Deck of Many Tarrasques

created by wookywok and Prokopetz

Wondrous Item, Artifact

wookywok asked:

Inadvisable DnD Magic Item #137: a Deck of Many Tarrasques

When a character draws from the deck of many tarrasques, roll 1d12 and consult the following table:

1. Summons the tarrasque, which promptly rampages as is its wont.

2. Summons a friendly tarrasque. It's dumb as a box of hammers and practically untrainable, but regards the drawing character and their companions as its dearest friends, and responds to any threat to their safety - real or imagined - with stupendous violence.

3. Summons a sleeping tarrasque, curled up like the world's largest and pointiest kitten. It shows no sign of waking any time soon, but growls warningly in its slumber if touched.

4. The drawing character's most trusted adventuring companion is transformed into a tarrasque - for is it not said that the real tarrasque is the friends we made along the way?

5. Summons a highly educated tarrasque. Though it disdains violence, its fearsome moral arguments drive all who listen to nihilism and despair; thus are dynasties brought low. If challenged, it claims to be conducting a social experiment.

6. Summons a seemingly ordinary - albeit somewhat clumsy - tarrasque. Upon its defeat, the beast proves to be an enormous biomechanical suit operated by a clan of scientifically minded kobolds, whose leader melodramatically swears vengeance upon the drawing character.

7. The drawing character is possessed by the spirit of the tarrasque. They gain all of its ferocity and drive to bring civilisation low, but absolutely none of its destructive capacity.

8. Summons a paracausal tarrasque. The nearest major community retroactively will have been destroyed by a tarrasque's rampage many decades in the past. The history of the game's setting is revised accordingly.

9. Summons an allegorical tarrasque, in the form of a sudden invasion by a brutal colonising empire whose heraldry bears the beast's image.

10. The drawing character acquires the reputation of the tarrasque. Non-player characters will regard them as an existential threat in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and brave heroes seeking the glory of slaying them begin to arrive in short order.

11. Summons the idea of the tarrasque, which takes hold in the public imagination and eventually drives the surrounding communities to destroy themselves in a frenzy of paranoid anticipation. The tarrasque itself never actually shows up; perhaps it is we who were the real tarrasque all along?

12. Summons a six-inch-tall tarrasque that steals everyone's socks.