rumpus has from the very beginning been All About items, and specifically all about picking up a random piece of TRASH and having it either be an exceedingly dangerous and weird piece of MAGIC TRASH or a helpful and powerful piece of trash with a monkey's paw, or even Only Trash, After All. i had been playing max's TWELVE YEARS (which is still SO GOOD, i will never stop screaming about it) and the suspense when you are rolling on the item tables is wonderful! and i loved that sometimes! your party members would roll up a fae-touched item, or a cursed item, and they would just poof! be gone! before you even started playing. so of course i started writing items from the other side of the mirror, which is really just an excuse to toss some fairy nouns and adjectives together and think about the gameplay ramifications of finding them. and that's how i made the table in fairyland which i still love Very Much. it will always be funny to me that you can find a splendid screaming crystal ear! so when i started writing rumpus items, i started with the same exact list that is in fairyland and most of them didn't do anything by themselves. but that was fine because items were both MONEY and FOOD, new paragraph.

really every fairy starts out being able to do MAGIC and they can ALWAYS* do it and it ALWAYS** works. that is very important*** to me! if a fairy wants to put your head on backwards they will just do it! you can't stop them. so every fairy is already starting the game with a powerful ability that they can just DO, which means items are very comfortably Bonuses, and it's ok if your Bonus sometimes is a Bummer! but what good are bonuses if you don't want to eat them, and so you CAN, you can eat any item to roll an extra dice when you do magic. "i thought you said magic always works" yes, it does. it always works. but there are SOME results that are so potent, so horrible, so unspeakable they can only be reached if you are rolling two or maybe even three dice. so even the most useless items (SEEDS. TEETH. PETALS. FERNS.) are FOOD.

but then there are SOME items that are not useless, and in the early iterations of the game you would probably not eat these, because they allow you to gain life (MUG) or attack from afar (BOW) or have a sausage (SAUSAGE). but they were kind of rare. but that was ok, because items were also MONEY, you would get them for winning, and get them for losing, and get them for going on little adventures after the game (SHENANIGANS, but if you squint it maybe looks like EXPLORATION from another tabletop game that some people like to play). so there were three ways to use items.

and THEN at some point we realized, eating an item could also give you another dice when you are fighting, and that was delightful because you could save your trash and then eat it to squish a fairy in one go. and then a playtester thought, you should be able to gain life from eating an item, the raw stuff of fairyland, and i agree, so you can do that too. so there are now five different uses for a single item! it's GREAT. GREAT!

BUT!

have you played a fighting game? on a computer machine? wouldn't it be funny if everyone just always smashed forward toward each other and didn't block or jump or move, just hitting and hitting until someone falls over? but that is often what happens in a tabletop game; after you close distance there is not really a good tactical reason for a retreat (i am sure 1000 nerds are preparing counter examples over on reddit but they do not know about this blog, so i am safe). it was true of rumpus too. we didn't notice at first because we started testing with scenarios first but we wanted to see if it could be fun just as, uh, a rumpus. and it mostly was! but it would often produce a scrum in the middle.

from the beginning, fairies could make traps as one of their actions, and basically plonk an item or a spell onto the board to go off later. we were thinking "oh wouldn't it be great if you juggled another fairy onto a trap, that would be bananas" but no one ever did it because there weren't very many ways to move fairies around and if you didn't have one of those magics (like throw, a great magic for bouncing fairies off of things) you were out of luck. i think it was max that fixed traps by making you have a chance to set one off if you moved through a space surrounding a trap, because all of a sudden a trap took up a pretty big chunk of the board and you could effectively use one to cover a retreat. but it still wasn't better than just eating the item and fighting the fairy directly, so we decided every trap should do something by itself regardless of if it has an item or spell in it or not, and no one should know what a trap will do until it goes off****. so there are some Very Powerful traps mixed in with the basic ones and NOW you could kind of Test Your Luck by setting a trap (by itself) and maybe you'll get something that affects everyone around the trap too! so there's the potential for a trap to be the Best Option when you're in a pile of other fairies, but it's not a Sure Thing. DOUBLE FIXED.