Loot-a-Day, Day 4: Precicous paper
The Dryad’s Memories
Wondrous item, legendary (requires attunement)
This book was made from paper made from a dryad’s tree. The spirit of the dryad resides in the book and may impart her wisdom and some of her powers to a reader.
Shared Insight. By perusing the Dryad’s Memories, you gain advantage on Nature and Survival checks and are considered proficient in these skills.
Living Dictionary. Using the Dryad’s Memories, you can communicate with beasts and plants as if you shared a language.
Fey Charm. Once per day, you may use fey charm as a dryad.
Tree Magic. The Dryad’s Memories allows you to use the innate spellcasting normally possessed by a dryad.
Sentience. The Dryad’s Memories is a sentient true neutral wondrous item with an Intelligence of 14, a Wisdom of 15, and a Charisma of 18. It has hearing and darkvision out to a range of 60 feet.
The Dryad’s Memories communicates by having writing and images appear on its pages. It writes and understands Elvish and Sylvan.
Personality. The Dryad’s Memories is still very much a capricious woodland spirit. Understanding what happened to her, the Dryad’s Memories purpose is to protect and preserve natural woods and their inhabitants. She feels a special kinship with trees which are isolated within civilized areas, such as in a city park.
Aside from her general capriciousness and her purpose, keeping her out of sight of any tree for more than a day will also provoke a conflict between her and her reader.
Why D&D?
After ending up with the idea of a magical tree-spirit-paper-book, D&D was just an easy and straightforward game to stat it in (also very forthcoming to such high magic concepts in general).
Loot-a-Day is a month-long German blogging challenge by fellow German blogger Greifenklaue, who was inspired by ArtifactaDay which we ran last August as a counterpoint to RPGaDay in Germany. We followed up on this with two more marathons of daily content about artificial creatures and science-gone-too-far, respectively, and now Greifenklaue seeks to spread the format.
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I like the idea behind this artifact. Perhaps the book covers are made out of wood.
I would have seen that the death of the tree, the transformation into paper/book, the fragmentation of the wood into fibres and the chemical bath for the paper creation had an effect on the personality of the dryad.
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My intent was to have the “kinship with isolated trees” and the strong focus on woodland preservation to be more or less subtle effects on her personality without completely turning the idea of a dryad inside out.
I also thought about having a much more sad, pessimistic, maybe vengeful spirit inhabit the book, but then decided against it and instead of sadness went with – possibly quite snarky – fey capriciousness, maybe with a tint of melancholy.
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Gleich noch eine tolle, naturzbezogene Schatzidee die geklaut wird. Sehr kreativ! Die Beschreibung der Persönlichkeit klingt aber etwas chaotisch für eine neutrale Gesinning, aber ich kann beide Aspekte irgendwie nachvollziehen.
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Chaotisch neutral würde auch gut funktionieren, das stimmt. Ich habe dann aber erst einmal einfach die Gesinnung der Dryade laut 5E Monster Manual kopiert – genauso wie bei den Eigenschaften.
Auch ein bißchen fragwürdig ist die Einstufung als legendärer Gegenstand. Das habe ich mehr gemacht, um die Einzigartigkeit des Buches zu betonen. Von seinen reinen Effekten her wäre aber wohl eine niedrigere Einstufung passender.