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Grug
2008-02-24, 09:55 PM
Fetch quests are always a pain, it seems like you'd learn to sense these things after you're sent off to get mystical plant F for the umpteenth time. Magical ingredients should be exotic, and unique enough to always be at the bottom of a dank dungeon. This is a thread to list interesting MacGuffins, including the exotic ways to get them.

Firstly: A scale from a great wyrm of Every Chromatic Dragon kind. Seems tough? Try visiting the forbidden dragon graveyard. All you have to do is deal with a dragon that's powerful enough to have died of old age.

A daffodil grown at exactly 356 feet above sea level. Find an appropriate spot on a mountain, then guard it from the elements and hungry herbivores.

Five hoofs from the same horse. Mutants galore in the lair of the crazy transmuter.

The orb of Ix. Sounds generic? Well it was last in the posession of a merchant who added it to a billiards set. If you want it back peacefully you have to follow the paper trail and eventually beat the champ at a game of pool, who uses it as his lucky 9 ball.

400 front teeth. Oh the possiblities for getting these.

Magma from the planet's mantle. Not only do you have to find somewhere deep enough, but there's also the problem of transporting it.

Feathers from a bird that has circled the planet. You can either kill one, or make one by escorting a winged familiar.

Add your own.

MisterSaturnine
2008-02-24, 10:19 PM
The heart of the Grandmage of Caelum. Problem with that, of course, is that Caelum was a kingdom that fell a few centuries ago, and thus the Grandmage's heart decayed into nothing a long while back. Of course, if you were to find his bones, a resurrection spell would supply you with his heart. You know, if you managed to kill him.

The other solution is to bring him back from the dead and seduce him, assuming a metaphorical McGuffin.

Funkyodor
2008-02-25, 01:54 AM
Or you can have a McGuffin that sounds like a riddle/metaphore but it really is a literal McGuffin. Like "You must find and retreive Pandoras Box!". Well there's this evil undead chick named Pandora...

Superglucose
2008-02-25, 03:08 AM
The heart of the Grandmage of Caelum. Problem with that, of course, is that Caelum was a kingdom that fell a few centuries ago, and thus the Grandmage's heart decayed into nothing a long while back. Of course, if you were to find his bones, a resurrection spell would supply you with his heart. You know, if you managed to kill him.

The other solution is to bring him back from the dead and seduce him, assuming a metaphorical McGuffin.

My god I LOVE this one! Not only do you have to FIND the thing, which is probably the center of some necromantic research guarded by some very... illicit mages (:smallwink:) but then, a ressurection question and finally a BBEG versus the guy who's heart you have to take.

Talic
2008-02-25, 03:16 AM
Five hoofs from the same horse. Mutants galore in the lair of the crazy transmuter.

400 front teeth. Oh the possiblities for getting these.


Firstly, though PETA will hate me, I'm just going to say that a good axe and a Regenerate spell will take care of the first.

Second, you're ruining the Christmas of 200 children.

Roderick_BR
2008-02-25, 06:28 AM
My fiend did this once: A magical box, in possession of a wizard/fighter that is the leader of a barbarian tribe, in a island full of dinosaurs (Savage Island anyone?). He doesn't know what's it about, but he's been working to find out, and will NOT give it up. And he has a short temper. And several of his henchmen can control dinosaurs as mounts.

The real quicker? When the PC's employer give them the job, he tells them "Whatever you do, don't open that box!"
Add whatever you want to the box. My DM made it a miniportal through where demons could come through. When we closed it, one had already escaped.

Ascension
2008-02-25, 06:32 AM
Can we talk about annoying macguffins too?

In our current campaign we asked a mages' guild to work on this crazy draconic cipher thing we found but couldn't translate and were in exchange asked to go find two guys who were (in turn) looking for a macguffin for them on another plane.

We agreed and set off to do just that. We found the people we were looking for... sort of... in skeleton form... having been raised by the necromancer who stole the macguffin. So we beat them and the necromancer, only to find that something (something very small) had gotten into the necromancer's treasure chest before us and dragged the macguffin out through a tiny hole in the back wall of his lair.

We busted down the wall, fought through some random underground cave encounters, and tracked down a tiny construct with macguffin in hand. Over the protests of our cleric, who wanted to negotiate with the thing, the rest of the party started shooting. The construct fled, leading us into a maze of surprisingly technological-looking corridors patrolled by large numbers of warforged guards.

We destroyed all of the warforged guards and tracked down the little construct to a strange room... only to find that he had somehow surrounded himself with an invisible energy barrier none of us could break through.

Then we were confronted by a rogue Inevitable who was somehow or another reprogrammed by a well-intentioned extremist druid to kill any intelligent life on the plane other than the fey. He told us that since we had killed the necromancer for him he would forgive us for killing his warforged as long as we left the plane immediately and never came back. For emphasis, he showed us a montage of him destroying civilization on the monitors in the room.

We tried to negotiate with him for a while, finding out in the process that all the macguffin (a small golden cube) does is to spread the effect of a caster's buff spells to everyone who's touching the cube. He gave us a HUUUUUUUUGE laundry list of side quests he wanted us to accomplish for him in exchange for the cube. We tried to barter with him, but to no avail. Eventually we just said "Forget it, we found the two guys... sorta... that's all we promised to do." and left without the cube.

Our next session has been repeatedly delayed, so it'll be a while before we find out if that's going to be enough to please the guild we're working for or if we're going to have to end up carrying out the mad inevitable's eighty-gazillion tedious-but-highly-dangerous quests. I sure hope not.