Not so useless as they thought...

[BowStreetRunner]

I was recently reminded of a wand of levitation that my party found a while back. The rest of the party considered it to be junk and included it with the pile of treasure that we planned on selling in the next town. My melee character had levels of Dragon Devotee and therefore two levels of sorcerer casting, so thought it would be nice to take advantage of the fact that he could use wands as he had a spell list. So I kept the wand.

While that character is no longer with the party, the wand has still been kept, used frequently, and is almost out of charges now. There were numerous times when it provided the best solution to some tricky problem - getting around various obstacles mostly. It really did turn out to be a nice, cheap but effective tool to have in the party.

So my question to the playground is, what are some items (magical or mundane) that your parties have had with them that turned out to be more useful than you had first expected?

[RFLS]

This. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148101) My DM has banned any equipment list that makes use of more than 5 items on that list =D I can claim more than my share of the blame for that, too.

Anyway, one of my favorites is a use activate wondrous item of Prestidigtation. There's a reason that that spell is known as Minor Wish. Other useful spells (which translates to useful items) would be Tenser's Floating Disc, Magic Mouth, Mage Hand, any of the spells recommended here, (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=254113) any of the Image line of spells, and Ventriloquism. There are, of course, dozens of other spells like this. ./brokencastingrant

[Garagos]

My dragonslayer and the NPC cleric used to make great use of Ring Gates. I just kept one tied to my belt and she had one tied to hers. Whenever I needed healing and was far away from her, she would stick her hand through the Ring Gate to give me the touch spell. Saved her from a lot of attacks of opportunities and such.

[MesiDoomstalker]

Once, in a airship heavy campaign, we looted a large number (50+) of Rings of Featherfall, which we quickly found were extremely inexpensive. Something like a gold a piece, they were so common place. We all slipped one on, not wanting to die a horrible, fall related death (GM basically said "you fall off, you die").

Later, we looted this paragliding cape things. They basically allowed us to glide at varying speeds. We were like "Why do we need these? We have an airship and a bajillion Rings of Featherfall." The party was about to toss them overboard, when a stowaway burst out of hiding, snagged the Macguffin and flew off the ship (apparently had pre-cast a fly spell). We gave chase with our airship (waaaaay faster) so he ducked into a canyon we couldn't navigate, being too narrow for our ship. So my ninja grabbed one of the paragliders and dove off, using our altitude to keep up with him. One nose dive later, I one-shotted the dude with my Rapier and fistful of d6s, and got the Macguffin back. The Ring saved me from turning into a bloody mess on the canyon wall.