Destroying artifacts and relics

[GRWelsh]

How many of you have had player characters destroy -- or try to destroy -- artifacts and relics in your campaigns? One of the most fascinating sections of the DMG describes POSSIBLE DESTRUCTION MEANS FOR ARTIFACTS/RELICS (p.164) since it gives out many inspiring ideas without fully describing them. The first is the most intuitive but least creative -- melting it down in the fiery furnace or mountain where it was forged (a la LORD OF THE RINGS), but many others are quite interesting... What do you guys make of these?

- Fiery furnace, pit, mountain, forge, crucible or kiln in which it was created
- Well of Time
- Abyss (is this the 666 layers of the Abyss, or closer to the definition of a "bottomless pit"?)
- Earth Wound
- Adonais' Deep
- Spring of Eternity (Fountain of Youth?)
- Marion's Trench (the Mariana Trench?)
- Living Stone
- Mountain of Thunder (inspired by a Zane Grey book?)
- 100 red dragon skulls (like "The Dragon's Graveyard" from the D&D cartoon?)
- Tree of the Universe (Yggdrasil, or something else?)
- Cerebus (sp -- Should be Cerberus, three headed monster dog that guards the gates of the Underworld, from Greek Myth)
- Lernaean Hydra (Greek myth)
- Titan (Greek myth)
- ancient dragon turtle
- Talos, a triple iron golem (from Greek myth especially "Jason and the Argonauts" as bronze instead of iron)
- Gates of Hell (idea seems to be taken from Greek myth yet popularized in Dante's INFERNO)
- Cornerstone of the World
- Artur's Dolmen (Arthur's Dolmen was the basis of the illustration for the cromlech in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary)
- Juggernaut of the Endless Labyrinth
- Heel of a god
- Clashing Rocks (The Symplegades, also known as the Cyanean Rocks of Greek myth, especially from "Jason and the Argonauts")
- Foot of a humble ant
- Ray of Eternal Shrinking
- the Sun
- Truth
- Encephalic fluids of the brain of Bahamut (AKA Behemoth, vast fish that supports the world in Arabic cosmography)
- Black and foul blood from the heart of Tiamat (Mesopotamian primordial sea goddess)
- Odious flames of Geryon's destroyed soul (Giant from Greek myth later adapted by Dante into THE INFERNO)
- Putrid ichor of Juiblex's deliquescing flesh
- Well of Life
- River Styx (one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek myth, it was the one Achilles was dipped in as a baby to make him invulnerable)
- River of Flame (Phlegethon? Plato described it as a river of fire)
- River Lethe (one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek myth, the river of forgetfulness)

[GRWelsh]

I remember a kid I went to high school with who supposedly was a really good DM and wrote an adventure titled "The Foot of a Humble Ant." Presumably, it was about destroying an artifact or relic by deciphering the meaning for this phrase. I'll have to ask my players about that, some of whom played with him back in the day. I love it when DMs take some little crumb like this and turn into a meaningful adventure! It seems too easy to simply put an ordinary ant on an artifact as the means to destroy it, so the phrase must mean something else, but what? How can an ant be humble, or by contrast, proud? I feel like I'm missing a Biblical or classical reference, here...

[Scott]

I had a party acquire the Orb of Golden Death. They talked about wanting to destroy it, but the campaign puttered out.
My current group talked about trying to destroy Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn after Ember was consumed by the paranoia effect, but haven't brought it up again since. It's basically been wrapped up and stored out of sight since.

[grodog]

I've had players wield nigh-artifact items (although I don't think any from the DMG, MM, etc.), and they were definitely trying to destroy some artifacts as well (in a Theopart-ripoff campaign in high school). I think a suit of Hellsguard and a Hells-based sword were nuked by the players, perhaps, but I'll have to go back to see in my DM Log what, if anything, actually was destroyed for sure.

Allan.

[geneweigel]

Jul 19, 2021 8:21:52 GMT -5 GRWelsh said:

I remember a kid I went to high school with who supposedly was a really good DM and wrote an adventure titled "The Foot of a Humble Ant." Presumably, it was about destroying an artifact or relic by deciphering the meaning for this phrase. I'll have to ask my players about that, some of whom played with him back in the day. I love it when DMs take some little crumb like this and turn into a meaningful adventure! It seems too easy to simply put an ordinary ant on an artifact as the means to destroy it, so the phrase must mean something else, but what? How can an ant be humble, or by contrast, proud? I feel like I'm missing a Biblical or classical reference, here...

The Bible constantly mentions ants being weak but they provide food: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!". I'm pretty confident that there might be a translation of this as "humble ant" somewhere but it might be a reference Aesop's fable The Ants and the Grasshopper which was a heavy medievalism. One version has the ants demanding the grasshopper dance because it sang all summer long.