Quote Originally Posted by MaN
Bracers of the Octopus
Causes the character to grow an extra pair of arms, just below his natural ones.
So this story is actually almost totally offtopic to this thread and probably this forum, but I'm going to tell it anyway.

If you've spent any amount of time playing MUDs, you've probably encountered Diku MUDs at least once. Diku is the most popular engine, most people who run MUDs just download the Diku software and write their own setting for it. It's an almost-direct rip of D&D, and if you've never played it then just think of Everquest because Everquest is the most direct ripoff of Diku you could imagine except without the fun.

One of the features of a Diku MUD is that you can't do anything at all to a corpse-- it's just an immovable object, a crate containing the deceased's inventory, that stays where it is until it rots or somebody sacrifices it to their God (usually a GM/sysadmin). However, every time you kill something, there is a certain chance that your killing stroke will strike off a limb-- a head, a leg, an arm, etc. These limbs can be picked up, and you can keep them as trophies, cook and eat them, etc. A usually-insignificant detail here is that whenever a monster kills you there is also a certain chance that a limb will be struck off, and it's possible to retrieve and morbidly collect your own body dismembered body parts upon resurrection.

So if we're talking about cool "magic items", one of my favorite things I saw in my MUDding days was this one MUD which, as a bit of an undocumented "easter egg", would actually allow you to equip your own severed body parts if you could somehow get hold of them. This had no extra effect, it's just that suddenly you were walking around with multiple arms or heads or whatnot and people somehow just wouldn't notice this. The only effect it would have was that you would suddenly gain the ability to equip more items than one would normally think makes sense-- like you could be wearing four bracelets or two helmets etc, and get the defense bonuses from all six of these. But of course you would also get combined armor-weight penalties so there were downsides...