492 – Deep Pockets

And now you know where the crew keeps all their gear… and the drawbacks of said. Jaine’s belt pouches are modified Bags of Holding with arcane reinforcement so that sharp objects (like Dhur’s axe or Jaine’s little-used rapier) won’t tear the bag and dump everything into the Astral Plane. Yes, I thought this through. Yes, I need to get out more.

Don’t know about you folks, but I’ve had an interesting July so far. Finally finished moving (goes slowly when there are just two of you doing all the work) and took my daughters to Disneyland for the first time for their 10th birthday (New readers: I’m the father of twin girls). That and many other vexing things have kind of smacked me upside the head and caused the unintentional hiatus I just finished. Once the girls go back to school in mid-August, I should be able to increase the frequency of the strip. You know, like a professional is supposed to be able to do. 🙂

Hope you’re all having a great summer!

~Rob

16 Comments

I think the demon bit off a bit more paladin than he could chew….

I guess I was always using Bags of Holding wrong,…. we always had it where you could reach in and grab the exact item you wanted [as long as you knew what you were reaching for,…if you had no idea what was in there you could not grab anything],…lol

I just did some quick research, and it is Heward’s Handy Haversack (v3.5, Handy Haversack for Pathfinder) that always has what you want on top. Though for a bag of holding that contains more than a standard backpack (as this obviously does), it is still only a full round action, which would imply that the demon/devil/thing that Becky just humiliated is significantly lower level that his otherwise impressive confidence would imply. Or the hammer is way overpowered, that can be fun too.

Ironically, apart from being a sapient artifact, the hammer would be one of the easiest things to store in a bag on holding…

I’d actually thought it was a chaotic earth-djinn myself, rather than a demon, although earth djinns are normally also lawful. In versions of D&D that aren’t cut down to five alignments, anyway. 😛

The item I always wanted was a bag of infinite holding, 100% full with sand, so that there’s no room for anything else, ever.

I don’t really know what I’d have done with it, but it always seemed like it’d come in handy some day.

At last, Becky gets to relieve some stress and show of her fighting skills. I am guessing she got tired of the hammers nagging and snide remarks. This is a great opportunity for her to show that hammer she isn’t to be trifled with despite her plain armor.

But if y0u take a bag of holding through an interdimensional portal, it will either rupture space time, or become temporarily non magical, in which case the items in it are either dumped out into your current reference frame, or remain in it’s own pocket plane, but are temporarily in accessible until the bag is returned to it’s plane of origin.

It would be interesting if you had a pair of pants enchanted with a holding spell. It sure would be nice to have an easily accessible pocket dimension.

My husband and I independently decided that in a world where enchanted items can be commissioned for a price, they’re not all going to be player character power-ups. We came up with stuff like the Belt of Manly Fashion, which looks like a fashionable man’s belt (duh) and confers just enough Strength, Dex, and Con to offset the inevitable losses of age (ETA: and an extra point of Cha, forgot that). Or the Keys of Necessity, which look just like three ordinary keys, but if you insert one in a conventional lock while using the activation phrase, you get a room with a crackling fireplace, a fur rug in front of said fireplace, and a big bed; a sumptuous bathing and sauna complex; or a nice clean privy. Player characters can use these too, obviously, but they are better stage dressing than “Oh, what plus is that sword? Cool, I’ll keep it.”

The keys sounds like something that would require Magnificent Mansion as a spell known to craft…

One thing a high-level dragon disciple of mine has is a ‘Portable Hoard’ – this is a Portable Hole containing all of the character’s wealth (not tied up in magic items, spell components, and the like) in gold coins. (Before that, it was a bedroll that went ‘clink’…)

@CaptEndo: Depends on the rule system and the plane. I think the main issue is that the bags need a coterminous ethereal plane to function – many Outer Planes don’t have one, but simply going through a portal doesn’t necessarily mean the bag will malfunction, it’s the properties of the other side that determine this.

@CaptEndo: I always ruled it like this: A Bag of Holding is a miniature portal to a small enclosed pocket of the Astral Plane. If a Bag of Holding is opened while on the Astral Plane, it explodes. So, all Jaine has to do is not open her pouches on the Astral Plane… which she hasn’t encountered yet. Going through portals, in my world, doesn’t count. 🙂

@Jenny: I like that! I would imagine Sean Connery has such a belt. 😉

Between you and Sohmer, I’m gonna develop a dwarf fetish.

@Jenny, and anyone else interested in such things ^_^ :
I seem to recall lots of items like that in GURPS: Magic Items and GURPS: Magic Items 2.

Huh. I wonder what Jaine’s rate of ukelele breakage is. Perhaps Summon IV [Celestial Hula Dancers] is just a spell particularly hard on the implement used.

Ooh! Ooh! My favorite bit of rule-jiggering: The party was out in the hinterlands for years, in a game world where you could only level up if you found a teacher. There were no wizards to be found, so my wizard was stuck with low-level spells cast at a higher level and more often. One of them was (can’t remember the 2e name) the one where you can animate a rope. She built up some money and favors, visited some dwarven craftspeople, and after several prototypes got a steel-reinforced woven silk cable that even an ogre would be lucky to break. She hogtied a wyvern once. It was awesome.

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MeatShield by Rob Chambers

Bi-Weekly D&D-style Fantasy Hijinks!

492 – Deep Pockets