Item Seed: The Grasshopper’s Revenge.

grasshoppers-revenge-google-docs

The Grasshopper’s Revenge

(With apologies to Expiration Date and Dracula)

This artifact is a heavily modified US Army XM27 prototype silicone gas mask (colloquially known as a ‘Grasshopper’).  The actual time of the modifications is unknown, but since the mask was only prototyped in 1966 it can’t be more than fifty years old (best guess is that somebody did the work at some point in the late 1980s).  It is not strictly speaking an enchanted item — The Grasshopper’s Revenge will not register as one via any standard magical detection method — but it is definitely an occult one.

Essentially (pardon the pun), what the Grasshopper’s Revenge does is detect the presence of buried treasure through the controlled burning of ghosts.  Simply place your trapped ghost in the handy side-mounted receptacle, ignite the ghost through the special wire mesh, then let the eyepieces fill with the burning ectoplasm (it probably won’t give you ghost cancer or anything).  For the next five minutes any buried treasure within naked eye-shot will have a small blue flame hovering above it.  
Simple.  Straightforward. Almost foolproof (of course, nothing ever is completely foolproof). But make absolutely certain that you purge any remnants of the ghost afterwards.  As any number of people on the West Coast can tell you, ghost-addiction is a very bad thing to have…