mithriltabby | Escaped gaming meme (Reply)

Things are slow at work right now, so think I’ll take a trip down gaming memory lane and share some of my more deranged ideas with my friends who haven’t yet suffered them. Fellow game masters are welcome to steal them for their own games.

The Great Hare Regalia is one of those magic items that is a litmus test for how a gamer roleplays their character’s self-respect.

The item comes in three pieces, crafted from a single giant rabbit. The pieces are:

A Russian-style white fur hat with flaps that cover the ears and a set of rabbit ears (from an oversized bunny) projecting from the top. They move and twitch as if alive. When the flaps cover the ears of the wearer, they gain a bonus on hearing perception.
A similarly oversized fluffy white bunny tail bangle attached to rabbit-leather straps that can be used to wear it at the small of the back. It is a bit too big to conceal well. This grants extraordinary leaping ability to the wearer.
A set of boots made from large white bunny feet. The wearer gains extra running movement and kick damage (both due to extra strength on the kick and the claws). The wearer’s feet slip in where the ankle is on the rabbit, giving them digitigrade locomotion (they’re running on the toes of the bunny feet) and raises their head to a height of about 7’. With the hat on, the ears reach to 9’ off the ground.

Wearing the boots and hat gives the wearer Danger Sense. Wearing the tail and boots allow the wearer to drum on the ground when they sense a surprise attack and negate any bonuses to the attackers for attacking the wearer and their companions. Wearing all three allows your companions to start acting on the initiative number after you drum, whether or not they have the initiative roll for it.

There is a subtle geas: if the wearer kills a rabbit or eats of the flesh of a rabbit (or broth, for that matter), they will slowly morph into a giant rabbit in their own right unless they go on a quest of atonement for the Rabbit Spirit.

The item is quite powerful— but it looks ridiculous. Most of the PCs in my game won’t wear it because it insults their dignity, and the humanoid puma won’t wear it because he refuses to look like a prey animal. At one point the priest serving the Enlightenment aspect of the god of Healing took up wearing the outfit because she was explicitly surrendering her dignity while being hunted due to a large bounty on her having been posted by the god of Deception, but she wasn’t happy about it. One of the PCs who was silly enough to occasionally put the outfit on managed to trigger the curse when she went hunting for dinner with the party ranger, and now won’t have anything to do with it.