Engaging Magic Items

How do you make magic items as interesting and memorable as they really ought to be?

A short list of suggestions off the top of the dome.

• Make them multi-purpose problem-solving tools, encouraging out-of-the-box thinking. Magic items conferring numeric bonuses occupy a tiny corner of the design space!
  
• Make them limited-use, for a resource management game. This way, you can put tons of magic items out there without getting hung up on balance and character power.
• Make them interact with each other in interesting ways, some obvious, some non-intuitive. What happens when you put the chemolotrophic coral fragment which continually dispenses clouds of steam into the impermeable, inviolable lockbox? Let's find out!
  
• Make some of them big and heavy and useful, so that the players have to work out how and whether to bring them on expeditions - and where to store them in between.
• Hand out visual and other clues to what they do, then play an identification mini-game (assuming some sorcerous source of apprehension isn't at hand). This can be as simple as asking the players what avenue their characters are going to explore first (e.g., "the coiled centipede figurine has a water droplet motif underneath, so we're going to try doing various things with it underwater or near bugs"); based on their answer assign an appropriate modifier to a dice roll to see how long it takes to identify.
• Make some of them quite minor and appear from the very first game session. They might be sold as treasure or never picked up to begin with, but they also might become a player character's favourite thing.
  

Above all else,

• Make them weird! Defy tropes! Roll on four completely different random tables and work out how something could possibly lie at the intersection of the four results! Blow minds! Change worlds! Borrow, steal, and remix! Life's too short for +1 armour!