Random Loot?

[Uhtred]

During yesterday's session, my players wiped the floor with a rival adventuring party and looted their bodies as has been the way with victorious adventurers since the dawn of time. On the body of a Druid they found a live goose (a snack for the Druid's slightly more carnivorous animal companion) which was immediately taken by the party's Chaos Gnome Illusionist. He had also looted a Monk's Belt, a pair of magic monk hand wraps, and a quarter staff, which he then applied to the goose. He then fashioned a Luchador's mask and put it on the goose, naming him "Honk: Luchador Monk Champion of all the Land." He brought it into a bar and bluffed some barbarians into wrestling Honk, then used a combination of Major Image, Grease, Prestidigitation, and Pyrotechnics to defeat all three Barbarians and sent them packing. With a goose. That I included as joke loot. IT'S JUST A GOOSE. Not an Awakened goose, not a Dire Goose, not a fiendish magebred war-goose with class levels. But now it is a valued and respected member of the party.
Any similar stories out there? Where you've given your players something as loot as a joke, something random and pointless, that your players have inexplicably bonded with and turned into a valuable asset?

[The Redwolf]

Well in one of our previous campaigns we were in what was (after it took us a helluva long time to figure it out) an evil and magical elevator, and when we first went into it it was covered in carpet from floor to ceiling, our centaur character cut the carpet off the entire elevator and added it to his inventory, and used it multiple times through the rest of the campaign to various levels of effectiveness ranging from containing some gaseous poison in a trap by covering it with wet carpet to throwing it on enemies to obscure their vision and give concealment. That was pretty great.

[Belril Duskwalk]

A treasure chest. Not the contents of the chest, but rather the chest itself.

As first level characters we were raiding a small dungeon to make the monsters stop attacking the town (and get treasure!) Near the end of our raid we found a mid-size chest. It contained a few coins and perhaps a few scraps of clothing, nothing too special really. Now, our barbarian realized that while he had a great deal of Strength with which to carry things, he had nothing in the way of a bag to hold it all with. He gathers up some rope and a few minutes later he has made himself a backpack out of a treasure chest. In spite of having since passed more than enough general goods stores where he might buy a proper backpack he continues to use the chest-pack for all of his carrying needs.

In another incident in a different campaign that somewhat fills the bill, our party got our hands on a Murlynd's Spoon. We did so by cutting it out of a Behir's stomach. A Murlynd's Spoon magically produces enough food for 3 people per day when placed into a bowl/pot. It's not tasty food, but nutritionally speaking it gets the job done. Anyway, our mid-level party got this item at a point in our career's where we no longer worried about the cost of our food, to the tune of eating 5 course meals at high end establishments whenever we were in town and carrying the really good trail rations when in the wilderness. A good half dozen sessions later we now find ourselves unexpectedly trapped in the Underdark with no clear idea of how to get home and not nearly enough rations to do it with. But we still have that Spoon!

[gr8artist]

(Rifto, Lorvain, Zordon, Nukgrub, Rand... Do not read this message.)
I'm running a campaign that involves planar travel. In one adventure, the players were desperately in need of funds to spend in the plane of commerce, but such funds were hard to come by. Fortunately for me, several players bought my bait and signed extra-dimensional contracts for their services. Whoever bought the contract could summon the contractee and force him to do his bidding (so long as such bidding didn't violate certain terms of the contract.) This was a great tool for me, especially since the players are all outlaws in a corrupt world ruled by evil overlords, who frequently visit this particular plane to acquire unique information. But my plans were foiled by our group's goblin, who decided to cash in everything she had, part with most of her gathered loot, and sign a contract herself, all so that she'd have the money to buy the contracts for two other members of the group... two members who had turned on her previously and almost killed her in some geass/quest PVP action. So now the downtrodden goblin holds contracts for the services of two members of the party... and they don't even know. She's waiting for the chance to taunt them with it, before enlisting their services for a material plane month.

[Deathkeeper]

Not quite the same, but at one point the GM of my first campaign put us in a Cloud Giant city. As flavor, he noted that the giants had a good appreciation for music and art, so there was a decent population of medium-sized people there plying their trades as musicians, artists, and craftsmen. I used this entirely flavorful description for my sorcerer to seek out a musical instrument craftsman, help him invent the harmonica (it's not in the normal list of instruments in Perform), give it to my pseudodragon familiar, and then go to the nearest bar with a piano, and together play Piano Man. May not be an actual asset, but I managed to turn a random description into the second funniest moment in the campaign.

Also, at one point he gave each player a magic ring as part of a loot pile, along with a tarot card of "The World." They were rings of Minor Resist Fire, FeatherFall, Walk on Water, Meld into Stone, and The Ram. The elemental ones were based on the Rings of Control Elements, which they slowly became as we leveled (the Ram player got plot-based powers, so it evened out). The tarot card was just meant to show that it was just the GM giving us a free present, but since we found The World on top of four elemental rings and an animal-based ring, we believed for almost the entire campaign that we would eventually use them to summon Captain Planet. We didn't.

[The Redwolf]

A treasure chest. Not the contents of the chest, but rather the chest itself.

That reminds me, the poison that was messed up by the wet carpet came out of a trapped chest in which my character found a crazy powerful magic item that couldn't be detected from the outside because the chest was shielded. I managed to bluff the hell out of everyone else that the item wasn't special at all but I really liked the chest and got the centaur to carry the chest with the item inside for me until we were done with the quest we were on at the time.

[Amidus Drexel]

I often get my stronger party members to loot the dungeon's accoutrements, like the doorknobs (and at higher levels, the doors). Sometimes I take parts of the walls or floors.

[BowStreetRunner]

I don't know about treasure, but I ran one campaign where one of the PCs was in the habit of acquiring quite a few of the random NPCs along the way.

In this campaign, there was a ranger, wizard, cleric and rogue. The wizard managed to save the life of the king and unravel a major plot against the kingdom, mostly on his own, and was rewarded with a peerage and an estate dominated primarily by some fairly worthless swampland. However, he developed plans to start a peat-farming and charcoal-making industry on his land and a nice-sized village started to grow there. He was constantly sending rescued NPCs back to his land to work as tenant-farmers or workers in his charcoal business.

[Togath]

In a campaign I once ran my pcs ended up looting a freeze dried hyena, along with a pound of random mushrooms(who's only original use was as lizard repellent)

[gr8artist]

I was the DM for a peculiar modern campaign where the players were being sent to assorted planes to do miscellaneous tasks for various deities from assorted pantheons. One such quest was for the newly born Atlantean god of games and stories.
I managed to mash up characters and places from over two dozen different sources, including the X-men, Pokemon, Batman, Wizard of Oz, Wonderland, and Peter Pan. The reward at the end was any lesson or any item from any character they'd met.
One guy learned Kamehameha from Master Roshi. Another took Batman's utility belt. But the only one I regretted was giving the brawler his very own poke'-ball.
He toted that around for half a campaign without ever giving it a second thought. The campaign, meanwhile, got more and more ridiculous, and we were obviously losing interest. (This was about level 15) I made plans for a total party wipe with some randomly OP creatures I pulled, literally, out of a deck of Munchkin cards.
Dungeon final boss was a "Plutonium Dragon". After the first round of combat, the brawler pulled out his gifted pokeball and threw it at the dragon. Dragon was at full health, so I told him the ball snapped and began to rattle. I was just about to say that it broke open, when the brawler ran up and held it shut with his hands. He activated every power and perk he had, dedicated to keeping that ball closed. Long story short, compressed plutonium doesn't end well for anyone, so I got my TPW anyway. But in the next campaign we made his old character a newly formed deity... god of the apocalypse.