The best thing you don’t want to know about.
So here’s how it happens…
You’re in some kind of trouble, but you might not know what kind. All you know is, a whole lot of people seem to be fighting each other so much for the chance to hurt you, they’re getting in each other’s way. And then one of the bastards puts something on you that can only be a damn tracking device, and you can’t get it off…
… You’re gonna kill him.
One version of the Snap Bracelet looks like half a set of plastic handcuffs. They go on fast, they look stupid… and they don’t come off unless you know what they are, and if you know what they are, you may wish you didn’t.
They’re powerful items of anti-magickal protection. Whoever wears one is untouchable by anything but the strongest magickal effects (and those are weakened), unless cast by the possessor of the other half of the cuffs. They’re safe, in a dangerous world.
The catch is – they’ll never know it. The cuffs work partly on sympathetic magick, one of the oldest magicks in the book, and they’re powered by the wearer’s rejection of everything that they stand for. If the wearer welcomes them – knows they’ll protect him, or even just thinks they look cool – they won’t work at all.
They’re useless to protect yourself. And if you want to protect someone else – someone you care about, or just someone you may find useful later on – the price for their safety is the fact that they’ll hate you for it. That stupid plastic cuff will be driving them nuts (it’s a variable Helplessness check, depending on situation, to have an artifact clamped to the body against the owner’s will).
Once the wearer learns the true nature of the Snap Bracelet, it can be removed easily, and the effects reverse somewhat; the former wearer will now know the precise location of the owner of the other cuff. You never know – they might be grateful.
No-one’s ever seen what happens if two rivals put opposing Snap Bracelets on the same person. Either they explode or they become a complete magickal dead zone, or something worse, but no-one’s yet tried to find out.
I like these. They will definitely make an appearance in my game. The only question is whether the players’ NPC patron will have some thugs stick one on his favourite PC, or whether the patron will recruit the PCs as the thugs, to apply this to some other lucky recipient.
The first approach aggravates and weirds-out a player (at the cost of giving him magical protection, but that can always be revoked later, by letting him know what they do – or by having some clever antagonist steal the other cuff from its possessor); the latter gives me an easy route to introduce another NPC to the game, under circumstances that suggest the new NPC could be at least a quasi-ally.