D&D: Five Artifacts That Will End Your Campaign
D&D is a game full of legendary artifacts that can absolutely break your campaign if you’re not ready for them.
Dungeons & Dragons’ most powerful magic items are in a league of their own. And not one featuring Lori Petty (who was in the original AND the 2022 remake) either. Artifacts are extraordinarily powerful magic items with a laundry list of special abilities that they confer upon their wielder.
But if you’re not careful, they can also disrupt your game and leave naught but ruination in their wake. Here are five artifacts that might just end your campaign. But for good or ill, that potential is what makes them thrilling.
The Deck of Many Things
Let’s start with the most obvious one. May as well. We all knew it would be on here. And so it is. The Deck of Many Things has a reputation for being a campaign ruiner for a reason. And that reason is the wide, swingy variety of boons and banes you can get when drawing from the deck.
Consider a party with the Deck of Many Things. One character might gain the ability to cast the Wish spell 1d3 times. Or gain 50,000 XP (enough for several levels, especially if you’re lower level. 50,000 XP can take you from level 1 to 9. Or if you’re level 8, it’ll catapult you almost level 11, well ahead of the rest of the party. But another character might have their soul removed from their body, containe in an object far and away. Another might summon an Avatar of Death. Or someone might just lose all their magic items.
The Deck of Many Things doesn’t equal instant end of campaign, but it does mean potentially a lot of chaos that can send it spinning over the edge.
TheHand/Eye of Vecna
These artifacts are both connected to Vecna. And one is bad enough, but especially if you have both of them on the same character, they can spell the end of a campaign. Or a favorite character. For one, they’re pretty evil. But they can give a character the ability to instantly kill any target that has a skeleton. No limit on CR or hit dice or hit point total.
Just a touch, a failed constitution saving throw, and your campaign’s villain’s bones turn to jelly. But the real danger of these artifacts is that whenever you use them to cast a spell, Vecna may devour your soul and turn the character into a puppet under the DM’s control. Of course, this isn’t obvious, and Vecna may start turning unsuspecting friends into jelly-filled meat bags and then undead servants under his nefarious control.
The Crook of Rao
The Crook of Rao was introducedin Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. And it’s a magical artifact that, on the surface isn’t too bad. It can banish fiends. Like, a lot of them. All fiends under CR 19 within a mile are instantly banished, no saving throw. But. It has been cursed by Iggwilv, the Witch Queen aka Tasha when she was/will be evil.
When the Crook of Rao banishes fiends or casts spells there’s a chance that extraplanar entities will appear instead. You might accidentally summon a Balor and a Pit Fiend (or open a portal toa n archdevil or demon lord’s presence), which could easily result in a TPK.
Or worse yet, Iggwilv’s Curse might bloom, transforming the Cook of Rao into a permanent, two-way portal to the first layer of the Abyss which will allow demons to flood in.
Baba Yaga’s Mortar and Pestle
This one’s actually pretty cool. Again, from Tasha’s Cauldron. Baba Yaga’s Mortar and Pestle is a combo of two artifactsth at, when combined, can shift the tone of your campaign away from what you might have thought it was going to be.
Because the main power of the two artifacts in conjunction is to grind things into powder, pulp, or paste, notably your enemies. You can make the mortar and pestle grind up anything, up to a Large sized creature, dealing 4d10 points of force damage each turn until that creature is reduced to 0 hit points and transformed into useful components of powdered bones and puled organs and the like.
Which is cool, but that might not be the vibe you were hoping for with your dramatic intrigue-laced political campaign. Hard to have an intrigue when you’re throwing your rivals into the mortar and turning them into paste.
Ruinstone
This one has Ruin in the name. And for a good reason. This artifact, introduced in the digital supplement to the Essentials Kit, Divine Contention, is a magical red crystal that can “undo one deed”. Which is hard enough to interpret – the suggested use is redoing an action in combat, but even that’s not using the full effect and the text admits this.
But when you use it, someone known to the wielder is erased from reality. Including the people you’re fighting. So even going up against someone wielding one of these might erase the whole party from existence. It’s practically guaranteed with some parties, once you start running out of people you know.
So make sure to keep this out of the hands of the edgy loner who doesn’t know anyone or have any friends.
Of course, one DM’s campaign-ender is another’s campaign-starter!
