes imagination to write a fable in which the talking animal satirizes with insight and wit some feature of society. Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects the remote, reinterprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a means of discovery, it must be called "Imagination of the real." Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of the imagination."

8.     Novels, Balzac And History

"The sense of 'how things go' presupposes that people and their habits, speech and costume vary wonderfully from place to place and time to time. Change is seen to come in curious ways from the interaction of leader and led, coupled with accident and coincidence. History reads like a novel and a novel is a history - almost."

9.     Romanticism

".. in Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked - egagé, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the people, whose own heart-and-mind provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy."

There is more. Much much much more, from a brief pen-portrait of a mid 20C humourist who wrote several books in a cod Irish brogue (“the equal of any humourist since Twain, and utterly ignored”), to the forgotten creatives of Napoleons Empire, always in the shadow of the Giant and tainted by his tyranny, to the fallen world of Stephan Zweig (who you will remember from ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’, to great tranches on music that I didn’t have a strong intuition for, (did you know there was a universally applauded period of English madrigalists?) William James inventing ‘stream of consciousness’ (I had to work hard not to buy any of his books). Barzun is a cornucopia, its his most engaging, honourable, life-giving but also frustrating qualities. This is a book written out of love. Literally a romance.

The West and the Rest

The thought occurs that to say anything meaningful about the 'West' it would help to compare it to literally anywhere else. This, in detail, we cannot really do. The equivalent peninsulas, half-continents and archipelagos, each for different reasons, fail to put out.

India, ever-absorbed in Big Loops of Being, didn’t write down much.

China did write a lot of stuff down, but every now and then, (recently; Mao), would burn the lot and re-write memory (which sounds nutty but if we look at the difficulty the West has had in living with its own memories, maybe there is a point to it).

South America – we melted its gold tongue.

The Rest of South East Asia is hot, wet and surrounded by sea, and any land with all those things will find it hard to hold a deep written history – the rocks will crumble and be overgrown; the rest; rot.

Barzun talks of the themes of Europe. Are they simply human themes written in a specific way? It is hard to say. We will have to wait for some kind of assembling-super-robot ultra-mega-mecha Barzun.

Goes Off On One At The End

At almost any point in Dawn, Barzun seems in love with history but vaguely annoyed that it has happened. He loves the world he describes but there is always pain and loss, offset, for him, by whatever funky new cultural stuff these penninsularies are getting up to now.

This fades towards the end of the 19C, staggers around the Great War, and collapses utterly when coming into modernity. There is a horror to being Jacques Barzun, which is that he was raised in a cultural time machine, a direct expression of a culture that was slowly perishing even as he was born. It is because he is this; a man from the time machine, that he can come forth and bring us wonders and lay out the rich incredible tapestry of the last 500 years before us, to reawaken the dreams and passions of our forgotten past and let us briefly walk amidst the ghosts of our ancestors. Also because of this, he must have been, intellectually if not socially, an inestimably lonely man - he reminds me of Gildas, the Welsh priest who wrote one of a few scraps of record we have from the British Dark Age - a list of the failings of his people and their doom and how they let him down. Barzun is a bit like that, a lone Priest, echo of a lost culture, sitting out on a rock watching a dark age rise and coping his tits off about it.

He is not wrong just not completely right. He doesn't talk about popular music, cinema, (good) television, comics, games - well they are utterly alien to him and so irrelevant. He is barely aware of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but even if he were could he actually bring himself to like any of it? Maybe Gene Wolfe - as catholic, complex, and full of difficult mysteries and subtle thought.

High culture should be no more elitist than science, and probably less elitist than the high sciences of mathematics and physics. More people can probably understand an opera than can easily learn calculus. But it certainly feels more elitist, and the rule of High Culture seems to mesh more neatly with and spring more rightly from, an older, more hierarchal, more conservative culture , while science, despite its deep difficulty, and the rare and elite nature of its finer practitioners, gets along broadly happily with the Demos and the Demotic, while Barzun could not. He hates modernity and hates being stranded here, alone, which, I suppose thankfully for him, he no longer is.

The Long Quote

I opened with the question of what Dawn actually is, and if or how it could be defended in the Court of Reason and Analysis. What is the book for? And can it even be regarded in those terms?

Primarily; no, it should not be regarded in those terms at all.

However, Barzun being Barzun, he has at least considered the question of analysis, of ‘teachable lessons’, of things to be gleaned, which, while not at all the main point of Dawn, (it is not an argument), he considers what its arguments might be;

[This is long, its why I put it at the end.]

"Not a science and not a philosophy, history is bereft in an age like ours, which wants at least theory when science is not attainable. Can a case still be made for Cinderella? One line of advocacy might be that even if history were simply a story recited in various versions, it would be worth having as a vast mural full of action and colour. But as pointed out earlier, when presented by a thinking historian, history does more: it shows patterns that recur with a difference, dramas in which one follows exposition, complication, and denouement, while continuity in aims suggests themes. In all these ways knowledge of man is enhanced. History moreover includes energetic lives, no two alike, that show creatures as characters.

These elements need no theory to earn respect. And a further possibility exists. At times in the present work, the narrator threw in the remark; "This is a generality." The dictum meant that a conclusion just reached applied mutatis mutandis to other broad ranges of fact. These fruits of reflection, like history itself, are interesting as well as useful; here is a round dozen to show how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses the mind with types of order:

- An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or two pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.

- A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.

- "An Age of ---" (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees.

- All historical labels are nicknames - Puritan, Gothic, Rationalist, Romantic, Symbolist, Expressionist, Modernist - and therefore falsify. But "renaming more accurately" would be effort wasted. Coming from diverse minds, it would re-introduce confusion. All names given by history must be accepted and opened up, not defined in one sentence or divided into sub-species.

- The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.

- Neither of these propositions is true by itself; "Ideas are the product of society." "Social change is the product of ideas."

- The denial just stated applies also to heredity and the environment; great men and the masses of mankind; economic forces and the conscious purpose; and any other pair of commonly invoked coordinate factors. The exact course of their respective action cannot be understood and consequently cannot be stated.

- A class is not a homogeneous group of people marching in step but a sort of labelled platform populated by a continuous stream of individuals coming from above and from below. Once settled, they acquire the common traits.

- The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care _after_ it has done its work.

- In art, influence does take place and when strongest is least literal. When it is literal it must be called plagiarism and the fact should not be concealed by the eminence of the thief.

- In biography, systematic explanation by unconscious motives defeats the purpose of portraying an individual character. It turns him or her into a case, which then belongs to one of the types in the literature of psychology.

- Progress does occur from point to point along a given line for a given time. it does not occur along the whole cultural front, though it may appear to be throwing into shadow the resistant portion. The sciences are no exception.

To these dogmatically stated rules, some modifications or contrary cases will no doubt occur to the student and the reader. That is one use of the rules: to sharpen the sense of difference in similarity. The other is to guide reflections on the facts met with in any account of a past or present scene. Testing a generality makes for precision in remembrance, which is knowing history. To be remembered also is that these twelve are not exhaustive; others might be framed, and few or none may fit times and places other than those which suggested them.”

The World of 100 Wonders

 On Twitter I brought up the concept of a D&D world with no magic but for 100 magical items and almost all foreign policy and intrigue was about possessing and controlling these items.

This was a very popular concept, especially amongst people telling me that everyone else had invented it first. Which actually came in useful when writing my own list as I could steal from all of the series and games mentioned.

Below is my list of 100 magical items that might define a world. There is no original content in the items themselves. I took them all from common stories, Mythology, Dungeons and Dragons, Hunter x Hunter, Xaiolin Showdown, Brandon Sanderson, Fred Saberhagen, Hugh Cooks 'Chronicle of an Age of Darkness' series and maybe some other places I forgot. The interest is really in the arrangement of the items, their use and the kind of world they suggest.

Reasoning

I selected and edited items based on a few factors, (and my intuition);

Differentiation of Powers

Ideally no two artefacts do the same thing. (in real Mythology there are basically 100+ magic swords that cut really well etc). Sandersons Stormlight Archive has large numbers of artefacts like Swords and Armour that do basically the same things. That gives a slightly different tonality and organisation to the world, lending it more of a material pseudo-historical texture. I wanted to take it in a different direction, with lots of wild possible counters and inventive uses.

Strong potentialities but also limitations

Everything is meant to be very extremely useful in the right situation, but also to be limited. In looking for limitations I tried to make them bound to the item doing specifically one thing well, and only that. Some items have 'refreshes' and none can be 'recharged'. The idea is to create interesting story and adventure possibilities and an interesting extension of the world these items are used in. So we can have a 'City of Golems' for example, where everything is automated by infinite cheap golems, but it all depends on this one, single, artefact, and if that goes missing....

I also initially tried not to use any Monkeys Paw effects [MEPs) where the item inevitably turns back on you as I considered that concept better for narrative than for play, however, in a number of cases I did end up using a slight MPE as I couldn't think of a better limiter. This may have been cowardice on my part.

Generally there are no ‘saves against’ or resistances to a Wonders power. The answer to a Wonder is another Wonder, tactical and strategic thinking about how to limit its utility, theft, careful assassination or just avoidance. They are all ‘singular’ items after all.

Physicality

I think I got all but one thing tied to particular objects, and that one is the Titan power from Attack on Titan where I really wanted people to eat each other. Almost everything else is small enough to be stolen or hidden. It could be taken by an army, or, in the right circumstances, a single thief. I think only one is inherently quite big and hard to move.

Familiarity of Concept

For use in games I wanted everything to be pretty readily explicable. Most of these come from mythology or known fictions, so everyone involved can 'get the basic idea' very quickly. (Also, I am not an infinite fount of ideas.)

Possibilities of strategic use

What does it mean for the world that this power exists, is known, is singular and is attached to an item. If a medieval kingdom had a Palantir, who would use it and under what authority, who would guard it and how? How would the population and nearby Kingdoms adapt to knowing they might be under surveillance, and so on.

The 100 Wonders

There is no magic in this world but for the one hundred items stated below.

1. Palantir

[From LotR, D&D and Myth]

Can see anywhere. The visions are silent.

Better in some ways than a spy satellite as you can direct the point of view. Limited by its singularity, one observer can only look for so much, even if they work in shifts, and by the limitations of, to some extent, needing to know what you are looking for.

More useful to a person with singular desires than to a state, but a state is probably where it is going to end up, in some intelligence department besieged by letters from various departments, guilds and lords demanding surveillance of this or that thing.

There is no 'search' function where you can flip right to who or what you want, so looking for stuff outside of regular areas, like throne rooms etc, where you know people will be turning up, probably won't work well.

Obviously made exponentially more useful if combined with the Demon Eye (below).

2. Girdle of Infinite Strength

[From D&D and Myth]

Grants Hulk Strength.

Body becomes strong enough to handle it, but not immune to any other forms of harm. So you won't break your own bones but might punch off your own skin, and can still be cut, burnt, etc.

An overwhelming offensive power, especially since the bearer can leap about, but one you can counter with organisation and mundane means. Massed arrow fire, poison, sticky fire, gas, a swamp etc.

The wielder is probably strapped into a metric tonne of armour only they can wear and uses a massive club so their hands don't explode. State or organised use would make this a kind of Captain America/Siege Weapon/Army Spearhead figure. Someone rulers would control with their family, and with luxury and status.

Like many offensive weapon wielders, you want the holder to be stupid or narrow minded enough to control but not so stupid they can be used in intrigue against you.

3. Precognition Stone

[Not sure but Hitogami fom Mushoku Tensai has a form of this power]

Holding the stone gives clear, precise and accurate visions of that persons future only.

The future-visions run in real time and can't be sped up but you can skip crudely back and forth. It doesn't tell you how precisely to avoid bad futures, but presumably common-sense solutions will work, this isn't intended to be a monkeys-paw inevitable fate deal where you trying to avoid the future creates it.

Vastly dangerous in the hands of a King, General or Master Strategist. Someone with a lot of centralised power who receives and puts out a lot of information. Simple fear of this stone in the hands of a general or ruler would absolutely terrify the shit out of all nearby polities. Would you dare go to war with a guy who has the Precognition Stone?

A sufficiently competent or ruthless leader, like a Borgia or Napoleon, would probably end up a world-Emperor with this thing. Then it would stick to the role and position, and become itself a cause of conflict.

Of course the fear of a Precognitive foe might be more powerful than the stone itself. On the other hand; a single person, even a powerful one, can't take care of everything or watch their own timeline all the time. The fear itself would impel others to oppose them.

4. Cup of Resurrection

[From Myth]

Brings the dead back to life.

You need at least a some bones and generally the more body you have and the better its condition, the better. Bones will take a full draught to regenerate. Pour the liquid in the cup over the bones and everything grows back, the person restored to their pre-death condition. Cup renews its power each day. A cupful will resurrect one Skull or maybe 20 recently deceased bodies. (Or remove this limitation if you want to see what happens in the world.)

As Star Wars told us, 'No-ones ever really gone'. Now this is verifiably true, but what happens when a limited number of people, realistically about 10 a day, can be resurrected, but only in one particular place?

Suddenly, finding the bones of, for example, Jesus, is a much bigger deal. Kings and Emperors can ensure their reign, to an extent, but the cup doesn’t reverse age, or heal disease, and only fixes wounds as much as needed to get someone back on their feet. If someone has a terminal disease or is just very old, repeated use of this might be like torture.

Like many of these items I imagine either hyper-secrecy, or a massive temple Bureaucracy with very long queues.

5. Pitcher of Eternal Water

[From D&D]

Pours a stream of unending, pure, water.

This seems like a very mid item but I included it because of the incredible necessity and usefulness of water in places you wouldn't usually find it. The Pitcher might enable some forms of exportation of deserts or other places, it might be used to sustain a small oasis city in the middle of the desert, all dependant on this one item.

6. Magicians Bottle

[Hugh Cook]

Imperishable Glass bottle and two rings. Someone wearing the ring and twisting it when within about 5ft of the Bottle can turn to smoke and disappear into it.

Inside the bottle is like a tower or castle of glass, very deep. Its full of rooms and great store houses. You could fit an army in here. Movement and force from outside the bottle does not affect those inside. Max amount of people you can get inside in one go is about 20, otherwise they clog the bottle neck. Horses also don't like it in there as they get stuck.

In Cooks stories inventive uses for the bottles are common, including, in one case, getting into one and being thrown off a castle wall to escape a mob. Control of the two rings is key, and those can be stolen and go missing.

7. Golden Scales

[Hunter x Hunter]

When faced with a two-option choice, these scales will tell you which is better for your future.  

It surely won't be long before someone tries 'hacking' this item by reducing a hyper complex situation down to a flow-chart of single choices. Limitation may include that the choice has to be actually instantiated before you, not just described, that the vision of 'better' only applies to one person, and that the scales decide what is 'better'. Which may be you being the only person to escape a battle in which your own side loses, or your wife and child being killed in a carriage accident instead of you.

8. Lamp of Three Wishes

[From D&D and Myth]

Rules equivalent to Aladdin and the D&D version. So not infinite reality-warping power but a lot of power to transmute and move things around combined with the intelligence and creativity of the Djinn to fulfil your desire.

Slight Monkeys Paw if you pose the Djinn incredibly destructive or difficult tasks it might indulge in some resentful compliance. Assume a Gygaxian attitude on the part of the Djinn, with more extreme, difficult and dangerous requests resulting in complications, resentful compliance of massive drawbacks.

Of course if you let others use the Lamp you could achieve a lot, but how do you control them?  Probably you are going to hang on to your third wish for as long as possible. The first thing many people are going to ask the Djinn is to steal some other Wonders. At that point, a hunt is on

9. Possible Glass

[Adapted from Hunter x Hunter]

Ask about any hypothetical situation and the glass will show you a 30-hour documentary of the possibilities.

In some ways this is better in terms of utility than either the Palantir and Precognition stone, purely because of it semi-sentient management of possibilities. The other scrying and prediction devices have a more mechanical aspect and so rely on the intelligence, organisation and skill of the user to both direct and manage the scrying, and to understand and transmit what they find. I suppose a lot like real intelligence where nations often have advance warning of things, but can't tell the true and useful information from the vast mass of random or false info coming through at any time. The Possible glass is like having an entire intelligence dept working for you, while the Palantir and Precog Stone are more like single intelligence sources. The glass producing visions that are less perfectly accurate but a lot easier to work with.

The equivalent might be letting George Bush watch a documentary on the Iraq War before it starts. It’s just a possibility but a lot easier to base policy on than a bunch of data.

10. Luck Die

[Hunter x Hunter]

Cursed item. Cannot be abandoned or given away until a skull is rolled.  A twenty-sided die with one skull face and 19-star faces. When you roll a star, the next choice or action will have maximum possible luck, but rolling the skull will be bad enough to cancel out all the previous great events.

I tried to limit 'luck' or 'fate' powers as they are extremely difficult to systematise or control in-world. I think this is the only one I left in, and it has an in-built MPE. In Hunter x Hunter the die isn't cursed and that show does a good job of showing how bad actors will systematise its use, keeping slave prisoners and forcing them to make decisions for the group while rolling the die, until it kills them, then moving onto the next.

In a sense that is very OSR behaviour, but I wanted to avoid it in-game. Though obviously feel free to edit that element if you like.

11. Key of Passage

[Elements from D&D]

Will open any lock, door or portal simply by touching them. The user cannot be held; bonds and adhesions will slip off them and they cannot be grabbed. So long as they have the key.

In the hands of an adventurer, an infinite, instant 'Knock' spell that works on anything. In the hands of a Guild or State, most useful in intelligence, but in a sense this is also its most mediocre use. Its most powerful use is the element of 'any', so no matter how great the gate (imagine sieges), or tomb, or if magic from another item has been used to bind - this may be one of the only counters to 'The Great Seal' (below). If you can find the spot something was sealed, or something close and inherent to them that was left behind.

It can also open the door to 'The Secret Room', if you can find it.

Becomes insanely dangerous when combined with The Ring of Shadows, or the Ring of Gyges.

12. Wand of Ten Hearts

[From Hunter Hunter or Xaiolin Showdown, can't remember which.]

User can manipulate ten (total) emotions in ten (total) people, but can't change anyone emotions towards themselves.

i.e.they  can make ten people fall in love, or force one person’s personality to be nearly what they desire, controlling ten of their emotions. You can't re-alter someone’s emotions without them being in line of sight and close. So if you set someone’s anger to high and they leave your presence, they are going to stay like that.

Consider adding a cost in ‘slots’ by focusing single emotions on particular objects. But I kind of already hate slots. Maybe just say ten separate emotions in ten people and that’s it.

13. Favour Cushion

[Hunter x Hunter]

Seat someone on this cushion, and they will do one thing for you, so long as it is within their capabilities.

The opportunities for stealthy use and the infinite possible uses with no recharge needed and no limitations except getting someone to sit on the cushion are great. Will probably end up belonging to a mafia/Borgia guy or some great merchant. If people know you have it, that’s a problem, so subtle use is essential.

14. Death Stone

[Hugh Cook]

Hold it for more than five seconds and you must use it or die. Every material thing more complex that water or air within a 500 meter radius is disintegrated. Safe zone at the centre has a 2 ft radius around the stone. 1 week recharge time.

It’s a nuke but you have to make yourself vulnerable to use it, are vulnerable after using it and if you use it in an emergency, you are going to kill most of your allies. In Hugh Cooks stories this is combined with the 'The Wizards Bottle' to great effect.

15. Death Note

[From the Anime of the same name]

Write someone’s birth name in this and they die, their last words will be your name and location.

Mild MPE added. Infinite uses but, unlike Kira, you are going to get famous fast, so you better hope you know the accurate, birth names of everyone around you, and everyone who opposes you.

The Death Note would add massively to the power of a stable Bureaucratic state, and might be a manageable power if it was used 'lightly' or at least according to some kind of law. But its nature would incline the user to over-use and those around them to rebellion. It also doesn't help you when a horde of Mongols turns up outside your door and you don't know their birth names. Or against a masked man who has broken into your house.

When put against the power of someone like a Chinese Emperor, the Death Note seems a lot less magical and consequential - the Emperor already is a Death Note. If they have your details, they can order your death, with only the same possibilities of revolt and coup as would challenge any Emperor.

In the hands of a terrorist or idealist though, super interesting.

16. Death Boat

[Hunter x Hunter]

A little silver boat, write a letter to any dead person and put it in water, it will sail away, returning in a day with an answer.

Even if you only write a letter a day and with the proviso that the dead are not compelled to tell the truth, or be verbose with strangers, any more than they were when they were alive, this would still make you a master of History, and the 'real' Death Boat probably belongs to a great University. Either that or another intelligence department.

17. Metabeast Cage

[Can't remember where from, sorry.]

This golden cage contains a curious creature. If released it can be commanded to transform into any creature, living, dead, or imagined in myth.

(But not ones with no known name or title, i.e. you can't just make one up). It can be verbally commanded. It has to hear you or be in physical contact with you to apprehend the command.

The creature is tame, so far as its nature accords, to the holder of the cage. I.e. it won't directly harm them in most cases, but isn't necessarily commensurate to command, unless that is already the creatures nature. If you make it into a horse, they are already tame so it should be rideable and quite commendable. If you make it into a Tiger, it probably won't eat you and will hang around you, but if you are both trapped in a cave or something, it will eventually eat you, as that is its nature.

You can make a Dragon or Godzilla. But while it is a Dragon or a Godzilla, it will act with the customary independence and wrath of those creatures, just not deliberately directed directly at you.

18. Butterfly of Gold

[Hunter x Hunter]

Whomever owns this butterfly, their direct blood descendants will prosper in matters of money.

Interesting in that it applies 'to descendants' and doesn't mention the owner themselves, and in being a general monetary prosperity hack, without any drawbacks, MPEs or mention of non-monetary effects.

A rare nearly-completely beneficent Artefact. Just hope your children are kind and strong enough to protect you if/when people find out you have it. If you hate your kids just sell it to someone who doesn't.

I can see this changing hands as part of a great dowry or an alliance between houses or nations, then someone steals it and a hunt is on!

19. Vengeance Play

[Hunter x Hunter]

A set of puppets, and a performance. One person watching the complete performance can name their wrong and fate will take revenge on the wrongdoer in exact proportion to the wrong done.

Another Fate power which I try to avoid, but too much fun to leave out. The Performance should be generally known but the Puppets may be separated and particularly vengeful souls might be looking for the full set. Both wrongdoers and the vengeful will be after them all, and of course, someone can be both a wrongdoer and a victim. Imagine if the Borgias found out about these.

Honestly maybe I need to write a Jacobean Giallo Anime about just such a plot right now.

20. Key to the Secret Room

[Basically the TARDIS]

Whomever has the key can use it with any door that has a lock and can enter 'the secret room'. This is about 20ft by 20ft and well-furnished. You may close the door from the inside and exit through any other door in the world. Focusing in on a particular door is a skill and benefits from knowledge of where you are going.

21. Tongue of Tongues

[May have made this one up.]

This eats the users tongue when put in their mouth. They can speak, read and understand any language or code. When pulled out, the users tongue does not grow back.

In most games of D&D multiple languages play relatively little part as they are hard to manage during play. If you are doing it semi-realistically, then there will be long periods where only one or two PCs speak the local language and the rest will have to use them as translators, and irl people gradually stop bothering.

In an actual game, things like magical languages, animal languages and codes and cyphers come up more often.

22. Crown of Control

[Adapted from Hunter x Hunter]

Everyone in the same building as the wearer will obey its current wearers verbal commands, so long as they are in that building.

The ultimate Palace Lord, and, if they want to be, master of Pleasures, but intensely vulnerable to anything outside the Palace, including knocking it down, setting it on fire, or just sending in assassins while the wearer is asleep etc. This is Pretty much Louis 14th in Versailles. Super strong if you have the subtlety and political acumen to use it wisely, very fragile otherwise, or once its counters are known.

23. Aegis Ultima

[From Myth, D&D and Brandon Sanderson]

This plate mail armour protects against all standard weapons and common forms of attack.

You can still napalm them and set them on fire like a tank, or tie them up. If the Hulk-strength guy punched this guy they would go flying and bounce, but would still be fine after that. If the Hulk-strength guy put them against a rock and punched them, they would break their hand or weapon, but the armour wearer might feel some of it. The armour does have gaps - you need to move and see out.

24. Excalibur

[From pretty much every Myth]

This sword cuts through anything. Does it cut through the invulnerable armour? There is actually a Chinese folk story about a guy trying to sell stuff based on the same premise but yes, this is one of few things that will.

In IRL myth pretty much every second artefact is a sword/club/spear/mace that wrecks everything it hits. Here I have allowed only a few and only one that explicitly cuts everything. Supremely dangerous in a single fight, but of course, insanely vulnerable in a battle - this guy is getting filled with arrows day one.

Combine the Aegis Ultima, Strength Belt and the Excalibur for one of Brandon Sanderons super-knights from the Stormlight Archive, but he goes into quite a lot of detail about various possible practical counters including massed fires, swampy ground, drowning, fire etc

This small clade of direct-damage combat oriented artefacts are the most powerful and charismatic, in a story or a single adventure, but over time and a larger scale, they are really just force multipliers and status symbols. Even combining the three into a super-knight, you have an asset that can take nearly any ground, but how can they hold it? And even so, counters can be devised. An ultra-powerful but still vulnerable spearhead which your army will come to depend on to win battles, and which is still dependant on the personality of one person. You can see how, just with Captain America, experienced Generals would be unimpressed with this potentially dangerous but singular and unstable, un-systemisable, weapons system.

The World of Wonders works better if played for a while, with coherent and intelligent factions that think and learn. It wouldn’t be very good for a single or small number of adventures. But I will go more into that if people want a second post on that.

25. Silver Hippo

[Adapted from Hunter x Hunter]

Once every six months, this hippo poops out a quicksilver pill. This pill reduces the effects of aging by one year.

All life/immortality pills in this world come from this Hippo's bum. Even a single pill can cost a lot. The Hippo can maintain two people at their current age, make one person younger, or keep one person at their age, with a massive profit from selling the pills.

Initially I had a much stronger ‘Grail’ type item with less limits, but eventually I went back to the original Hunter x Hunter pill concept. I just really wanted immortality pills, they would add so much to a game.

26. Crystal Philtre

[Adapted from Arthurian Myth]

The Philtre decants drops of love potion. Drops lose their effectiveness in about an hour. A single drop causes someone to fall in love at first sight, to the exclusion of all others, eternally.

There is no real pro-social use for this. If you think about it, it’s one of the more monstrous things on the list. Its social and personal effects would be horrific if someone went on a spree with it.

27. Goose that lays Golden Eggs

[From Folk Tales]

(I originally got the Gooseonomics very wrong, basing my estimates on the fecundity of a Canadian Goose during laying season but expanding that year-long. These are the revised figures;)

Average yearly fecundity of a White Italian Goose - 50

Assuming an average egg volume of 150cm squared.

150cm squared volume of gold is about 2,900 grams.

That weight times the annual number of eggs; 145,000 grams.

So, only 145 kilos of gold, about £821,000.

Very rough estimate but we may be mining as much gold-per-person as we were in pre-industrial times, so assume its value is roughly equivalent.

So, enough to make one a very rich person, or a meaningful addition to a business or Noble House, but not consequential on a national or global level. A medium treasure then.

28. Night Jade

[From Hunter x Hunter]

A jewel. When danger is about to befall its owner, it will deflect it to someone else.

This is pretty much perfect as it is. Contains its own MPE and makes the wearer near-invulnerable, at the expense of being despised by those around them. I wonder what Greek philosophers would have made of this as a thought experiment instead of the Ring of Gyges. You can be completely safe, but at the expense of anyone close to you and the opinion of society as a whole.

The stated rules don't indicate what happens when there is nobody nearby. So probably you need to keep others around.

This thing would be widely despised in the World of Wonders. Probably there are street insults in every language based on it. A traitor is probably called a 'Nightjade'.

29. Sage's Aquamarine

[From Hunter x Hunter]

Its owner will have many intelligent friends and keep those friendships for their entire lives.

Unaltered from the original. Probably one of the subtlest and, along with the Butterfly of Gold, one of the most clearly beneficent Artefacts. Not very impressive from an immediate tactical position but imagine it as a long term force multiplier for someone with political, cultural or military power. A basis of Kingdoms but also of Cultures. How many intellectual and moral revolutions will have come from this stone?

30. Roaming Ruby

[From Hunter x Hunter]

The owner of this ruby will gain immense wealth, but will never be able to remain in the same place for more than a week.

Unaltered. 90% of adventurers are not seeing the downside here. Your insane wealth might not mean as much if you have to keep moving. Maybe somewhere there is a Palace-caravan moving nation headed by a Mansa Musa figure endlessly on the move.

31. Lonely Sapphire

[From Hunter x Hunter]

The owner of this sapphire will acquire vast wealth, but in exchange, will spend a lifetime alone, forsaken by friends, family, and significant others.

Actually pretty bad for a Player Character to own, but perhaps a good addition to the world. There must always be a 'Despised Prince', someone of incredible wealth but total loneliness. What will they do out of resentment or loathing? Probably evil schemes. Even if they aren’t scheming evilly and are scheming pro-socially, no one will like them for it and will assume the worst.

32. Levitation Stone

[Not sure where this comes from]

A stone about one carat in size that levitates. It can levitate any solid, contiguous single thing

But doesn't improve its structural strength. If you want to levitate a castle with this you will need to design it specifically to maintain itself via tensile strength. Otherwise the most common usage will be a magic ship, (you will still need to learn a way of 'sailing' it.)

Possibly a big enough lump of strong stone could form the basis for a floating island, but the stone still doesn't give you a way to steer it, or a way to come and go from it. Still, there should be at least one floating island in every fantasy world.

33. Staff of Judgement

[Hunter x Hunter]

Raise this staff in the air while calling out the name of someone you want to punish, and calamity will befall the one of you who has committed more bad deeds, the target or yourself.

Another unaltered Wonder.

Is the desire to punish itself a 'bad deed'? How exactly is the Staff Judging these things? Still, a pleasing paradox in that those who would most wish to use this will also be most fearful of actually using it themselves. Likely manipulating 'innocent' people into using it would be best.

Surely the concept of the Staff would have a place in popular culture? A great weapon against conquerors and tyrants - the first thing they would want to do is secure this.

Several of the Wonders have something of an equalising effect which make it hard to hold on to tyrannical power, or even to really piss people off in ruling, which is a pretty necessary form of statecraft. The Staff, the Death Note etc. Those seeking political power would seek these things first, or accommodations with those who control them. Empires and Confederations of Artefacts, and perhaps many secret or masked Emperors - after all you can't take revenge if you don't know the person to revenge yourself against.

34. Sword of Truth

[Hunter x Hunter]

Splits in two anything and anyone deceitful. The sword will shatter when used to cut something true, but will regenerate if stored in its scabbard for one day.

More like a magic wand in the form of a sword, instant death and destruction for anything "deceitful". How will the sword judge these things? Use it again to find out.

For a world-campaign I might reduce the renewal to once per full moon or something.

35. Ring of Gyges

[From myth and philosophy]

Turns the wearers flesh invisible. Nothing else.

What more needs to be said? The only change from the D&D spell is that you can still take actions while invisible. I kept the ‘naked’ aspect from the Invisible Man movies as its just creepier and a nice inherent limiter.

36. Night Gnome Deck

[Hunter x Hunter]

A pack of cards showing 52 Gnomes. While the bearer sleeps the Gnomes come alive and work for them, but they have only the skills and abilities of the Bearer.

Its tremendous imagining how this might work. What if you give it to a master craftsman, if you give it to a courtesan are the gnomes sexy? What if the Emperor sleeps but the Imperial work goes on, in fact more than before, with fifty two imperial gnomes walking the Palace? Imagine taking your orders from a Gnome. What if the Emperor only communicates by Gnome? During the day he watches through his Palantir, or scrys his own future.

37. Crown of ESP

[Adapted from D&D]

User can read the surface thoughts of anyone they can see and focus on within 50 meters.

Massive and terrifying imperial or royal control. But in a way, just an extension of the cloud of illusion that surrounds a ruler. If you were conspiring against the ESP King, you would make damn sure to do so from a distance and that anyone who got close to them had no idea of your true intentions.

38. Ring of Dracul

[Adapted from Bram Stoker]

Whoever wears the ring has all of the powers and vulnerabilities of Dracula, as written in the book of the same name.

All vampires in the World of Wonders descend from this ring. The Vampires they make can make more vampires. Vampires will broadly follow the usual rules about ‘sires’, but if the user loses the Ring of Dracul, they stop being a Vampire and will probably be eaten by the Vampires they created.

So far no-one has willingly taken off the ring.

If you want extra-business, start adding stuff from the Demons of Demon-Slayer, like Demon Blood Arts. They are basically just super-vampires anyway.

39. Amulet of Annihilation

[D&D]

Works as part of a pair with the Sphere of Annihilation, a 2ft wide Black Sphere that floats in the air and which destroys anything it touches.

The amulet gives some control over the sphere, allowing the user to move it about around them, though if it goes too far or out of direct sight control becomes much more difficult and irregular. The sphere will destroy other Wonders though legend, and some scholarship, suggest that if a Wonder is destroyed, another, new Wonder will be ‘born’ somewhere in the world. Other cults and groups disagree and some want to use the sphere to destroy all Wonders forever before annihilating the sphere itself by combining it with the Pearl of Infinity, which they think will free mankind from the terror of the wonders and the Chaos they bring.

40. Mirror of Duplication

[D&D]

Any living being reflected in this mirror will be duplicated down to the smallest detail, resulting in two of the same.

Most often used for replicating prize animals and feeding cities. Duplicates will not produce duplicates themselves, which is the only way of telling which one is the original, in every other respect both believe themselves to be the ‘real’ version. The original can be duplicated as many times as you like, but most attempts at mass-duplication have been horrific disasters. There are entre ethnic groups that still have a genetic signature from mass-duplication events in the past.

41. Architects Harp

[D&D]

Ten seconds of playing is equal to the work of 100 men labouring for one day.

The harp can build but not create the materials to build out of thin air, although you can just take the Harp to a mine or forest and have the 100 worker-equivalents mine or cut the needed things. It depends on human skill in both architectural imagination and music. The better the user is at both, the better the Harp works and the finer the result.

That’s only if you want to create, if you want to destroy, cruder imaginings and discordant music will do.

Temples, fortresses, palaces, great walls and even cities have been made and destroyed by this Wonder. As a result there are way more buildings, tombs and megastructures around the World of Wonders than would be natural.

42. Golem Tome

[Inspired by D&D & Mythology]

The holder can make and maintain clay golems. If the book changes hands the Golems fall apart.

The Golems are expensive and difficult to make and obey commands literally in the simplest way but there is no upper limit to the number of Golems you can make, and you can order the Golems to make more Golems. Only Clay really works.

Commanding a bunch of Golems can get very tricky. You can transfer command to sub-commanders by saying “follow their commands” and they can try transferring command to further sub-commanders, but often the chain of commands can get a bit screwy, so it really depends what chain of commanders your golem has. And if the one with the book is separated from it, they all turn to dust.

43. Fog Vase

[D&D]

This vase contains an infinite amount of Fog.

When decanted it acts as normal fog. I felt this was kinda underpowered but in battlefield and stealth terms, being able to create your own fog is pretty great and several Wonders work on sight.

If you want an ‘improved’ version, try the My Hero Academia Version – the holder can ‘sense’ things in the Fog and move it about, meaning only they can see clearly within it.

44. Compass of Desire

[Pirates of the Caribbean]

Points the way to the holders true desire.

Most useful at sea and if the holder has a simple, clear desire related to an object, person or place. Most humans do not have long term sustained and singular desires like this that will remain the same throughout a long journey but some with extreme personalities, or those in extreme situations, do. If you are ruthless you can try creating such situations.

The compass points to the closest as the crow flies path. It can be used to triangulate, to a degree, if you move around enough and the true desire is stationary enough.

45. Famine Bell

[Inspired by Warhammer & D&D]

Those who hear this bell ring will become so ravenous they eat everything available and will cannibalise each other.

An utterly horrific area-of-effect Wonder, easy to counter if you know its coming and can block your ears, absolute nightmare otherwise. This is kinda worse than the Death Stone. Wouldn’t you rather be disintegrated than eat your friends and family?

This thing would be considered a war crime and keeping it under lock and key would be a responsible act. Unless it goes missing. A good mission for the PCs?

46. Titan Strain

[Inspired by Attack on Titan]

I think this is the only thing on the list that isn’t an object. Instead the quality is carried inside the brain of the user. To gain it, you must eat the current/soon-to-be-former users brain.

Whoever has the Titan Strain can transform into a Titan from Attack on Titan. They are a standard sized one, usually a bit nuts to begin with, but can learn to control it over time. The Titans are insanely strong and resistant, and will heal slowly from nearly any damage, needing only sunlight to do so, as will the current user when not a Titan.

Unlike the anime version it doesn’t have a time limit but also doesn’t prevent natural aging. Some users can develop the ‘Titan Howl’ ability that will transform those nearby who share the bloodline, or who have been infected with its spinal fluid, into ‘mindless titans under the control of the user. No other anime powers.

As in the Anime, you need to cut, bite or rip the nape of a Titans neck, where the original human body is curled, to take it down.

47. Notch-Cutter

[Every Manga by Tsutomu Nihei]

A little handle that emits a beam of light that can cut wood. Dial at one end. Max power can cut through a mountain.

A gravity beam emitter from the works of Tsutomu Nihei. Max setting lasts for a few seconds, emits a pencil-thin beam and has a long, several-day, cooldown period. As a kill-everything beam, it puts it in the same class as the Death Stone. Terrifying aggressive power but can be countered by some other Wonders, and so dangerous, that any use will summon massive, intelligent and organised pursuit.

48. Winged Helm of Hermes

[From myth & comics]

Grants the user the powers of an early, Golden Age Flash.

They can run at just under the speed of sound. They can’t vibrate through solid objects. But they do have the cancellation-of-inertia powers that are the Flashes main benefit. They can cancel the inertia of anything they pick up, and medium objects they interact with, like doors, for as long as they are in contact, but can’t, for instance, throw pebbles at sonic speed. Once they leave the users aura they will only be thrown with natural force. They could pick up and fire ten crossbows at super-speed though.

The wearer must be moving to use the powers and preferably running, only slowing down for relative moments.

49. Demon Eye

[Inspired by Mushoku Tensai]

Can locate any named person or thing if the owner knows their name and/or enough details about them. The eye will rotate in the skull, focusing on the thing, giving an image of its location and a general direction and distance.

This becomes insanely dangerous if combined with the Palantir or the Akashic Record. With the Palantir it adds a ‘search and locate’ function to a tool made challenging by its indifference to the wearers intentions, making it more like a traditional ‘crystal ball’. If used with the Akashic record it turns that Borgesian text into a searchable document; the user can pull whatever info they like from it.

Traditionally all wielders of the Palantir or Akashic record have been on a search for the Demon Eye, but they have rarely been combined, other powers finding the union too dangerous and combining against the holder.

50. Akashic Tome

[Inspired by  Mysticism and Borges]

A Borgesian book of infinite leaves containing all knowledge of material things.

Unlike Borges library, the information is not random, but coherent and sequential. If the pages are not physically kept open and the page-turning not carefully controlled, the book will close, or pages whirl and when opened again will be at a completely random point in the knowledge of material things. There is no index or way of finding exactly what you want, except perhaps for the Demon Eye or Lucky Die.

There is a LOT of knowledge of all Material Things. For a lot of it, you need to understand the earlier stuff before you can understand the later stuff, but the book is organised by subject. So hopefully you might hit an early page in a subject you want to know about and can work out enough to keep reading.

Big big big arguments take place in the college of owners about whether to keep reading and trying to understand what they are looking at, or whether to try turning the pages back (more risky that forwards. One group is always accusing another of ‘sunk cost fallacy’ or saying they are ‘wreckers and impudents’. Everyone wants to find the Demon Eye, no one is brave enough for the Lucky Die, even if they had it. Some have suggested trying the tongue of tongues. Some think the Tome itself is a kind of cognitive trap sent to cripple the development of natural philosophy and want to destroy it.

Still, much of the systematically medical and physical knowledge of this world has come from careful painstaking reading and researching based on stuff seen in the Akashic Tome.

51. Golden Finger Gauntlet

[From Xaiolin Showdown]

Freezes any object or person it's pointed at in place.

A well respected counter to pretty much any other Wonder. Of course its only useful as part of a team and with a clear target. Can be easy to get into a Mexican Standoff with another Wonder-user.

52. Grand Seal

[Inspired by myth and comics]

The holder can 'seal' any being or object away in its own timeless dimensional prison. The only natural counter is the Key of Passage and, perhaps, communication with whatever has been sealed by a user of the Astral Pillow.

The seal doesn’t damage what has been sealed in any way. What is kept remains largely timeless, and any new holder of the Seal can release whatever they want. Holding the seal grants you knowledge of what has been sealed. Successive lucid dreams will fill out a kind of ‘library’ of sealed items.

Small things can be ‘unsealed’ from any location, giving the holder a kind of ‘swiss army knife’. Larger and more sentient things, like people or monsters, usually need to be unsealed at the location they were first sealed at. Though possessing fragments or very personal items can increase or obliviate the range.

53. Polymorph Potion

[Inspired by D&D and Harry Potter]

Drips from this Philtre can allow you to transform into the appearance of any other person.

The potion-glass is infinite but the effects of each swig wear off in time and you must keep drinking regularly to maintain the effect.

54. Mother Idol

[Suggested in a Twitter comment]

All lands within a 50 mile radius of the idol will be reliably, but not unnaturally, fertile.

Land and people are the surest form of wealth. This might end up in a desolate land, making it into a liveable Kingdom, or in a fertile one, making it an agricultural super-power. Whoever has it will not let it go. Unless they are a purely export economy, losing the Idol means mass famine.

55. Gae Bolg

[From Myth]

A spear which will hit what it is thrown at.

Line of sight, and a degree of athleticism is necessary. The spear expands barbs in the target and needs to be cut out. It is almost always lethal. Gae Bolg will defeat most normal armour, but not necessarily other Artefacts or thick walls. It can curve a bit, but unlike the spear of vengeance, will not fly magically forever.

56. Lightning Club

[From Myth]

A brutal and primitive stone club. Anyone hit by it will be hit with lightning at the same time.

It does need a storm to work. It can summon storms but they can take from minutes to hours to appear, depending on weather. It also doesn’t work that well underground or in a building.

57. Kite of Aang

[From Avatar, the Last Airbender]

This kite folds in or out of a staff-form. The user can unfold it, hang on to it and fly on winds summoned by the kite itself.

This is as vulnerable as and can be broken like a normal kite. It can be repaired in which case a Ship-of-Theseus effect means the repaired kite has the same powers, but if you use its parts to make two kites, only one will have the magic. It carries one person and needs some skill to use well. It does not protect, in itself, from the rigours of long sky-travel like tiredness, cold and low oxygen.

58. The Twist

[Inspired by comics and One Piece]

The users body can morph like rubber granting Mr Fantastic-like powers.

With practice and skill, user can advance to plastic-man or early-Luffy powers.

59. Astral Pillow

[Hunter x Hunter]

Whoever sleeps on this pillow can send their astral body zooming about while they do so.

Losing the Pillow during sleep means the astral body is lost. Many ghosts are thought to result from this. There are also rumours that Wonders can cut the astral thread or some other magical effects can touch the Astral body.

60. Ring of the Nine Dragons

[From Xaiolin Showdown]

Multiplies the user into as many as nine people, but it also divides up the user's skills and mental prowess among all the clones.

Unless you are an exceptional person, you won’t be producing nine ‘Dragons’, you will be lucky with three idiots. However the rapid creation and absorption of clones for single uses can create a lot of tactical possibilities. Making a double can also be useful. Its not clear what happens if a clone dies or is destroyed, though they do seem to share some kind of vague hive-self, which can be made sharper by intelligence and practice.

61 Clew 

[Slavic Myth]

A ball of thread. Whisper your desire and the thread will roll over the ground, at walking speed, on the shortest route to your desired location. 

The slow speed makes it all but useless for locating things over great reaches of space and its nature as thread means it doesn't work well in wet situation but its ability to find a path makes it more useful in complex environments, and staggeringly useful in hyper-complex mazelike environments or for finding hidden things. Unlike the Compass, it wont make an abstract judgement of whatever your 'true desire' is, and will find based only on your words (which should be precise).

Many Wonders are held inside highly complex secure environments, which function reasonably well as the Demon Eye only shows you the place where something is, and not how to get there, while the Compass gives only direction. The Clew solves this problem, though it does take you on the shortest path, and not the safest one.

62 DRINK ME

[Alice in Wonderland]

A little bottle with a paper label reading DRINK ME. Drinking half a bottle reduces one to a height of ten inches, while half a bottle reduces one to a size of five inches. 

The user must wait for the liquid to be fully digested and excreted, which can take up to half a day, or with exercise and coffee, a few hours. They will regain size as they excrete the liquid. By this time the bottle will have filled up again.

In many ways an extremely dangerous and vulnerable Wonder, but does open up some concepts for stealth and concealment, and can be used to drug others. Only works on creatures up to a cow in size. Relative strength remains so the small beings will be quite "springy" and strong, compared to other creatures of the same size, though still much weaker than big people.

63 Silver Plate and Magic Apple

[Slavic Myth]

Put the apple on the plate and speak what you want to see. If it exists in the world the apple will roll around the plate, 'painting' an image of your intent at the current moment.

The painting is accurate for that point in time, and is still. As a scrying device the ability to choose your target makes it perhaps even more useful than the Palantir, although, unlike that item, it can't show you things you don't think to ask about, and cannot move at the speed of thought.

64 EAT ME

[Alice in Wonderland]

A small box of cloudy glass. Inside is a cake, with 'EAT ME' spelled out using currants. Eating the cake makes you grow to 12 feet high, or 9 feet if you only eat half.

The effect lasts until the cake has been digested and excreted, with the individual slowly returning to normal size as this happens. When the last piece has passed the glass box can be opened once again and the cake will be present.

65 Pleasant Pipes

[Fairytales]

This set of pipes can charm all who hear it to dance, even to dance after the pipes, for so long as they are played.

The effect can be focused on particular, general, types of people, defined by single words only; like 'Knights', 'Children' or 'Women'

66 Devils Green Coat

[Fairytales]

[Cursed item, will always return to the owner while they live]. A bright green and very recognisable coat. Its pockets are always full of money.

Only the owner of the coat can pull out the money while they are wearing it. each handful of money is a wildly random mixture of coins in many currencies and values, along with some things not used as money in many places. 

The high visibility of the coat and the limitations and randomness of accessing the money make this a death sentence for any unguarded person, and often impractical for those important enough to afford guards. It is impossible for them to ever claim they 'don't have the money', since everyone knows they have an infinite amount, but getting the 'right money' can be an agonising process.

67 Goliath Blade

[Biblical and Berserk]

An absolutely massive iron sword, far bigger than any normal man could wield. The owner can use it as a normal sword, though its victims feel the full weight, mass and speed.

The sword is over 150 cm long and extremely thick and heavy. It can easily cut a horse in half. Though the user doesn't feel most of the inertia of its use, its still very easy to get it stuck in a wall or the floor, or for them to leave themselves open due to the size of their swing. It takes some practice to use and is near useless indoors or in close formation.

68 Wise Burros Charm

[American Myth]

The holder commands seven Donkeys of unusual intelligence and telepathic power.

The Burro's are extremely perceptive and intelligent and can read the surface thoughts of those nearby. They can't read, write, do arithmetic or speak, nor do they have a deep analytic intelligence, being more like extremely experienced and crafty peasants. Though they will serve the holder of the charm, they are not ensorcelled to do so and will preserve their own lives if they can. They also understand and remember bad treatment or cruel behaviour.

Three are three males and four females. Though immortal the Donkeys are not immune to harm. If badly hurt they heal only at a normal rate. If some are killed they will breed with each other till there are seven again.

69 Snipes Grass Cage

[Invented but common theme]

A grass cage holding a common Snipe. Whisper a name and a short message to the Snipe and set it free. The bird will race off at 60mph and deliver the message into the ear of the recipient, then fly back.

The sentence must be not over-long or with too many clauses. It doesn't bring a return message. The target must be alive, accessible and somewhat willing to listen. The Snipe is a tireless magical creature.

70. Spear of Vengeance

[Adapted from Fred Saberhagen]

Can kill any person, demon, or god the wielder wishes, regardless of the physical distance that separates them or the level of protection they enjoy. The wielder must think of their target and throw the spear.  The blade will then fly from the wielder's hand and seek out its prey, until it finally pierces its heart. While the Spear can travel any distance in pursuit of its target, it will NOT return to the wielder's hand once it has completed its mission.

Pretty much a perfect Wonder, and largely unaltered from the original. Joss Reynolds stole it for one of his Age of Sigmar books but probably did so by accident. Another ‘Equaliser’ weapon.

71. Ring of Shadows

[Adapted from Fred Saberhagen]

Changes the perception of anyone looking at the owner, making the wielder appear as someone the viewer knows and trusts, and allowing them to move freely wherever they choose.

Largely unaltered from the original. Combine with the Key of Passage and the Secret Room for the ultimate in super-spy Dr-Who adventures! Or live like a rat in a royal court eating from everyone’s table but known to no-one, like that guy who started living in the Google Complex secretly. Or just start breaking dudes out of prison. Or kill a king. Good for stealing other Wonders.

72. Equalising Arms

[Invented, I think]

Sword, shield, mail and helm, they all grow stronger and more potent based on how overmatched the bearer is.

The perfect heroic accoutrement. Consistently take on threats much greater than yourself to gain the near-perfect sharpness and protection of the Arms, but be careful if fighting some random dude as he may just shank you through the paper-thin armour.

73. Ruby of Ramses

[Xaiolin Showdown]

Allows the user to telekinetically move targeted objects.

Telekinesis baby! I am not sure what limit, if any, to put on this. Maybe it’s enough for it to simply be a ‘coherent object’ like the levitating stone, within line of sight.

74. Serpent's Tail

[Xaiolin Showdown]

Phasing powers when held.

A classic from the comics. An excellent defensive and infiltration power, but mainly useful in complex environments and with limited offensive capability.

75. Crown of Morpheus

[Inspired by Myth and comics, possibly also Xaiolin Showdown]

User can lucid dream, enter into the dreams of others and change the substance of their dreams.

A ‘soft’ power, with limited but very very wide applications. Information drawn from dreams will always be a bit squishy, but with no limitations you can torture, seduce, frighten, amaze, whoever you like, for as long as they sleep, and there is no defence.

Unless you fuck with the wrong person and they realise you are doing it, and find out who you are.

76. Staff of Fire

[D&D]

Shoots fireballs. No charges and it does not run out. It does heat up after a while.

The main limitation of ‘Fireball’ in dungeons is the close confines and back-blast. Its main limitation on battlefields will be skirmishers, snipers, commandoes, spies, assassins etc, as well as other Wonders. Its still an utterly mighty battlefield weapon, but of course, it is singular; if its in use over here on a flank or defending a city, it can’t also be over there. So there are strategic and tactical counters, as well as the usual danger of over-reliance common to most offensive Wonders.

77. Veil of Tears

[Invented I think, but generic power set]

The wearer can heal any ills by laying on of hands. They cannot reverse aging but can create a relatively ‘healthy’ old age. The few people consistently healed by the Veil live with acuity and activity to about 110 years old and then perish and die very quickly over a few days.

The veil can reorganise living flesh into ‘health’, but can’t regenerate it. So it can’t heal lost limbs. It also can’t fully amend some full-spectrum genetic disorders like Downs Syndrome, as these things are ‘built in’ to the beings expression of self. Though it can ease negative symptoms and fix minor or less-expressive genetic problems. (This doesn’t really ‘make sense’ by our standards, but no-one using the Veil even knows what Genes are, only that there are some things the veil considers ‘natural’ and some it will change. This conception of ‘naturalness’ doesn’t make perfect rational sense but hey, its magic and will basically do a best-guess when necessary.

Other than that there is no limitation or exchange except for a period of concentration as the wearer lays on hands and a degree of mental fatigue after sustained use.

This is the only ‘true’ healing power I allowed in the list and its power is focused but near total, with no limitations or cost except for its singularity. Like the Cup of Resurrection, I imagine most of the depth, danger and complexity will come from the organisation of living beings around it. It will be regarded as holy in itself and access supremely well-guarded and controlled.

78. Memory Eater

[Men in Black]

A wand which emits a directional red light from one end. Anyone looking into the light during activation will have a certain period of memory utterly wiped. In the immediate aftermath they will be highly suggestable to immediate authoritative and reasonable-sounding instructions about their circumstances. The user can set the memory loss to any length of time. If they wipe a subjects entire memory, they will become a near vegetable. The wand is usually accompanied by two sets of black lenses which will protect against its effect.

79. God Wand

[Myth and Folk Tale]

Tap an inanimate object to bring it to life!

The degree and kind of ‘life’ will be pretty wild and wacky and in most cases quite primitive, becoming more and more complex, coherent and human-like the more like a human the object is. Statues and dolls will usually try to behave with a crude equivalence to whatever their form suggests. Sculpted monsters will act like monsters. The life so given cannot be ‘taken back’ unless the object is destroyed.

It’s rare for the ‘life’ to include  and magical or organic powers, the created beings ending up more like complex golems, but rare works of genius can sometimes produce living beings which seem to have the breath of actual life to them and sometimes a feeling of actual sentience in depth, and/or actual magical powers. There are a handful of living sculptures made by geniuses which still exist as products of the wand. Some have demanded, and a few, received, recognition as legal living entities.

Creatures birthed this way are, in a sense, immortal, but cannot regenerate damage, heal or grow, so will eventually be chipped away by entropy. If ‘kept’ very carefully, they can last an extremely long time though.

80. Body-Swapper

[From Konosuba, but likely others]

The swap itself is temporary, but if you kill the other person, it becomes permanent. Hijinks or terrifying immortality beckon.

81. Mad-Stone

[Hugh Cook]

A stone in a lead box. Another container with fifty charms on necklaces. If the box is opened, everyone within 200 meters goes insane, unless they are wearing a charm.

The charms are the real treasure, and over time the possibility of them being broken up, faked, replaced etc is high. But having about fifty makes the Mad-Stone an actually insanely useful weapon of war. Fifty cavalrymen with the Mad-Stone at their head are death to most armies. Fifty men in a castle with the Mad Stone open at its centre are nearly invulnerable.

Counters include theft, the use of non-sentient creatures and long ranged fire.

82. Swan-Ship

[From 'Merlins Ring' by H.Warner Munn]

A metallic super-science ship in the shape of a Swan. The Swan breathes fire.

Can fit as many as a large yacht. Fast safe transport across any sea. An survive near anything the ocean can throw at it and metal skin invulnerable to most conventional weapons. Very beautiful. Main danger is it being stolen if unguarded and if someone works out the secret of getting inside. (There is no key or code.)

83. Chimera Queen

[May have invented but is a common trope]

A rare ‘big’ wonder. But it needs to be to fit the monster in.

A larger than life size brasslike statue of a pregnant woman. Feeding the woman bits and pieces of various animals, along with sperm and enough meat and organic material, will cause her to give birth to…. some kind of living entity.

Whole books have been written about what to put in, the conditions, timing etc, and what will come out. Like other Wonders it is a field of science/alchemy based around one object. Most creatures born of the Queen are sterile, but not all, and some of those can cross-breed with others of their kind or near-relatives.

Most monsters, demi-humans and similar in this world are products of the Queen. Some of the more intelligent demi-human cultures worship her as a creator. Though difficult to move she has changed hands a hundred times over history and been used to exhibit or fulfil all kinds of strange philosophies.

84. Metamorph Stone

[Comics]

The user can morph into an kind of natural animal.

There is a limit on conservation of mass of about 100%, so you can become an animal twice as big or twice as small. You keep your own mind and can change back whenever you wish with no negative effects. The amulet won’t change stuff or clothes so you will be naked.

Probably the most simple and prosaic transformation Wonder. In many cases being an animal of roughly equivalent mass isn’t necessarily that great as humans are quite efficient for the size we are, but flight, natural weapons, bear strength, animal senses, octopus squeezieness etc can all be very situationally useful.

85. Solaris Bird

[From Mysterious Cities of Gold]

A golden Condor-shaped solar-powered gigantic ornithopter.

It can carry the weight of about 20 people max. Has limited auto-guidance and self-repair systems and you need to experiment or be trained in how to use it.

It uses solar energy to levitate and fly, thus only flying during the day. Near sunset, the Condor finds a suitable location and lands automatically.

The ultimate in high-status rides but extremely vulnerable to being stolen as there is no key or lock of any kind. Only the knowledge of use stops someone getting in and making off with it and a lucky idiot could possibly do that. Gets stolen a lot.

86. Talisman of Five Tigers

[Cant remember]

Five friends can wear a talisman each, each friend will have the combined physical and intellectual powers of all.

In fact many of these qualities work on a logarithmic scale so all five are only about three times as intelligent and creative as each. They are each as strong as all five though.

The positive effects only work so long as all are friends. If this is not the case then negative aspects also start combining and replicating across the whole group, so they will be as greedy, impulsive, angry, foolish as all combined as well.

87. Soul-Eater

[From Warhammer 40k]

This spear devours the soul and memories of those it kills, giving them to its wielder.

This can be overwhelming and unpleasant for many people and if they “eat” a strong and experienced soul they can end up with a ‘Baron Harkonnen’ effect where there are significant personality changes and its not clear who is in charge or who the new person is.

Still gives a massive increase in knowledge and experience to those who can handle it. Some get addicted and become utter deranged beasts, no longer anything like their former selves.

88. Spear of Truth

[From Warhammer 40k]

Anyone wounded by the spear is stripped of all illusions, deceptions and self-deceit taken and given a kind of clear self-knowledge usually only granted to philosophers and Saints.

The most common effects of this are mental breakdown followed by either suicide or massive life changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

89. Ash Jewel

[Invented]

The user can transform into a contiguous, sentient, otherwise natural fire.

They need something to burn and oxygen but can otherwise change back whenever they like. They have a limited but not total amount of control over what the fire burns and no specific control over secondary effects like heat or oxygen loss. They can ‘speak’ to a degree with the voice of the fire. In theory this could grant a kind of immortality as the fire is eternal so long as it is fed and some have attempted this, setting themselves up as prophets or gods.

90. Spiral Hat

[From D&D and inspired by Alfred Bester]

User can teleport themselves, alone, with no more gear than half their body weight, anywhere they have been that they remember well.

Small things will be moved out of the way but if building work or landslides have happened they will phase into them and die. Which is how most owners of this item die.

Because it only works for this particular person the wearer is often not well trusted by those in dangerous situations as they can get away from anything quite easily. The hat also makes you look like a tool. People will not invite you into their personal space if you have this.

On the other hand the wearer is usually respected as a messenger or herald, which is often what they end up doing.

Because they are alone, vulnerable and obvious, the wearer is often extremely paranoid. The hat has been stolen many times.

91. Crown of Immortality

[Forget where]

All aging is deferred so long as the crown is worn. Catches up with you when it is taken off.

The ‘Crown’ is only a silver band so its not that much of a nightmare to deal with day to day, but for the few people who are willing to use it extensively, it of course becomes insanely dangerous after a decade or two of youth. The longer it is used generally the more extreme and ruthless the wearer will be to ensure they can keep wearing it. This is not so much a magical curse as a natural consequence of this power and human nature.

The ‘secret immortal’ would be a fun opponent. Anyone smart and capable enough to hang on to this for a long time should be a consequential being.

92. Wolfs Tooth

[Inspired by Mythology]

Cursed item, cannot be willingly removed or taken off. Gives wearer werewolf powers based on classic mythology.

Strong vitalism, instinctual behaviour and loss of internal restrictions. Limited immunity to most disease and most non-silver weapons. Uncontrollable transformation every full moon. The bites of the Werewolf will inflict lycanthropy and the bites of those werewolves will also.

This Wonder is the source of all were-wolves in this world.

If you want to extend of complicate its power, you can have the beast transformed into change to a degree depending on character or culture, producing were-tigers etc.

93. Cauldron of Bounty

[Inspired by Mythology]

This Cauldron contains an everlasting infinite stew.

That’s it.

94. Gorgon Shield

[Inspired by Mythology]

Terrifies all who look upon it.

Natural counter to the Parazonium Banner below and a strong counter to many ‘attacking’ Wonders. Armour and swords won’t protect you from fear. Fog might though. Maybe a bit too similar to the ‘Mad Stone’ but less evil in nature.

95. Elephant Charm

[Inspired by D&D]

Turns into a large, kind, tireless and reasonably intelligent Elephant which will assist the bearer as much as possible.

If you really mess with the Elephant and mistreat it, it will start refusing to transform. Not a super-powerful Wonder but notable for its infinite use and almost no downside. The Elephant is very much not malignant or uncontrollable and asks for nothing except respect and melons.

96. Tornado Kriss

[Xaiolin Showdown]

Kriss which allows the bearer to summon and ride within a Tornado.

There ain’t no limits. This thing is going to wreck everything around it and you will generally not be popular when you come down. You can also only transport yourself. It won’t work indoors. Its also not impossibly fast. It moves at about 40 mph. Faster than a Galloping horse, but not much faster.

97. Dáinsleif

[Mythology]

A bitter toothed sword that gives wounds that never heal. The sword cannot be sheathed without killing a man.

An extremely dark and unpleasant weapon, most useful for the fear it creates, often in the hands of warlords of bandit kings. Also used as a threat in torture. Even small wounds will never heal.

The Veil of Tears may heal such wounds, but legends speak of it only doing so ‘at a cost’, not usually the case for the Veil. The two Wonders are natural counters to each other and the forces that have them almost always end up opposed.

98. Parazonium Banner

[Adapted from history and Mythology]

A banner with crossed daggers. The bearer and all who follow them and can see the banner, are enfolded in an aura of courage.

It’s not quite an ultimate-suicide level of self destructive courage, (unless you already have that dog in you), but a very strong sense of purpose and direction, and the absence of fear. You do have to already genuinely, if only a little, support the banners holder though, and in general the cause it is being  wielded for. If you are truly only faking and going along with the crowd, it will have little effect.

The banner has formed the centre-point of many successful armies and in particular, heroic defences, where it can be put up on a tower to be seen by all. But, oh dear, night and fog can obscure it.. (You can light it with braziers at night, not much you can do about the fog.)

99. Māui's Fishhook

[Mythology]

This hook will pull whatever is hooked to it with enough strength to move it.

It seems not to move the entire planet, but if hooked to a piece of underwater land that’s reasonably coherent and is ready to break away, it can indeed pull up islands.

Other than that, you can, for instance, pull a gigantic ship from a tiny canoe, pull an elephant along, pull down a castles walls and so on. The hook and line are (largely) imperishable when in use. Though a few artefacts, like Excalibur, might cut it. More line can always be tied on though, which will gain the same magic.

100. Pearl of Infinity

[From Jujutsu Kaisen]

The Pearl grants the user the ability to extend the distance between things to an infinite extent, taking advantage of Xeno’s Paradox to effectively negate one thing touching another.

This relates only to what they can immediately perceive. The Pearl also grants the user a 360 Spider-Man type ‘Danger Sense’, meaning the usual use is to make themselves invulnerable to physical harm.

More abstruse and abstract powers can be developed from the pearl based on the skill and intelligence of the user.

The Pearl is often considered the ‘natural counter’ to the Sphere of Annihilation and its Talisman.

Phew!

That took a LOT longer than I expected. If people are interested and want me to think more about the World of Wonders as a campaign world, how it might work, adventures etc, leave comments and I will.

Peace!