I keep finding fascinating things that I'd never heard of! Ok, fascinating to me. The latest find is the Welsh lovespoon. A spoon carved from a single piece of wood to give to a loved one. They even developed a common system of symbols. V
ia here. Check it out for history and lots of pictures.Right now you might be thinking, but Telecanter, how is this of relevance to my campaign. Well, you don't need to keep them literally lovespoons, but look at some of the designs and think of some magical spoons.
For example:
Ranulph's Runcible
This utensil is carved from a single piece of maple. When used to spoon liquid from a container, the runcible will turn black if the liquid would be harmful to the imbiber. This black color will fade away in a day.
St. Lambert's Spoon
This crude wooden utensil will heal a person that sips clean water from it.
Clement's Cozener
This spoon is ornately carven with horseshoes and diamonds. The person that sips warm broth from this lucky utensil will charm all listeners, winning arguments, getting their way, and wooing the opposite sex.
Update:
Dammit, those are obvious as magical spoons, aren't they!? How about:
Collyng's Commingler
This ornately carved wooden spoon will allow the amiable admixture of any two liquids. Highly sought by alchemists, it allows two potions to be mixed in a way that allows both effects to function, if not additional affects.
Godith's Gauge
By floating this utensil on liquid, a person may find that which hopes to do them the most harm. The spoon's bowl will spin to point toward that which poses the greatest threat to the owner of the spoon.
I've seen some very big, hefty lovespoons in Wales carved from solid chunks of dark wood, perhaps 3 or 4 long. They always made me think of some female Dwarf somewhere defending hearth and home and Dwarf pups from marauding Goblins with a mighty two-handed swing of a rune-encrusted lovespoon. Quite possibly the weapon of choice of Dwarven domestic violence :)
ReplyDeleteThat's 3 or 4 feet long...
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting, I didn't think of extra-large spoons! I should have, vaguely remember a Andre Norton book for kids about silverware from a picnic set turning giant, Steel Magic or something.
ReplyDeleteThis is why a random table for item generation can be so useful, a result on "size" column could have spurred me to think big (or tiny) when my brain was thinking mundane spoon sizes.
Interesting, because when I posted this, I was thinking this was another type of item difficult to randomly generate, but now, not so much:
kitchen utensil, carved, for communication/commemoration
I remember reading a Hellboy Comic, the Troll Witch, in which a Scandinavian faerie tale about a girl descending into trollheim, armed with a wooden spoon, to rescue her sister from the trolls. She gives the spoon in question to Hellboy, telling him to place it across the entrance to trollheim because the sound of their breaking bones held in the spoon will frighten the trolls and keep them from approaching it so in the morning they would be killed by the sun.
ReplyDeleteEver since, I have referred to any large wooden spoon as a 'trollbeater'. My mom has one maybe 18 inches long and stoutly made, but if you go to a kitchen and restaurant supply store, you can get a proper cauldron stirrer, yes, 3 or 4 feet long. What was that other page saying about us all using the same memes or tropes? Yeah, I've been considering a spoon as a weapon for awhile too.