The Evil Warlock Die (A Cursed Relic From The Depths of My Dice Bag)

We all have dice that betray us at the worst moment. Sometimes they make us look foolish, or cause us to botch what should be our best skill. Sometimes they get our characters killed. For most of us those particular dice are regarded with suspicion, given to new owners, or in some cases locked away in shame jails or knotted dice bags, never to see the light of day again.

There are some dice, though, that do not learn their lesson. They do not repent. They steep in their own malice and spite, eventually becoming forces of chaos at the table. This is a story of one such die.

So much fear... over such a little thing...

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How The Evil Warlock Die Came To Me

I acquired this die very early on in my tabletop career. At the time I only owned two sets of dice, and had never gone past level 3 in a game. I was at the hosting player's house, and I noticed she'd been cleaning out her fish tank. While I'd noticed there were dice in the tank before, I'd always thought it was just decoration. When I asked, though, I found out that the tank was where the traitors went.

"Sleeping with the fishes," she'd said solemnly. "Nobody double-crosses me."

I noticed that all of the condemned were d20s. They'd been laid out and scrubbed along with the gravel, but one of them sat alone. It was a black die with red numbers, part of a standard Chessex opaque set the company still sells... but it seemed wrong, somehow. Sinister in a way the others weren't. I touched it, and turned it over onto another face, revealing the jagged scar that ran along the die. Its previous owner looked at me, and told me I could have it if I wanted it.

I wasn't sure I did, but I took it anyway.

Discovering Its Trigger Word

All magic items, even cursed ones, have activation terms. So it was with the Evil Warlock Die, as it came to be called (since DND 3.5 was the current edition we were playing at the time, and because the warlock happened to be the class I was playing). I'd been using the die for several sessions, getting mainly mediocre, lackluster rolls. The standard for any game I'm in, which is why I have to min-max everything so stringently; if I can't succeed on a 5, then I could go entire sessions before my character actually did anything useful.

It was while we were fighting an orc chieftain that none of us could touch that I discovered the activation terms for the die. I had to be swirling it around, either in my hand or a dice cup, and speak the phrase, "I have a stupid idea," before laying out my plan. In this case I wanted to instigate a grapple check (something my character was not trained to do), before laying my palm in a sensitive place (the chieftain had a rather elaborately described codpiece with a skull on the belt buckle), and letting off my eldritch blast.

Ain't no safety on this big gun.

The GM fully expected my crunchy caster to get his head stoved in by the orc's great club. I also fully expected this result. What happened instead was one of the most epic critical hits our table had seen in some time, confirmed with a second natural 20, and a pool of 6d6 to a rather sensitive place that almost rolled maximum damage. To paraphrase the GM:

"The orc takes a 5-foot step to the left, loses the will to live, and falls down dead."

This was the first recorded incident of this cursed item coming through in a pinch, but far from the last. The Evil Warlock die has been responsible for blindly activating epic-level magic items several levels early, giving the party access to wish in a very unintended way. It was the die that allowed a gunslinger to blow out a dragon's remaining eye, setting the GM scrambling because he'd expected us to run screaming from the wounded, but still high CR, monster. It seemed to take particular delight in ruining the plans of a punitive GM, allowing strategies that had no business succeeding skate by on the skin of their teeth due to obscenely lucky numbers.

However, the Evil Warlock Die is still a cursed item... which means there's a price to pay for its devil's luck.

I've lost count of the number of natural 1s this die has rolled on saving throws, confirmation rolls, and skill checks. It has taken its toll from my characters in blood, but yet I always have it set off to the side for when things get dire. Because there is another part of the formula that always plays into the power of this die... it only seems to grant its luck to my worst plans when they would have the largest dramatic impact.

If I want to do something silly in a situation with no stakes, I get a 1 or a 2 for my trouble. If I want to spit blood in the wizard's eyes to blind him so my allies can reposition themselves on the battlefield, or if I want to leap down from sprinting across a roof beam and spear the monster in the throat, tearing my way down its gullet sword first, this is the die I reach for.

Particularly if it's established that it doesn't care for the GM. Because, at least in this case, the enemy of GM is my friend.

What's Next on Table Talk?

That's it for this installment of Table Talk!

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