Basic Trope: A powerful evil artifact that often has negative effects on the user and its surroundings.
- Straight: The Eye of Tollew, a large, blood-red ruby on a black chain, gives its user the power to divine the truth at the cost of their health.
- Exaggerated: Gormaggh's Spear is so rotten it causes its user to turn into a living corpse just by touching it.
- Downplayed: The Iron Crown of Pride makes its wearer into an insufferable git, but only while being worn, and the only major side effect is a stiff neck from carrying its weight.
- Justified: In forging the Whelp's Dagger, dark wizards committed unspeakable atrocities on the innocent to imbue the materials with the very essence of evil itself, a force powerful enough to convert whoever uses it to the cause.
- Inverted: The Holy Lance of Hanna gives its user divine protection from all evil.
- Bill's Rake, the rake of a guy named Bill, was bought at the hardware store yesterday and has no enchantments, evil or otherwise.
- Subverted:
- At first glance, the Box of Infinite Pain seems like a bad thing, but the box itself isn't evil—what's inside it is.
- The Umbral Shawl looks like a frayed cloak with creepy eye patterns on it. Anyone who drapes themselves in it is immediately knocked unconscious... and then awakens later to find their wounds and/or sickness cured.
- The Abyssal Blade, an incredibly powerful magic sword, has possessed everyone who has ever tried to wield it. This is actually a defense mechanism to prevent wicked people from using its powers for evil. When a farmer desperate to save their village finds the blade, it willingly cooperates.
- Double Subverted: The Worldbreaker performs a ritual to break the will of the Abyssal Blade, turning it into a weapon that fills its wielder and anyone near them with hatred for all life.
- Parodied: Anyone who puts on the Immortalitrousers, a legendary pair of pants sewn together by an ancient race of tailors using golden cotton stolen from the gods, is granted eternal life at the expense of everyone and everything else in the universe.
- Zig Zagged: Sunlings grow in all kinds of soil, which means they emit sweet light and warmth in The Endless Fields and darkness and cold in Lurgh's Bog.
- Averted: The Chalice of King Calcus, while very old, is not evil in the slightest.
- Enforced: Dark magic is more powerful than white magic, which results in the creation and persistence of more evil artifacts than good ones.
- Lampshaded: The Prism of Pyrus, with its tarnished metal sides and dark, foggy glass, doesn't make a good impression on anyone.
- Invoked: Lord Myser never misses an opportunity to build up the reputation of his Doom Aegis, which is just a really heavy shield painted black.
- Exploited: Orsk the Guileful uses a side-effect of the Deathless Veil to reach the underworld and find his beloved.
- Defied: Despite being forged for the foulest purposes in a costly and lengthy ritual, the Flying Hook of Ob is totally useless both as a weapon and as a repository of evil, since all it wants to do is catch fish.
- Discussed: Scholars of magic often consult the Tome of Asking Many Questions as to why artifacts tend to be evil.
- Conversed: The Backstory of the Unstoppable Chariot of Terror contains a clue to how it can be defeated.
- Implied: The Hairpin of Fate tends to show up at the site of some pretty nasty tragedies.
- Deconstructed: Evil and stability don't often mix, which is why the Atomic Golem wiped itself out along with its creators.
- So many evil artifacts were once created that most old objects are destroyed sight-unseen, resulting in the loss of harmless treasures from several extinct civilizations.
- Reconstructed: A few evil artifacts manage to survive because their negative qualities can be framed as positives, allowing them to influence many users for the worse over the centuries.
"Unless we act now, one day the main page will destroy us all."
