Trinkets don’t get enough love. Players can choose one from the list in the Player’s Handbook at character creation, but if/when they do select a trinket, the player doesn’t know what to do with it, so it just just becomes some forlorn item on a character sheet for most people.

To me, trinkets are a fun way to deliver lore by building them into an adventure, especially for Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak. I look down that d100 list, and immediately see potential for how I can work at least twenty of those into those two adventures.

For example:

A diary written in a language you don’t know: This battered old diary might have been picked up at a dodgy market stall, handed down to the character as an heirloom, or found on the body of a long forgotten dwarven corpse. The diary contains entries written in Shanatan, a rare dialect of Dwarvish once used by Shield Dwarves. Even if a character is proficient in Dwarvish, Shanatan is an archaic, dead language, and requires a successful DC 25 Intelligence check to translate.

The character can make one check per day if they devote an hour of time to studying the journal. A successful check unlocks lore about one of the following:

• Axeholm: the pages of this diary are fairly mundane, until the final entries give an account of the civil unrest fomented by Vyldara, her transition to undeath, and the flight of Axeholm’s residents once the shrieks of the banshee’s wail forced them to abandon the dwarven fortress.
• Dwarven Excavation: the pages of this diary are the daily thoughts of a Dwarven priest of Abbathor, the god of greed. One entry makes mention of an approaching eclipse, another mentions the capture of travelers intended to offer as a blood sacrifice to their god at the eclipse, and another passage worries that the offered gemstones accompanying the blood sacrifice may not be enough to appease their god. As it turns out, they were not enough, and the last pages of the diary are an account of the final days of the survivors of an earthquake that trapped the dwarves in their temple after incurring the wrath of Abbathor.
• Wave Echo Cave: the pages of this diary are written by a smith who worked at the Forge of Spells. For the most part, the entries speak of the daily lives of those who labor at the forge. But other entries proudly document enchanted items of exquisite quality crafted at the forge by the diary’s author:
  • An enchanted mace by the name of Lightbringer, crafter for a hero of Neverwinter named for a cleric of Lathander.
  • An magical breast plate called Dragonguard, commissioned for a hero of Neverwinter named Tergon.
  • An enchanted longsword for the Knight of Tresendar Manor in Phandalin named Talon.

Let’s be mutuals over on Bluesky! If you’re interested, I’m @ticklecorn.bsky.social. I always follow back.

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