If you crack the Player’s Handbook open to about halfway through, you’ll find the Trinkets page—a full-page spread d100 table of a bunch of strange items. The accompanying text reads:

When you make your character, you can roll once on the Trinkets table to gain a trinket, a simple item lightly touched by mystery. The DM might also use this table. It can help stock a room in a dungeon or fill a creature’s pockets.

Player’s handbook, chapter 5

Do you use trinkets in your game?

We’ve talked about equipment and using it to flesh out your character before, as a player. Trinkets are unusual items, most seem to come with a bit of story already attached to them. The PHB notes that Dungeon Masters can also make use of this table.

As a player, I like to speculate about where my character’s trinket might have come from. With more of the mundane-seeming items, I might directly integrate my trinket with my backstory. Discussing the origins of your trinket with your DM is a great way to start filling in some details about your character.

Or, you can just leave it up to fate/your Dungeon Master!

If nothing else, I think it’s helpful to at least come up with a reason why your character is holding on to, say, this vial of fingernail clippings, or this strange perfume bottle.

As a Dungeon Master, you can use trinkets in a few different ways. I’d be cautious of randomly rolling to, as the PHB recommends, “stock a room in a dungeon or fill a creature’s pockets,” if only because the trinkets vary in, uh, strangeness. If you’re giving trinkets as treasure, it’s best to pick from the list so you know what you’re about to dole out.

If your players rolled trinkets, these items can be great jumping-off points for plot and character development. You can even develop a trinket into something of higher significance—making it into a magical item or just something integral to a storyline.

Even the suggestion that a trinket could be more important than it seems can pique your players’ interest. You don’t need to give specifics at first, and letting your players’ imaginations fill in the gaps can leave a big impression. This creates a thread you can pull on when the action starts to slow down—reminding your players that they don’t have everything figured out.

You can even create your own trinket table to fit with your campaign. For example, Curse of Strahd has its own “Gothic Trinkets” that are more in-line with the module’s aesthetic.

In SBotLL, one of the Evil Squad characters started with a trinket that turned out to be of importance to both the events on the surface and in the Underdark. Cipher/Wethryn, the changeling rogue disguised as a drow, is not originally from the Underdark; he found himself belowground after a heist went wrong. He rolled the 100 result, “a metal urn containing the ashes of a hero,” during character creation. So, Cipher’s player decided that this urn was what Cipher was contracted to steal in that last job on the surface.

Then the Dungeon Master filled in some details.

The ashes in the urn belong to an elf named Varis Amakiir, who participated in psionic research and had psionic power himself. He was the son of the famous elven Historian, and he was responsible for the conspiracy leading to the banishment of the grey elves, gnomes, and dwarves to the Underdark (peoples who then became the drow, duergar, and svirfneblin). Varis Amakiir’s… spirit? Has reached out to Cipher a few times to communicate with him, and that’s how Cipher is multiclassing into psionics.

On the surface side, Finnith (my bard on the Good Squad) has been unraveling this aforementioned conspiracy, only to notice that, hey, the urn where Varis Amakiir’s ashes are is missing

That’s just an example of how player and DM input can make a trinket into something more. Obviously, doing this with every trinket can dull the surprise factor. But done every so often, you can keep your player on their toes!

Do you use trinkets in your game, as a DM? As a player, do you always roll for a trinket during character creation? What do you think about using trinkets?