Have you used Artifacts in your games?

[kigmatzomat]

I'd been thinking I'd been free of artifacts in my current campaign and realized I was fibbing. The Dragon Orbs are present and the party has had access to two of them. One is still being used as the powersource for a massive anti-scrying field that can even deflect a god's attention. The other was broken when they got it, they hid it for safe keeping, and then gave it to a protogod (the quote was "Hmmm, if he's destined to be a god he'll outgrow it. If he isn't, it will destroy him in a year. Odds are he can't do more damage in a year than we'd do duking it out over the orb."). They're now off to get another Orb away from several undead who are using it to block out the "harmful" aspects of the sun in their domain.

(BTW: this was not the crux of the campaign; some of this stuff is them deciding to go be heroes when I talk about bad things that are afflicting other nations)

Anybody remember the Bottle from "Bottled Demon" in Shadowrun? That was our 2nd or 3rd SR game ever, back in the early days of SR 1st ed. I was the mage and was smart enough to assense the item before touching it. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I figured out it was some sort of life-force stealing power booster. I turned to the cybered out samurai and said "that thing is bad mojo. Do not let any magic user touch it; not Jefe, not even me. If we do touch it, shoot us." Heh, Jefe was greedy, but not so greedy to risk getting shot by the vindicator-toting samurai. We tossed it in a full concrete mixer and then towed the mixer home. I believe we managed to get a dragon to disrupt the Bottle. IIRC, the dragon let us keep it and the samurai kept it on his mantle.

 

[Chimera]

Ah yes, the Illearth Stone. I used something like it in another campaign.

Party was investigating some problems in a distant forest and had encountered a higher level NPC party doing the same thing. Sometime later, they came to the source of the problem.

Evil guys around this big glowing green stone. NPC party frozen in place, just like in the book. Stone has been placed at the roots of a big massive tree that is the "heart" of that forest, corrupting the entire thing.

Party attacks.

Now the fun part was that, a few sessions earlier, something had happened to one of the player's swords to give it an anti-magic aura. I can't remember the precise details, but it was one of those rare "defect" type of things that really came in handy.

Player plunges his sword into the stone, like Arthur. Glow creeps up sword. Glow retreats from sword. Glow creeps up, down, repeat a few times. GM (me) counting under my breath. PC standing there transfixed, because the player is completely confused as to what to do now. I'm nice, so one of the NPCs yells "RUN!!!"

Boom.

Stone gone, sword gone, tree gone. Bad guy, almost all of NPCs and two of the PCs killed in the explosion.

Problem solved in a spectacularly messy fashion.

Later they found a basketball sized seed to this particular tree, planted it elsewhere in the same forest and hit it with Plant Growth.

They were also given a mithril arrow that was a bit more than invisible to Wizards. To them, it wasn't only invisible....it simply didn't exist. Quite a bit of fun for them to attempt to figure out what it did.