Impossible Item Drop

Where was it even keeping that? Roaches don't have pockets!

"You're a squirrel that somehow has money, and sometimes swords and shields."

— Final Fantasy with lyrics

Plenty of enemies in games drop items when they are defeated.

Sometimes, this can present a bit of Fridge Logic as to why the enemies have those items. What exactly are those slugs doing with a sword and tunic? And how do monsters have ammo for your weapons (which they obviously never use), but not ammo for weapons you haven't found yet? Furthermore, monsters will tend to drop items associated with their specific abilities. For example, a monster with a petrifying gaze will commonly drop a de-petrification potion, implying that the monsters are actually made of the stuff, in convenient, easy-to-use form.

A potential way to explain this is that killing these monsters is obviously the popular thing to do and somehow they aren't all extinct. Maybe that's because some people aren't as good at it and got eaten along with their stuff. Perhaps they just didn't use that de-petrification potion in time. This doesn't explain how an enemy could have some items that should be readily visible, like in the page image. At other times, it makes no sense that they weren't using that deadly Randomly Drops Infinity -1 Sword before they died.

Sometimes Loot Command or Loot-Making Attack may avert (or, rarely, justify/enable) this trope.

Money Spider is a subtrope for the specific case of animals dropping money. Contrast Unusable Enemy Equipment, where your enemy is carrying weapons that you can't pick up when he's dead, and Organ Drops, where enemies only drop things that are part of their anatomies. Subtrope of Random Drop.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• In The Legend of Zelda series, most enemies (and random objects like pots or bushes) drop rupees, arrows, bombs, magic potion vials, and hearts at random. Even better, whenever you get a new item that consumes a resource, that resource suddenly starts appearing everywhere in spite of its not showing up before (ie: when you get the bow, arrows suddenly start showing up). As a justification, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap states that tiny little people called Minish hide useful items in random places in order to make life easier. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild mostly averts this, with item drops being much more plausible. Monsters will only drop the weapons they were fighting you with or wearing, their body parts, and for some monsters, food items they were implied to have swallowed. The mechanical Guardian enemies, likewise, will only drop pieces of their own machinery. The only enemies that drop Rupees are Yiga Clan assassins, who are people, not monsters, and Treasure Octoroks. On the other hand, silver-tier enemies (and the gold tier exclusive to the DLC Master Mode feature), which are the strongest type, play it straight, as they will also drop gemstones, and Silver Lynels may drop Star Fragments as well. While their color is described as silver, there's no lore saying they have a connection to precious minerals. Then there's the Eldin Ostritches that tend to drop two Raw Whole Birds on death.
• ANNO: Mutationem: Most enemies drop a variety of items that they wouldn't be in possession of, such as Attack Drones dropping a Stim Shot, or regular enemies having medicinal herbs and mushrooms for Item Crafting, and a Giant Enemy Crab carrying a module for a weapon upgrade.
• In Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time, almost all mooks drop carrots when Bugs beat them; cavemen, knights, crabs, and spiders. Even bosses like Sam and Rocky may drop carrots even if he just attack them.
• If it can be killed in Cave Story, it will either drop experience crystals, hearts, or (if you have the missile launcher) rockets.
• Castlevania: Starting with Symphony of the Night, even small weak enemies in many titles will drop weapons, armor, and foods that shouldn't even exist in the depicted time period. For instance, one Infinity +1 Sword in Symphony is dropped by the Shmoo monster, which is basically just a bloody, flying burlap sack with a face.
• DuckTales: Enemies will often drop diamonds or ice creams when defeated.
• Eastward: Salt is primarily dropped from fought enemies, some occasionally drop ammo and bombs.
• Considering that one of Monster Hunter's trademarks is using monster drops, some of which have torturously-low drop rates, to create new weapons and armor, this is one case where Tropes Are Not Bad and Rule of Fun trumps realism:
  • You can carve more than one Crooked Horn from the horn you just broke off Ceadeus.
  • Rhenoplos Bone is a drop you'd expect to be exclusively carried by Rhenoplos; however, it can be carved from other herbivores as well, particularly Slagtoths and Apceros.
  • Similar to Ceadeus's Croked Horns, it's possible to carve more than one Plesioth Head from the clearly-one-headed Plesioth you just killed.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories: The Meadow Mage, seemingly just another low-level mook before a high mage, inexplicably gives Yugi the best card drops out of anyone in the game.

Beat 'em Up

• Legend (1994) have bats which drops chicken drumsticks for replenishing health. The sprite for the drumsticks are roughly the same size as the bats themselves. And then there are skeleton enemies carying similar drumsticks (what, do skeletons need to eat?).
• The Legend of Silkroad have enemies dropping gems and items all the time, even if said enemy is a savage wolf or a rotting, naked zombie with bones exposed. There are also flying fishes who drop meatballs on a stick for health replenishment.

First Person Shooter

• In Borderlands, it's not an uncommon occurrence to blow up an unarmed midget, only to see him cough up a rocket launcher that's larger than he is.
  • In the case of most Pandora wildlife, they really do eat guns. Skags in particular are said to eat absolutely anything, only to puke up the stuff they can't digest later (which is why you can find guns and other gear in skag waste piles).
  • Occasionally, freshly spawned (that is, a queen Spiderant just birthed them) Spiderantlings will hork out a sniper rifle longer than they are upon death, being impossible in both a physical (how did it fit inside it?) and temporal (where did it even come from in the two minutes it's been alive?) sense.
  • Then there's the various Eridian monsters, many of whom have been sealed in Vaults since time immemorial, possibly from before humanity even existed. Won't stop them from dropping the latest goods from your friendly neighborhood weapons manufacturers like Maliwan and Tediore, though!
• Death in the Water is an FPS set underwater, like what the name implies. All your enemies consists of aquatic life, like sharks, moray eels, sea snakes, octopi, lionfishes... and killing them will yield gold coins.
• The old PC shooter, Raising Dead, have zombies who drop cups of coffee after being slain.

MMORPGs

• World of Warcraft:
  • Most non-humanoid opponents drop items instead of money. While there is some attempt to make the items dropped match the creatures in question, it is often forced, such as making the bodies of most types of carnivorous animals - including things such as harpies and giant spiders - edible delicacies and/or requisite components for items the players can make or trade for. These are often also Plot Coupons for one or more quests as well. Even so, it is not unusual for a deceased opponent to leave behind something that makes no sense at all for them to have had.
  • Raid boss class enemies, however, typically hoard both gold and 2 to 6 pieces of equipment (out of a total loot table of 8-12 specific items), regardless of what they are. Sometimes the equipment is mildly appropriate, such as a weapon the enemy was seen to use, a dragon's jawbone one may wear as a helmet, or something thematically linked to the enemy's lore. Most items, however, have no reason whatsoever to be upon this particular boss. One may wonder why exactly does Ragnaros, a massive fire elemental lord who has no legs,^note In the incarnation when he dropped pants, to be specific. His later reappearance, now with legs, doesn't drop any pants, but instead shows off a collection of helmets and weaponry. have a vast collection of pants for every class in the game... Or not...
  • Items themselves also come up in improbable locations. One is left wondering not only how the item fit into the animal, but how the animal managed to kill and eat somebody who was using what is sometimes very good equipment, and why, if it did, it lost to you with your inferior equipment. For another example, nagas, snake-bodied merpeople, are considered humanoids, and drop humanoid-based loot sets, which generally include pants.
  • Worse is that sometimes quest items drop for all the party members. This might make sense if it's about claws from four-legged best for four players (not that a single player can take all four claws at once), and even a raptor might be carrying multiple heads of its kind for whatever reason, but it becomes truly impossible when a named NPC drops its head five times.
• In the MMORPG Dream of Mirror Online no enemy will ever inexplicably drop gold, but will often drop items whose sole purpose is to be sold at a set price to NPCs. Some of those drops are even more inexplicable than the gold they replace however... Like pigs carrying carved wooden sculptures of bears, birds with perfume, and eventually male human wizards who drop ladies underwear.
• EverQuest II features loot that drops in the form of treasure chests. The type of chest that drops determines the value of the treasure. There are small wooden chests, normal treasure chests, Ornate chests, and the absolutely gigantic Exquisite Chests (which are larger than the majority of the smaller player races, who stand between 2 and 4 feet tall.) Monsters in the game can be as tiny as will-o-wisps or Brownies, which only stand about 2 inches off the ground. At that size, even a small chest will completely crush the corpse of the monster you just killed. How a 2 inch tall Brownie can carry around a small bank vault like a Exquisite Chest is anyone's guess.
• Everquest is no stranger to this trope either, with some interesting twists. For example, pickpocketing a foe allows a rogue to take an item off the creature's loot table, leading to such bizarre occurrences as pickpocketing a goblin and stealing his brain.
• Zigzagged in Fallout 76. Weapon-wielding enemies can be trusted to drop a weapon when killed, only nine times out of ten the weapon they drop is not even close to the one they were using seconds ago. Pipe gun-wielding raiders are as likely to drop an advanced energy gun as they are to drop another pipe gun, and won't drop the ammo type it fires, either. Enemies wielding heavy weapons nearly always drop the exact weapon they were wielding as well as a pile of relevant ammo, however.
• In Killing Floor and its sequel, you get money bonus with each specimen you kill, even though they are not seen carrying any "dosh" on their own.
• Kingdom of Loathing's GameInformPowerDailyPro dungeon has randomly-generated drops, so you can get such illogical things as turtles dropping flaming swords. Lampshaded by the roasted chicken drop — "not the sort of food you would expect to find being carried around by some random monster" — a parody of the inexplicable roasted chickens/turkeys in Duke Nukem II.
• All over the damn place in RuneScape. Some of the drops make sense, like many things drop bones, hides, the goblins drop goblin armor, etc. But then you have giant roaches that potentially drop ancient Dragonkin artifacts, dragons that have chocolate cakes, and the like. And that's before you take into account the Rare Drop Table, so you have situations where monsters like the abyssal demons can drop five hundred sharks (in banknote form).
• Ragnarok Online has this in spades. From cute little baby pigs that somehow drop heavy axes despite not even being capable of downing a first-class character to bird eggs dropping china platters.
• The Elder Scrolls Online falls victim to this now and again with rare item drops. Generally, beasts will drop hides, meat, and maybe some biological vendor trash, with gear and money limited to humanoids. This isn't a hard rule, though-what that mudcrab was doing with a two-handed iron waraxe, you'll never know.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean Online, anything you defeat has a chance of dropping a Loot Pouch or Chest, which can contain gold, swords, guns, playing cards, and even cannonballs. Anything you defeat. Even bats, which are smaller than the pouches they drop.

Real Time Strategy

• In The Battle for Middle-earth 2 and its Rise of The Witch King expansion, wild troll lairs, wolf lairs, and bizarrely, giant spider lairs are filled with lootable gold. this canonically makes sense for trolls, but less so for wolves and spiders.
• The enemies in Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 randomly drop various articles of Space Marine weaponry, armor, attribute-enhancing Purity Seals and other stuff. Why and, most importantly, how would they lug around armor plates from a Dreadnought?
  • It was then Hand Waved as being "released from the Blood Raven vaults" as reward instead. But the question of how some of these items reached the chapter vaults in the first place led to the Bloody Magpies meme.
  • In the earlier Warhammer: Dark Omen, your enemies are humanoids or, occasionally, huge monster spiders/scorpions, so if they drop a treasure chest or a potion now and then, it doesn't look too conspicuous. Moreover, if an enemy group carries an artifact (like a banner that invokes lighting bolts), they will actually have sense to use this artifact against you! And every enemy keeps their eyes open for some unattended goodies and will not hesitate to pocket them.
• Pikmin: After being killed, enemies commonly regurgitate large and often eclectic objects, particularly the bosses, which drop the games' Macguffins. You can kind of understand why they might be carrying fruit in Pikmin 3, but God knows why they seem to have swallowed parts of Olimar's ship in the first game.

Platformer

• In Daze Before Christmas, you collect assorted presents from enemies in order to save Christmas. Some of the presents can be collected from spiders and rats, where the sprite for the present is larger than the onscreen enemies!

Roguelike

• This trope is used by several different enemies in the Diablo series, but a notorious example are the Swarms in Diablo II: swarms of insects able to, and quite likely to, drop items like pieces of armor.
• Path of Exile also suffers from this. Humanoid enemies dropping weapons and armor is all well and good but then you have giant spiders or animated streamers of cloth that will drop sets of plate armor.
• Slain Nethack monsters drop the contents of their inventory, plus a chance of a random item generated on the spot. While usually unobtrusive, the death-drop mechanic is painfully obvious in fast-breeding enemies such as gremlins and black puddings. These enemies can rapidly reproduce themselves under certain circumstances, and each duplicate has an independent chance of leaving behind an extra item when it dies.

Role-Playing Games

• The Narrator in The Bard's Tale comments on the ridiculousness of this in the early game when a wolf drops a sword. He says he'll skip all such passages from now on, and the bard complains that its his primary source of income. Averting this has less of an effect than in most games, since everything you find as treasure is instantly converted into cash in any case.
• The monsters in Dungeon Siege drop money and items at random.
• Everquest: Champions of Norrath on the PlayStation 2 features Fire Beetles, which only stand about half a foot tall, but can end up dropping longbows, swords, giant war mauls, and various forms of armor along with gold.
• The Legend of Heroes - Trails: Monsters have materials for use as healing items, quartz, and incredibly rare drops depending on how high the luck stat is, unique weapons could be given especially.
• Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story: The materials used to upgrade magical girls are part of a Witch/familiar they drop from.
• The RPG Mass Effect has a somewhat specific variation of this effect- since the game is completely devoid of standard Shop Fodder, all recovered items must take the form of weapons, armor, tools/implants, and upgrade modules for the aforementioned weapons and armor. This can lead to a seemingly odd proliferation of military-grade equipment in the world. While it is perfectly reasonable to recover a Scram Rail or High Explosive Rounds from a krogan mercenary, it is odd to recover assault rifles from apparently naked and weaponless cyber-zombies, and advanced ultra-tech materials from lost, 60's era Soviet lunar probes.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic featured enemies who would drop random weapons and armor. While this made sense, much like Mass Effect, there were peculiar instances. It was entirely possible for enemies roughly the size of a large dog to drop six-foot long, double-bladed swords.
• The Elder Scrolls generally Averts this, but there are a few exceptions.
  • In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, it's not uncommon for mud crabs to be carrying cutlery around with them or for wolves to be carrying lockpicks, though it can be justified that those mud crabs eat small stuff and the wildlife and monsters are swallowing their previous prey including their belongings. Similarly, wolves and bears in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim can sometimes be found with jewelery or gemstones on their corpse, though these are again something that could have just been accidentally swallowed by them.
  • The Elder Scrolls: Blades is the only game in the series to play this entirely straight. Non-humanoid monsters can drop not only sacks of cash, but also alchemical ingredients that you wouldn't expect to butcher from them and bulky construction materials.
• Scrupulously Averted in Titan Quest, where everything dropped by monsters (except certain quest items and the enhancer items) is something that the monster that dropped it was using against you, which includes extremely powerful weapons and armor. Non-humanoid monsters which don't use equipment rarely, if ever, drop anything other than monster specific charm items such as fangs, horns, or samples of venom (not even gold).
• Final Fantasy XII. The Humbaba monster drops a Beastlord Horn. Humbabas don't have horns. In the Necrohol of Nabudis, the monster that drops the Maximillian armour is the wrong shape to wear it, and the monster that drops the Runeblade has no hands and kills its enemies by trampling them or casting spells.
• Ultima VII and its sequel come so close to averting this. Deer you kill drop legs of meat, perfectly reasonable. But. . . the (normal, four legged) deer tend to drop five legs of meat apiece for no apparent reason whatsoever.
• Cute Knight: Only humanoid monsters drop armor items, which makes sense. However, dresses are also classed as armor items, which raises some questions about what a goblin was doing with a nice party dress.
• In Dragon Quest IX, in addition to randomly dropping items, it's also possible to steal items (often the same) from a monster, and there's an item that gives a chance of obtaining an extra item at the end of each battle. Thus you can steal the skin of a snake, take the one it was carrying in a chest, and take a third skin off its corpse.
• Fallout 4 has this due to having random items drop from almost all enemies now. So it's now possible for a pigeon-sized Blood Bug to be carrying 25 pounds of scientific equipment or a mole rat to drop a quad-barreled rocket launcher that's larger than it is.
• Luxaren Allure lampshades it with the Egg of the King: "Alchemy ingredient. A strange item indeed, given that kings usually don't lay eggs."
• Divinity: Original Sin II has the Lucky Charm skill, which gives you an additional chance to find rare, valuable items in any container (container contents are generated randomly upon being opened for the first time). The game has a very generous definition of "container", which boils down to anything which is not a dead body that can contain items. This leads to you watching your lucky looter stumbling up to a small potion rack, rummaging around, and pulling out a legendary two-handed warhammer.
• In XenoGears, all enemies have items drops they wouldn't have, a slug possesses the rare Speed Shoes and other types drop a large amount of money.
• Might and Magic:
  • VII has bats and rats sometimes drop rings (and only rings). Since these are giant versions, an explanation that they bit off finger of some unfortunate explorer with ring on it is as good as any.
  • Same game has also trees sometimes drop gems for some reason.
  • VI and VII has Titans drop an equipment that is completely unsuitable for use by them, but is of perfect size for you. Never ever they drop something that would fit their size. Maybe they had it in their pockets as a trophy?

Run and Gun

• Commando 2 allows you to collect items by killing insects. There's also an area filled with headhunters who uses primitive weapons like arrows and spears, but somehow killing them yields ammunition.
• The Metal Slug games do this all the time, especially in 3 when they started adding all sorts of implausible elements. Killing flying fishes will drop ammunition crates, while one area in the fourth level requires you to collect enough AA-batteries from Man-Eating Plant enemies to proceed to the next area.
• Operation Wolf have eagles, pigs, chickens, and coconuts who drop items when shot at.
• Spinal Breakers have you playing as a soldier Time Travelling into the past to prevent rogue androids from rewriting history... and can collect bullets, grenades and missiles from dinosaurs, samurai, Ming Dynasty soldiers, cavemen and enemies in time periods set before the invention of gunpowder.

Sandbox Game

• Creepers in Minecraft normally drop gunpowder, which makes sense, but if they're killed by a stray arrow from a skeleton, they drop a music record. Guaranteed. Zombie Pigmen may drop Golden Helmets, despite the fact that they are never seen with the helmets on.
  • Before chickens or rotten flesh were introduced, zombies used to drop feathers. Zombies now have a rare chance of dropping carrots, potatoes, or iron ingots, which makes a bit more sense if the zombie is an infected villager.
  • Fishing, in particular, can cause this - by simply casting out a fishing line and having enough luck (or an enchantment), the player can obtain things like saddles, rare bows and enchanted books. Even in a small pond that they personally made. Yeah.
  • The Looting enchantment increases the amount of items mobs will drop when killed. This means that it is possible, for example, for one chicken to drop four entire Raw Chickens if killed by a Looting III sword.
• In Don't Starve Together, during the Winter's Feats event, killing animals results in them dropping holiday related loot, i.e. egg nog, cookies, fruitcake, etc.

Stealth Based Game

• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood does this. Sometimes it is reasonable, like guards holding crossbow bolts or bullets - Real Life soldiers do hold onto ammo - or Borgia messengers holding onto rare Shop Fodder that might well be what they are supposed to be transporting. However, when guards pack poison vials or the random pickpockets are also holding onto rare Shop Fodder, it gets less plausible.
  • It's even worse in Revelations, when bomb components are added. Why, exactly, would a halberd-wielding palace guard be carrying deadly poisonous datura powder?
• From Hitman (2016) onward, NPC characters, such as guards and special NPCs will drop whatever they are carrying, such as intel on a target, a gun, or in some cases, concealed weapons like a poison syringe or wrench.

Survival Horror

• Resident Evil:
  • In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the titular monster, despite using a rocket launcher and his bare hands exclusively and having no orders to collect items, will drop several handgun components when beaten on Hard Mode in non-mandatory fights. This is carried on to the 2020 remake, where in fact the only way to get the achievement for collecting all of the Equipment Upgrades is to down Nemesis at least twice.
  • In Resident Evil 4, Leon's survival allowance comes from the fact that the enemies he kills conveniently drops ammunition for the weapons he's carrying at the moment. This leads to the absurdity of villagers not equipped with firearms from a rural backwater place in the middle of the woods dropping bullets for submachine pistols and light grenades and monks who dwell in an isolated castle leaving explosive darts specifically made for a special kind of mine thrower. You can also find said items by breaking wooden barrels and decorative vessels. The colmillos, parasite infected wolves, usually drop boxes of shotgun ammo upon death, which is supply for the most effective weapon in getting rid of them. Even more absurd, killing crows results them in dropping grenades.
  • Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 have the exact same Item-Drop Mechanic as RE4 though toned down.

Tabletop RPG

• Parodied in GURPS: Creatures of the Night which includes a completely immobile plant monster that comes complete with a treasure trove full of things that are useful when trying to kill plant monsters. Why? Because it enjoys murdering adventurers and taking their stuff (which it then buries somehow).
• Dungeons & Dragons usually attempts to justify monster treasure in their Monster Manuals; the more savage varieties of monster tend to have the gear of previous attempts at killing it strewn in their lair, while more intelligent ones like how it looks. The really dumb or bizarre monsters don't have treasure listed for them at all. There are also restrictions based on creature powers: a salamander that's permanently Wreathed in Flames won't have any flammable items like magic scrolls while a rust monster won't have any metal treasures.

Non-game examples

Fan Works

• Downplayed in I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?. Loot drops for killing dungeon minions are always things that would logically be part of the minion's anatomy (things like coins or metals are instead looted from treasure chests or other loot spawners), but they are sometimes dropped pre-processed. For example, one possible drop from giant wasps is a glass vial full of wasp venom.

Literature

• He Who Fights With Monsters:
  • Jason is initially very bemused at how the Organ Drops from the monsters he kills come neatly wrapped in butcher's paper or tied with twine.
    Jason: [examining a bound bundle of snakeskin looted from an Umbral Mountain Snake] What, did I loot the string from the snake too?
  • Particularly noticeable is the epic-rank dagger he received as a quest reward for killing the snake. Not only does the dagger come with its own sheath, it comes with a belt to hang the sheath on!
  • This becomes a plot point in the second book, when Jason loots an intact Star Seed from a Builder cultist. When another cultist hears about this, he insists that it is absolutely not possible, and the cult has to move quickly to secure the item before the heroes can figure out a way to use it.
• Only Sense Online has this for a few enemies, like a fish that drops a cooking set, or a flying fish that drops canned food version of themselves. Several characters lampshade the oddity of this.
• Overlord (2012): The main character is a gamer trapped in the body of his game avatar and sent to another world that is not the same as the game he was playing. He expects this trope to be in play in the new world but it is confirmed that it isn't. Monsters do not drop crystals. You get rewards for killing monsters by bringing back their body parts as proof.

Mythology

• When Susan-oo killed the serpent Orochi; the legendary "Grass-cutting Sword" Kusanagi was found in its tail. (Some modern writers speculate that it was stuck in the Orochi from a previous hero's unsuccessful attempt at killing it; but this is never stated in the legend.)

Webcomics

• Spoofed by Penny Arcade in this comic.
• Dragon Mango: Parodied; Mango receives a suit of fashion plate mail for swatting a mosquito, then wonders how killing a bug made armor appear. (Answer: it was a drop bug.) She later has to assure her mother that she didn't hack anyone for it.
• Undertow came up with an interesting explanation on this page. The author's idea was the loot came out of the stomach of the monsters from unlucky adventurers they had eaten. Ew.
• Made fun of in this Virtual Shackles. "What the fuck Darksiders. Why does everything I smash have a soul in it?"
• This trope in action gave Ardam a Heroic BSoD in Adventurers!, when a small fly somehow dropped a piano.
  • Another similar instance has Drecker steal a huge sword off an enemy mook. Not the sword the mook was wielding, but another, much bigger and better. The mook complains that he would have used that sword (instead of his usual, which appears to be made of wood) if he'd known it was even there.
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has some of the characters go on a quest to "rescue" Alexsi from Biggs, but by the time they get there Alexsi was just leaving. Mab declares victory and calls dibs on the quest loot. Where the loot actually came from can be explained by Mab being a Cloud Cuckoolander with Reality Warping Powers.
• Referenced in The Order of the Stick #1029. When you're an adventurer, even cleaning bathroom mold will yield a few coins and a potion!
• In Irritability, a character accidentally runs over a small, squirrel-like creature with her bike, causing coins to come out. The next day she buys a bike with wide, spikey wheels "for improved smooshing".

Web Original

• Conversed in Third Rate Gamer's Battletoads "review":
  "And when you kill this bird, it drops a sword. Why would a bird be carrying around a sword? And where was it keeping it anyway? [...] Are they shoving these things up their asses?"
• Parodied in an episode of Epic NPC Man where one player character gets many golden coins by killing rats, while the questgiver can only afford 10 silver pieces as a reward. Not only those, but the rats corpses also drop large items such as a breastplate, a broad sword, or a king's shield. The questgiver in the end kills one last rat, absurdingly gets a royal chair, and then lampshades the trope by commenting that it "doesn't make any sense at all!"

Western Animation

• The captive sun in The Begun of Tigtone drops a pair of magic boots when Tigtone kills her. The boots even appear like a video game powerup until Tigtone picks them up.

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