magic items

Spenser & Sword Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is one of the most important epic poems of the English language. Formed by six books of rhymed verses, it narrates the allegorical adventures of a group of knights embodying fundamental virtues like justice, temperance and so on. Like many other old poetic works depicting warriors and […]

Dungeons & Decameron Storytelling games are as ancient as humankind. In his most-known book, The Decameron, the medieval Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) narrates how a group of young people manage to exorcise the fear of the Black Death spreading in Florence through the art of narrating stories. Many of them contain fantastic elements—even magic

The Odyssey, an epic poem written thousands of years ago by Homer, is one of the first examples of fantasy literature, complete with the mythic-but-human hero Odysseus and the classic monsters of the harpy and cyclops. And of course, magic items. Two of these are particularly important in the narrative: the bowl and wand belonging

Dante Alighieri cited various magic items in his masterwork opera Divine Comedy. As already done for otherworldly swords, 5E stats are presented for two potent items appearing in the first part of the epic poem Inferno. The Rod of the Heavenly Messenger  Rod, rare (requires attunement by a good-aligned cleric or paladin) “Well I perceived that