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Lordly Garrote
🕑 Added 2025-10-24 15:12:04 +0000 UTCThe items from this week can be found in real life! Check out friend-of-the-Saddlebag Yaniir's Kickstarter to get your own Monolith Crystal items to wear! Live now!
Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)
This silver necklace is actually an ornate garrote. Once on each of your turns when you attempt to grapple a humanoid within 5 feet of you, you can use the garrote with two hands as part of the grapple. A creature grappled in this way can't speak, and if the creature is still grappled at the end of its next turn, it begins to suffocate, gaining one level of exhaustion at the end of each of its subsequent turns while it remains grappled by you. The creature loses all levels of exhaustion gained in this way once it's freed and is no longer suffocating. The garrote isn't large enough to suffocate a Large or larger creature (but can still prevent it from speaking).
When found, the garrote has 1d4 − 1 charges. It gains 1 charge whenever you slay a humanoid with it or while wearing it, up to a maximum of 4 charges. For every 10 days that pass where you don't slay a humanoid, the garrote loses 1 charge. If you're using the garrote to grapple a creature, that creature suffers a penalty to rolls made to escape the grapple equal to its number of charges.
While wearing the garrote as a necklace, you don't need to breathe, and you gain a bonus to Charisma checks equal to the number of charges it has. Furthermore, you can use a bonus action to expend 1 of its charges to cast the charm person spell from it (save DC 17), with the following changes:
The target doesn't know it was charmed by you when the spell ends.
Casting the spell requires no components. It's impossible to detect that the spell was cast by you, unless a creature has magical means of doing so.
A creature that succeeds on the saving throw against it (or that can't become charmed) takes 4d6 psychic damage, as hellish visions assault its mind. A creature that's reduced to 0 hit points in this way is knocked unconscious and stable.
The poise, the charm, the style of a lord, all worn as facade to step through the walls and wards of caste to get just close enough.
For wealth and power are no substitute for simple breath.
