InDungeons & Dragons, trinkets are abstract objects with unique descriptions that separate them from piles of gold, rare gems, and magic swords. Trinkets offer dungeon masters a chance to include magical and fantasy elements in their world without the pressure of focusing on mechanical effects.
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The best trinkets are ones that give your players opportunities to role-play or find creative uses for items that otherwise seem like flavor text in a Soulsborne game. Although most are self-explanatory, there is much to consider when peppering the best trinkets throughout your campaign.
10A Diary Written In A Language You Don’t Know
This might be one of those more difficult trinkets to implement but can be the most rewarding if done correctly. Although this is likely a trinket you’ll have to prep rather than choose on the random trinket table, it gives an excuse for your players to choose underused spells like Comprehend Languages.
While you could just choose for the diary to be in a truly unknown language or code, consider making it written in a language, not on your player’s list of proficiencies. Then they could set an objective to find an NPC that happens to speak celestial, aquan, or whatever language they choose and learn whatever secrets the diary holds.
9A Wooden Box That Holds A Living Worm
While one of the more strangely worded trinkets, this box with a double-headed worm can be an opportunity for some very unique role-play. Especially when you consider that spells like Speak With Animals and Beast Bond will work to communicate with it.
If your players are attempting to speak to the worm then you could have fun with it and voice two characters at once, one for each head. All for you to determine is what the beast knows, what it wants, and if it’s really a couple of powerful, feuding wizards who werecursed by a hag.
8Half Of A Floor Plan To A Temple, Castle, Or Other Structure
This trinket has obvious benefits for your party when preparing for a dungeon or ruin exploration. On the map, you can include secret entrances and hidden traps as well as information on who made it and why.
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This trinket makes good boss loot or at the end of a dungeon so that your party already has another objective. If you choose this item as a part of character creation, it can be a long-term goal to discover what it belongs to and why you possess it.
7A Blueprint For A Complex Contraption
A trinket that will have artificers salivating, this piece of parchment, covered in a complex drawing, fits more into the lore of D&D than you might think at first. Depending on who designed the blueprint, it could be ademon’s hellfire engine, a modron from the plane of Mechanus, or a design to create a warforged.
While this trinket could easily be just a small puff of flavor used to give insight into an NPCs goals, it is open-ended enough to be the basis for entire adventures or character goals. If this is in your character’s starting equipment, consider working with your DM to get the most out of it.
6A Nightcap That Gives You Pleasant Dreams
A perfect excuse to demonstrate your character’s motivations and role-play intimate moments outside the other party member’s perception, this trinket can be either a random boon for your players to forget about five sessions later or a useful DM tool.
If you want this trinket to see more than one session of screen time as a DM, consider warping or twisting the wearer’s dreams when they are inside the regional effects of powerful enemies like Elder Brains. Or have their dreams be affected by spells like Dream, but allow them a bonus to their saving throw or other special effect.
5An Indecipherable Treasure Map
While the description of this trinket makes it a challenge to implement, it is up to the DM to decide whether it is truly indecipherable or rather requires an adventure’s worth of investigation to unlock its secrets.
Like the other trinket map, this trinket is best when prepped beforehand to allow your players to inevitably treat it like an important item and something they will want to unlock. The treasure can be a simple chest buried under an old tree or inside a ruined castle controlled by a lich and his army of undead.
4A Vest With One Hundred Tiny Pockets
While not easily fitting in most players' aesthetics, this heavily pocketed vest is an opportunity for DMs to inject a healthy amount of whimsy and otherwise straight-up prank your players. While the vest itself is unique, the true power of this trinket comes from its pockets.
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While you could blend it into the mechanics of D&D to allow additional carry weight or make readying and stowing items easier, make your players casually find random objects and even other trinkets in the various pockets. You could even make some of them lead to extradimensional places, much like a Handy Haversack.
3A Mummified Goblin Hand
The first and most iconic trinket on the trinket table, this mummified hand is strange enough on its own to warrant investigation from your players while having room to transform it into a truly powerful cursed or magical item.
One example of a way to transform it is by allowing it to grant wishes, closing one finger each time, but always twisting the wish into something horrible. Or use it as a way for your players to gain additional attunement slots as long as the attuned item is a ring, worn on the mummified hand.
2A Divination Card Bearing Your Likeness
This trinket is best used in horror campaigns likeCurse of Strahdto put some fear into your players and enforce themes of esoteric mystery and inescapable danger. you’re able to also flavor it as a tarot card and use real meanings behind specific cards to foreshadow events in the campaign.
This is a trinket that is also meant to be reused, either by including other members of the party or by having additional tarot cards show the same character. That player may even be rewarded or cursed after finding the whole set.
1A Deed For A Parcel Of Land In A Realm Unknown To You
As a DM, there is always a point in the camping where your players need a home base, and there is no better way than making them work for it. However, this trinket is really only useful if your players can actually use it to acquire the land and plan on leaving the kingdom to do so.
To make this process more of an adventure, you’re able to make the deed to an abandoned wizard’s tower full of traps, monsters, and magical artifacts while putting a teleportation circle inside for easy access. This could also be a side venture for the party to make additional coin by hiring workers to grow crops.
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