Back in the game, our brave adventurers trigger a trap... and Naya is NOT amused.
Nerd By Northwest #354 - "Mirror Mischief"
(Click on the image to see the full-size version)
For a party led by a supposedly-good paladin, the rival adventuring group sure knows how to play dirty, huh? 😏
The Mirror of Opposition is a classic magic item from the Dungeons & Dragons game. For the non-grognards among you, this magic mirror creates a real-life duplicate of whoever's image is reflected on its surface (Naya and Sir Marko in our case)... and just like Pickles said, that duplicate is hell bent on destroying the original and will keep trying until it either succeeds or is destroyed itself.
It's a neat idea, and one of the few criticisms I have about the 5th edition of D&D is that this legacy magic item did NOT make it into the new edition. So I decided to make my own version and put my own little touches on it. If you remember the Star Trek original series mirror universe, the mirror universe Spock had a beard, Uhura sported a crop top, and so on... so I figured something like that is more fun than plain ole' exact mirror doubles. I guess one advantage of the magic item NOT being in D&D 5th edition is that I'm not restricted to the original rules, and get to make my own! 😁
For all my fellow gamers out there, here's my own interpretation of this wonderfully insidious magic item:
Aran's Mirror of Opposition
Wondrous Item, Very Rare
This item resembles a normal, full height standing mirror. Once activated by the command word, any creature reflected in its surface will result in a mirror double of said creature coming into existence, which will proceed to fight the original until either it or the original is killed. While most other such mirrors create an exact double, this particular Mirror of Opposition variant creates doubles that often differ in some way from the original. Whether this is due to influence from the personality of the mirror's creator or whether the mirror actually draws the doubles from an alternate plane of existence is up for scholarly debate (at least it would be, if most scholars survived their encounters with the mirror). Normally, the mirror double and all items it appeared with vanishes once either it or the original is killed. However, with this particular Mirror of Opposition variant, when the double kills the original, there is a 25% chance that the original and its bodily possessions vanish and the mirror double remains instead. In such cases, to find the body of the original might involve a search into other planes of existence, up to the discretion of the DM (and of course, whether the original's companions care enough to look...).
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That's a nasty trap to set. Is it also a rule that the 'evil' double has to be sexier? I never played enough such games to get that deep into it.
!BEER
Not a rule... just funnier this way! 😁
Also, the creator of the magic mirror trap quite possibly adjusted the mirror to slightly modify the doubles because 1) he's still harboring a grudge against our heroes, or 2) he's suppressing some fetishes that are coming out in the magic items he creates (might be hard to recognize, but that is a Cat 'O Nine Tails her double is holding in her left hand... 😏)