Nightmare Treasure: Wand of Wild Candy

Hey adventurers! I see my position as resident Comedy Archmage as not just an opportunity for butt jokes, but as a chance to create extremely strange catalysts that you can drop into your own games of D&D and hopefully create a little bit of comedy for you and your friends.

Some of you might read that and think, “please keep your strange catalysts off of my table!” Maybe your table is a nice expensive wood one, so I understand. But to the rest of you, welcome to some Halloween-inspired stupidity! I'm all for occasional stupidity (and silliness).

I’m a big fan of Wild Magic. On my podcast Nerd Poker, I made my own Wild Magic effects table for player Blaine Capatch’s druid character, so that every time he communes with nature there is a chance something utterly chaotic will happen. It's not your typical surge, it's extra... nerdy. Also Blaine is a comedy madman, and enjoys courting chaos.

Equally wild and messed up is the Wand of Wild Candy. Made from a shiny black twig that evokes black licorice (the divisive "cilantro of the candy world"), it contains 6 charges and you must be attuned to use it. 

Each wave of the wand causes a different candy to appear, and the type of candy summoned is dependent on a d20 roll. All candy appears cute and innocuous, but ingesting it will cause strange and potentially disturbing effects. See the below table to discover which! All effects last 2 hours, summon 2 of the specified candy per cast, and all candy fits in the palm of a humanoid adult’s hand unless otherwise stated. In my opinion immunities to charm spells should go out the window- they ate this magic and it lives inside them like an apple from a stranger. But hey, maybe I'm a jerk.

I think this works best if players have no idea what the candy is going to do. Some effects are best left as unknowns to the players, as all hell can break loose. This can be especially useful to employ mid-combat or right before engaging an enemy, so that a player can be told to just point their various body parts at enemies and cross their potentially cursed fingers as the Wild Magic happens. Perhaps players should tread no further, and merely pass this along to your DM if it sounds interesting. Or you know, be the only one in the party who reads it and then pass it along.

The candy itself can be stashed in a pocket for use later, though impulsive consumption is encouraged, particularly because it’s the holidays and those calories don’t actually count. 

When all charges have been used up, the Wild Candy Wand explodes in a harmless cloud of bright orange sugar dust that tastes eerily like the contents of our world’s Pixie Stix. Eating this dust has no ill effects! However, you have to kinda run around in the cloud with your tongue out, or scrape some off the ground as it settles, so you’ll look kinda weird. Live with that truth. Happy Halloween.

1d20

The Candy

The Effect

1

Crunchy Sugar Worms

After eating these (they have the consistency of Pez or Smarties, but you know, they're worm-shaped of course) you can hold your breath for as long as the spell lasts, two hours. However, if you are standing on wood, stone, or soil you will become intangible as far as the ground is concerned and drop 10 feet down unless you hit steel, ore, or a synthetic bottom. The intangibility effect also lasts two hours. If you become tangible while hidden in the dirt and stone you will be forcibly ejected out of the ground another 10 feet into the air. Players can attempt to dig you out, as you are only phasing through the ground and can be touched by other organic beings, but if they dig up your arm and touch it to start pulling you up, and then let go, you will plummet ten feet beneath the new dirt line they've dug up. In other words. Being carried around on shoulder, in a cot, or some other such burden will allow you to move with your party.

2

Moist Green Gumdrops

After chewing on these earthy, wet lard dollops your hair becomes wet and dark green, and your finger and toenails dissolve and leak acid. You are also immune to acid damage, and can cast Acid Splash as a cantrip for two hours from any of your available four limbs. Unfortunately the acid drips slowly from all twenty sources, dissolving all non-magical rings, gloves, and footwear. Also your hair is dark green until it grows out again.

3

Dark Chocolate Raisin Wads

A magically tumultuous stomach will result from digesting these wads, allowing the ingester to cast Eldritch Blast as a cantrip. However, the effect comes not from their hands, but from their backside, and they must roll a DC 10 Constitution Saving Throw or else be the one pushed by the force effect, effectively propelled by the explosive butt jet like a rocket. Also you can choose not to resist and be propelled if you're so inclined.

4

Candied Roaches

A population of several hundred cockroaches expands into a temporary two-hour pocket dimension that is created in the ingester’s stomach. The colony o' roaches can then be expelled (puked) onto an enemy as an action, and function as a Swarm of Rot Grubs. The ingester is immune to the roaches, though at the end of the two hours the pocket dimension collapses and 300 roaches (6 swarms) are ejected from their mouth at once. You ate a candied roach, you kind of saw this one coming.

5

Sugar Blossoms

Eating this magical violet blossom will cause a bloom of candy blossoms to instantly sprout, vine-like, from the ingester's back flesh between their shoulders. The blossoms stick out of their collar and fall out the back of their shirt. Those flowers are equally sweet and tasty, cause the same effect, and have no other effects. Unless ingested they disappear in a puff of glitter after two hours, but the chain of re-blossoming can continue indefinitely if desired. And let's be honest, free candy for life if you invest the time in it. Weird flower candy that grows out of your own back, sure, but haters gonna hate.

6

Marzipan Panda Faces

These tasty, almondy faces cause sharp bamboo quills and claws to violently sprout from one's hands and forearms, which can be alarming to others but does not otherwise hurt. This temporarily adds 2d6+4 slashing damage to all unarmed strikes, but really shreds your shirt and gloves. Hope you wanted a fashion makeover. Also you will hunger for bamboo and will regularly have to make a DC 10 Charisma saving throw to resist having a little gnaw at one of the arm shoots.

7

Chocolate Twirly Twirls

Light chocolate curled into bent little sticks with layers of air between to add texture. They taste really good. Isn’t chocolate great? You’re welcome.

8

Ginger Knots

Fried pink knots of ginger, which are spicy to the taste and just so happen to cause you to exhale small jets of flame from your nostrils for two hours. You can’t use the flame for any type of attack, but you have advantage on Charisma (Intimidation) checks for an hour! Oh, and your skin is fine, but you now have a mustache made of hard, porous black charcoal that has to be chipped off your face with some kind of steel and does not go away on its own.

9

Wax Lips

Big, weird lips made of wax. You can put them in your mouth and hold the tab between your teeth and look like you have exaggerated luscious lips. They have these on Earth for some horrible reason. Note: If a player tries to ingest them, the character will turn into a wax sculpture of themselves that renders them effectively paralyzed and easy-to-melt for 2 hours. Only waiting it out or casting greater restoration can reverse the state. Your AC drops to 2, and your hit points drop to 2, too, so hopefully you’re not running an Avernus campaign. Wink wink.

10

Little Gummy Beer Bottles

Why do gummy bottles exist as a thing in the real world? If you've never seen them give it a Google, it's dumb. Anyway, here’s a couple of them! You, the ingester, will probably wonder why these exist in a meta way just like I, the writer, did. But also your character is now poisoned and blinded for 2 hours. On the bright side, you roll with advantage on all Charisma checks, because you ate the weirdest candy and learned a valuable lesson. It's charming to hear about how wise you are now. That’s what you get for eating gummy beer bottles. 

11

Giant Cube of Delicious Pink Cotton Candy

Oh sweet, a huge and delicious cube of cotton candy! So mouth-wateringly good! Psst, note to the Dungeon Master only here: this is a gelatinous cube that looks and smells exactly like fluffy pink cotton candy. It’s very proud of its state and will not move aggressively in the hopes someone will come taste it. Which will get you absorbed.

12

Mooncake

You have a single, sweet-and-savory mooncake. And if you eat it you will hover and be invisible for two hours. The downside is you smell like old cheese and have disadvantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks for an hour and you have a -10 penalty on them, too. So you’re not really hidden at all, or harder to hit. Your invisibility is actually just kind of unsettling. You smell just plain horrible. Lordy. At least you can hover, that’s nice. (And any creature you touch must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw, or suffer the same fate.) 

13

Chocolate Rum Buttons

Your head swims with madness you can barely contain, allowing you 3 casts of dissonant whispers at any point over the next two hours, without using spell slots. Sadly you automatically fail stealth checks as you can’t stop mumbling your groceries list to yourself. The rum in the middle tastes good, but mostly you’re thinking about vegetables and demons at this point. 

14

Blue Sugar Cookies

Two dense, delicious sugar cookies that are blue for some ominous reason! What could possibly go wrong? Well, this: you are now a small, blue crab that can’t stop doing a cute softshoe dance from side to side. Standard polymorph rules apply, but the dancing functions as Otto’s Irresistible Dance and will last two hours and cannot be resisted for the first minute.

15

Double Rainbow Lollipop

Two rainbow-striped lollipops appear on a single Y-shaped stick. Licking the lolly gives the ingester darkvision for 100 feet for 2 hours, and gives them glowing, cool-looking rainbow hair that cascades with a magic pulse. Biting the lollipop, on the other hand, causes all 8 rays of Prismatic Spray to go off inside their mouth at once, and they cannot be saved against. The ingester is probably going to die if they bite it. Smashing the lollipop without biting it causes all rays to be cast in different directions to be decided by the Dungeon Master, and can be saved against. On the bright side, if you die biting this lolly, it will be beautiful. The lollipop’s candy dissolves into harmless rainbow-colored water 24 hours after it is licked for the first time.

16

Rock Candy Dragon

This candy is pink and sugary, and eating it does not make the ingester feel any different. Note to the Dungeon Masters out there: The ingester can only say the word “dragon” for the next 24 hours, and cannot initially hear that it is happening as they speak. The Dungeon Master is encouraged to pass a note to the other players stating “No matter what ___ says as a player, their character seems to be repeating the word dragon over and over.” Consider having this prewritten on index cards in advance if you're planning to use the wand in your adventure. This way your players can break it to the ingester, rather than you, and hopefully making it more magically shocking or increase the silly. This can be ended early with dispel magic.

17

Caramel Geese

Two chewy caramel geese appear! They’re so chewy you want to cause utter anarchy! For two hours you, the ingester, get really excited about putting other things in your mouth, running away with these things, and hoarding them in a dark secretive place. Each round of combat, or once a minute or so outside of combat, you must make a DC 18 Charisma saving throw, or else the Dungeon Master may pick anything grabbable that will fit in your mouth, as well as a nearby quiet dark place to drop it, and the you will make an uncontrollable rush to do so. If you roll a natural 1 on your saving throw, your Dungeon Master may insist you make a honking noise. Shiny objects like weapons and amulets, as well as sun hats, are particularly attractive.

18

Red Velvet Gum

Sticks of red chewing gum, which is really just white-cake-flavored gum that looks red. Confusing if you think about it too much, but hey, to each their own. Chewing it gives immunity to fire for 2 hours, but also causes fake blood to pour uncontrollably from the ingester’s mouth. Spitting out the gum does not end the fake, corn syrup blood gush, but at least the nice fire immunity doesn’t require you to keep chewing either.

19

Ruby Ring Pops

You get two novelty toy rings with large candy rubies as their gemstones. Wearing the ring causes ten duplicate, spectral hands to float, evenly-spaced, in a ring around the wearer’s hand. These hands are non-corporeal and cannot affect objects or creatures, but give the wearer advantage on all melee attacks as ten spectral weapons also appear in these hands, disorienting the creature on the defense. The candy gem tastes like watermelon. The ring vanishes 4 hours after its first use, but the candy, which is non-magical, does not.

20

Black, Green, and Violet Candy Corn

A small pile of ten candy corns appear, striped with the unusual aforementioned colors. Each time one is eaten, roll 1d10. These function exactly like the berries summoned by goodberry, unless the ingester rolls a 10, in which case they sprout giant black wings with glittering green and violet ash dripping off of them. The wings function exactly like Wings of Flying, and last 2 hours before vanishing in a puff of violet and green ash.

 

I'm sure a standard adventure doesn't require so many wrenches for your gears, but it's a fun time of year to throw a special holiday session together, and I thought you might like to give it a shot (you can always reduce the wand's charges if you're feeling shy). Hope you’re able to find an excuse to spring this wand on your players, and happy adventuring!


Dan Telfer is the Dungeons Humorist aka Comedy Archmage for D&D Beyond (a fun way they are letting him say "writer"), dungeon master for the Nerd Poker podcast, a stand-up comedian, a TV writer who also helped win some Emmys over at Comedy Central, and a former editor of MAD Magazine and The Onion. He can be found riding his bike around Los Angeles from gig to gig to gaming store, though the best way to find out what he's up to is to follow him on Twitter via @dantelfer.

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