With some brainstorming help from friends last week, I have a new idea for the Ruby Talon Deeps. The core credit for this idea goes to Geoffrey Fortier. A new treasure type, called remembrances, are consumable items that grant both an effect and a memory relating to the history of the Ruby Talon Deeps. They look like small pieces of amber that encase motes of light; the color of the light suggests something about the mood of the memory or the nature of the creature who first had the memory.
Ruby Talon Deeps Map | Locations 1 | Treasure
Remembrances
A remembrance is a piece of amber of up to two inches in diameter, surrounding a mote of light. A character can crush a remembrance as a bonus action, receiving its effect and instantaneously experiencing the associated memory.
A single memory can create more than one identical remembrance. At the DM’s discretion, a remembrance might become unreliable (50% failure chance) if taken more than a few miles from the place it was created.
Timeline of the Ruby Talon Deeps
As recorded within remembrances, the history of the Ruby Talon Deeps starts with the planting of the Raven Tree. Some parts of the dungeon existed even before the Tree – the Amethyst Sky existed for eons beyond measure before the stone giants discovered it – but the Tree was among the first things that is still part of the present-day structure. There should be a lot more events, but I figure ten new magic items aren’t too bad.
The First Planting
The blossoming remembrance holds a soothing green light. When you crush this stone, you regain 2d6 hit points, and can spend a Hit Die to add its result to the hit points regained.
You gain the memory of a gray-cloaked elf dismounting from a moonstone dragon on a grassy hillside; the elf plants a seed and sings to it, causing it to grow. Even its earliest shoot is utterly black. She whispers a blessing of long life and memory upon it, mounts the dragon again, and departs.
Ram-Govog Builds the Dream-Tower
The mason’s remembrance holds a piercing purple light. When you crush this stone, you gain proficiency with mason’s tools and advantage on all ability checks with tools for the next 8 hours.
You gain a memory of a male stone giant with extensive tattooing finding the Amethyst Sky. He quarries stone from the surrounding area, clearing out the chamber that now exists below the Amethyst Sky as well as the area that has become the Lair of the Midnight Wyrm, and builds the massive Dream-Tower.
Conflict with the Dragons
The flameguard remembrance holds a light that cycles between purple and red. When you crush this stone, you gain resistance to fire damage and advantage on Dexterity saving throws for 10 minutes.
You gain a memory of a red dragon and its minions making multiple assaults on the Dream-Tower, slaying many of Ram-Govog’s clan. Ram-Govog seeks new allies to strengthen his settlement.
Death of Ram-Govog
The heartless remembrance burns with a bitter red light. When you crush this stone, you critically hit with weapon attacks on a die result of 19 or 20, and once per round when you make a weapon attack with advantage, you can deal an additional 1d6 damage. The effect lasts for 1 minute.
You gain a memory of a duergar artificer, Oghus the Machinist, who met with Ram-Govog in his search for allies. Once he learns as much as he could of the Dream-Tower and Ram-Govog’s clan, he treacherously murders Ram-Govog and travels to the Dream-Tower. There he introduces himself to the clan as Ram-Govog’s new recruit.
The Machinist’s Works
The machinist’s remembrance holds a bleak gray light. When you crush this stone, you gain resistance to psychic damage and can speak, read, and write Dwarven for 1 hour.
You gain a memory of Oghus the Machinist using the stone giant clan’s resources to fund his artifice, as he claims to work to their benefit. He builds a waterwheel to generate power for his forge and devices. He places his Operations Console in a chamber deep beneath the Dream-Tower, with numerous fail-safes if the stone giants learn the truth.
Silver Leaves
The autumn remembrance holds a silver light. When you crush this stone, you can immediately cast your choice of divination or modify memory (targeting yourself and automatically failing the saving throw) without spending a spell slot.
You gain a memory of the elf returning to the tree on the hillside. Its trunk is black, its leaves silver. She has accumulated many scars and her black hair now has a shock of white. A porcelain mask hangs at her belt; she dons it to perform a ritual upon the tree. The silver leaves turn red and gold, and golden sap beads on the trunk; the elf looks satisfied with her work.
The Banishment of Oghus
The exile remembrance is almost entirely black, with only a faint amber shimmer at the edges. When you crush this stone, you can’t be teleported or moved away from your current plane for 1 hour.
You gain a memory of a dreaming stone giant named Airadka seeing a vision of Oghus’s treacherous murder of Ram-Govog. In secret, she explores the deep tunnels where Oghus has built his machines and learns how vulnerable he has made her clan. She returns to the dream-tower and confronts him. He retaliates by collapsing many of the tunnels, caverns, and bridges that support the clan. He escapes into his lair.
The Eye Opens
The desolation remembrance burns with an awful crimson light. When you crush this stone, for the next hour, you can see invisible or ethereal creatures and objects outlined in crimson.
You gain a memory of Oghus growing ever more paranoid about intruders, especially invisible or Ethereal ones. He develops strange new machines to warn him of intruders, but he is never satisfied. He overclocks a device he calls the ethereal scrutinizer. A rift between the Material and Ethereal Planes opens in the shape of an eye, and ethereal cyclones rise through the tunnels toward the surface.
The Quest of Tasrim
The questing remembrance glows with a steady white light. When you crush this stone, you reduce your exhaustion level by one. During the next hour, you have advantage on saving throws against exhaustion.
You gain a memory of a half-orc eldritch knight named Tasrim, who makes it their personal mission to seal the rift that Oghus had opened. They lead a party of a dozen adventurers into the tunnels, suffering heavy losses to the ethereal monsters and cyclones. Together, they construct a magically warded base camp where the Market of Nyrus now stands, to mount a final assault against the Eye of Desolation. Only Tasrim survives, with their remaining companions lost to the Deep Ethereal, but the cyclones cease and the Eye now redirected to a demiplane.
The Amber Harvest
The harvesting remembrance holds a dull brown light. When you crush this stone, you gain resistance to cold damage, and once per round when you deal damage to a Beast or Plant creature, you deal an additional 1d6 necrotic damage.
You gain a memory of the elf, now clad all in black and silver, returning to the tree. She collects golden sap from the tree with a long knife. She tastes some of the sap from the blade, and her expression shows that she is experiencing memories from it. At a touch from her finger, beads of sap harden into amber, which she takes away with her.
Design Notes
This is the first ten major items in the timeline of the Ruby Talon Deeps, as I’m imagining it right now. Naturally, any of these could change or have more events shoved in earlier as I flesh out more of the place and make more decisions about its story. I hope you like the idea of very directly using consumable magic items to deliver story – though there’s nothing stopping you from going through the potion table and just assigning memories to each one, either.
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This is a really fun idea. I really love this as an alternative way to deliver backstory to the classic finding journals or ancient scrolls or whatnot. I also really like all of the mechanical effects that these items grant. Even without the memory effect these would all make fun potions or stand-alone consumables.
My one critical comment is that combining the mechanical, primarily combat-related effects with the lore dump effect makes it much less likely that PCs will get the full benefit of either one. The first time a player crushes a Heartless Remembrance outside of combat and gets an expanded critical range and a bit of background on the site they are either going to be disappointed that they can’t use the combat effect or become reluctant to use any other remembrances when not in combat.
As a fix might I suggest making the mechanical part of the item be an effect that the PC can trigger, as a bonus action, anytime before their next long rest? That way the character is likely to use them when they find them to gain the lore info and can still benefit from the mechanical bump.
It’s my expectation – perhaps incorrect, of course! – that players would use identify to figure out what they’re getting from remembrances generally, and thus not use them at “incorrect” times.
On the GM side, it’s probably best to copy them memory onto an index card for the player to reference as-needed. I think it’s important that the character now and in perpetuity HAS the memory, rather than it being a single vision that they have to write down as the GM delivers it. (Lessons hard learned from LARPing.)
I’m specifically resisting separating the activation action from a second activation bonus action. That feels like ramping up the chances of the whole effect getting forgotten.
Identify can, of course, overcome some of this problem. My current group of players somehow made a collection of 5 PCs, including 4 primary spellcasters, and somehow does not actually have Identify at level 3. They have already made plans to correct this oversight, but it was funny when they realized no one had taken it.
I 100% agree with the index card for the memories. I deploy cards for a lot of stuff in my games because I have a lot of custom or 3rd party items and effects, many of which it is difficult or impossible to properly represent in D&D Beyond. I can see where a second activation might lead to players forgetting the whole thing, but I can also see where activating this in the middle of a combat encounter is going to lead to a weird break in the action while you narrate this secondary scene.
Maybe the solution is to separate the memory remembrances from the mechanical ones entirely, with the Identify spell telling PCs it’s ok to just use the memory ones immediately. Maybe the mechanical ones are tied to remembered emotions rather than actual coherent memories, so PCs experience a burst of rage or happiness or grief when using them, but nothing further.