You are a fool if you think players won't find a way to make these useful! I think they are going to be great additions.
I mean, based on the narrative, it's not that they "didn't have time" for real magic items, so much as putting them in was a last minute idea. I would have been fine with 27 pages of name tables (hmm, sweet, sweet name tables in a printed book), but this does seem like something folks will have fun with.Well, given the context of the book itself, at least some of then are more useful to players than seventeen pages of character names.