When I first started as a Dungeon Master about a decade ago, I had a rigid plan for my Dungeons & Dragons group. I wanted them to join the ancient order of magical Weavers, under the tutelage of an Obi-Wan Kenobi-style veteran named Cid. Each of them would acquire their own Relic of Anur, a powerful artifact weapon made of an alien metal with transformative properties. The Ranger, Iona, got an arm that can transform into all sorts of things. The Artificer, Khatska, got a spear that changed in size and allowed her to teleport.
Except our Druid, a dwarf named Belric, saw Relics as deeply unnatural. He also hates all kinds of metal. And our Monk, a Maztican named Toto, generally thinks that anything even remotely magical is a sin against his beloved feathered serpent god Qotal. [Insert long, exasperated DM sigh here.]
In retrospect, that was one of my biggest early lessons as a DM. I had these very linear plans for how I expected, and wanted, things to go. But I didn’t leave room for what my players wanted. In some ways, that’s one of the cardinal sins of D&D. The best campaigns are not scripted stories told along predetermined narrative paths. They’re sandboxes full of situations, allowing players to make meaningful decisions that resonate with who their characters actually are. DMs also need to respect the roleplay above all else.
Toto’s Macuahuitl ended up teaching me that same lesson twice. First, when the player rejected my plans for his character. And second, when the weapon itself started rejecting our plans for combat encounters.
The Relics of Anur are essentially magical superweapons forged from an alien metal called Transmutanium, which crashed onto the planet long ago in a meteor strike. Different relics can reshape themselves, absorb energy, or manipulate reality. They’re legendary artifacts tied deeply to the setting’s mythology — which is precisely why Toto wants absolutely nothing to do with them.
This abstract mysticism is fundamentally at odds with Toto’s worldview, which often makes him feel more like a Cleric at the table than a Monk — despite how often he punches things. Instead of wielding a reality-bending relic, Toto carries a Macuahuitl, a real-world weapon used by several Mesoamerican cultures, particularly the Aztecs. Truth be told, I had never heard of one before Toto’s player brought it to the table, though I immediately recognized it from natural history museums.
Imagine a wooden paddle roughly the size of a baseball bat, with jagged obsidian blades embedded along the outer edges. That’s a Macuahuitl, sometimes called an obsidian sword. For all you Game of Thrones fans out there, Dragonglass is simply obsidian — a volcanic glass formed when silica-rich lava cools rapidly. It’s also one of the sharpest materials on the planet. When broken, its edges can be as thin as 10 to 30 atoms across. But it’s also brittle, which is why Mesoamerican civilizations figured out they could create devastating club-like weapons by embedding obsidian shards into wood.
Toto’s player eventually came to me with an idea. He wanted to modify the weapon by replacing one of its obsidian blades with a shard of Transmutanium. I suspect there was at least a little bit of FOMO involved after watching Iona absorb elemental energy and blast it back out of her palm like Iron Man.
The mechanic itself was simple. Toto’s Macuahuitl has six obsidian blades around its edges, but one is now Transmutanium. Every time Toto successfully lands an attack, he rolls a d6. On a 1, the shard activates and triggers a Wild Magic Surge. Toto’s player then rolls a d100 on a Wild Magic table to determine the effect.
What I didn’t predict was how much this tiny mechanic would completely transform the energy of combat encounters. I’ll say yes to almost any request like this that my players make. Hilariously, Toto went months without triggering a single surge, and I basically forgot about it completely. Entire story arcs passed by with nothing happening at all. Then, somehow, it activated twice in a single encounter.
While the party approached a massive factory where Warforged were being mass-produced, they were ambushed on a cliffside by flying Warforged equipped with jetpacks. Toto managed to knock one from the sky and swung his Macuahuitl. It connected. He rolled the d6. One.
Toto instantly transformed into a ceramic potted plant. Literally.
For one full round, our devout warrior Monk devoted to the feathered serpent god Qotal became an ordinary clay pot with leaves sticking out of it. Plasma rifle fire rained down on them. The Barbarian screamed. The Druid summoned lightning strike after lightning strike. All the while, Toto’s leaves rustled in the wind. Toto, naturally, interpreted this as Qotal’s divine will. The pot got smashed, and Toto returned.
Then, only two rounds later, he rolled another surge. This time he triggered Fog Cloud, enveloping the entire cliffside in thick smoke. Neither players nor the enemies could see anything anymore. Our Barbarian Kellnor immediately used the confusion to his advantage, leaping blindly through the fog to grab one of the flying Warforged by the foot, so he could yank it down to the ground.
Ever since then, every successful Toto attack has introduced a second layer of suspense at the table. Everybody braces for the d6 to see what absolute nonsense might occur. I fully expected us to go another several months without another surge. Instead, very recently, Toto triggered the single most dangerous random effect we’ve seen yet.
Toto and Kellnor were trapped inside a massive facility during a security lockdown, fighting flying drones inspired by the enemies from Marathon. The saucer-like machines had fleshy underbellies filled with writhing tentacles that grappled enemies and drained their life force.
In the middle of a small room, Toto rolled another surge. After reading the result on the Wild Magic table, Toto’s player immediately burst out laughing. The effect created a carbon copy of Toto that sprinted directly toward the nearest enemy before exploding with force comparable to a Fireball spell.
Looking at the battlefield, I quickly realized this would almost certainly kill Toto, Kellnor, and their new robot companion Friendi. So I made an instant ruling: the remaining saucer drone swallowed the duplicate into its fleshy undercarriage just before detonation. The explosion tore through the creature from the inside out, while Toto and Kellnor had to scramble out of the blast radius with Dexterity saving throws.
That moment perfectly captured what I now love most about the Macuahuitl of Chaos. Most magical weapons in D&D are designed to make players feel stronger. Toto’s weapon does something much rarer: it makes the entire table feel uncertain. And after years of carefully balancing encounters and planning elaborate story arcs, I’ve learned that kind of uncertainty and chaos is what creates some of the most entertaining stories at the tabletop.
