D&D: Take the pendant somewhere to be identified.
From Create Your Own Story
You touch the red stone, gazing upon the pendant thoughtfully. There's power of some kind in this, you can feel it. You'd be a fool not to try to find out what kind, and you suspect by the means of its arrival in your possession that it likely isn't good. You find yourself staring at the pendant for a long moment, only snapping away after you realize that the stone has heated up intensely all of the sudden. You yank your finger away and shake your hand, sucking on the tip of the afflicted finger. It doesn't look like it burned you, but it hurt quite a lot.
With your attention back on the task at hand, you make your way to a curiosities store you happened across shortly after you arrived in Waterdeep. The store is unremarkable from the outside, but inside it is filled from wall to wall with exotic oddities from all corners of the world. A few are supposedly from other planes as well but nobody really believes that.
But the real value of the store is its owner, an Moon Elf of old age named Edrol who is something of an underground celebrity. His knowledge of religions and magics is nearly encyclopedic. The man himself is kind, if a bit terse. He smiles at you as you wander into the store. "Ah, yes. Something for me to look at again?"
"Prescient as always," you respond, placing the pendant onto the counter in front of him. "This was passed off to me by a stranger in a back alley less than an hour ago. I can feel the magic radiating off of it and thought it best to find out what it is."
"Wise," Edrol says, taking the amulet and peering at it through a strange tube-like tool. He studies it quietly for a long moment, breaking his silence with a worrying muttering of, "Oh dear..."
"What? What is it?" you ask as he turns and heads into a back room. You hated when he did this, but you're used to it by now.
He emerged with a dusty tome already open to a page bearing a mark similar to the design on the pendant. "You haven't touched the stone, have you?" he asks.
"Uh..." you mumble, glancing at your finger. "Yes, actually. It got quite hot. Why? What's wrong?"
"Oh my," Edrol says, sighing heavily. "The symbol is that of an ancient goddess of eroticism whose name is long lost to history. She thrived only on the seed of males, is credited by some sources as the inventor of fellatio, and was infamous for her tendency to take her, erm, "meals" from anything equipped with a phallus. Her cult supposedly still clings to existence."
"That's nice," you say, planting your fists on your hips, "but what does this thing do?"
"Unbound, it hums with power but confers no effects, good or ill. Bound, however, as it is to you now, since you touched the stone and felt the burn, when worn, it allows you to selectively warp minds to your will. You couldn't make a paladin murder indiscriminately, mind you, but you could, say, convince a shopkeeper to let you have something for half price, or convince a guard to let you off the hook for a minor offense."
"What's the catch?" you ask.
Erdol blushes. You'd never expected to see that in a thousand years. "The use of this power comes at a cost. The more you use the power, the "thirstier" you will become."
"The hell does..." you start, but you trail off as you remember the bit Erdol mentioned before about the sex goddess. "Wait, you don't mean?"
Erdol nods. "Should you seek to get rid of it," he speaks, "I know of an old site of this goddess' cult, in a cave just off the beach down the coast, about a day's travel. I fear there's nothing I can do about it here. You might try one of the wizards or sorcerers in the city, but they may not be able to help, and even if they can, they'll likely charge quite a bit."
"Thank you," you say.
"You're welcome" he said as you leave, wishing you luck as you close the shop door. The pendant may not be magnificently powerful, but the magic is has sounds rather handy. The question becomes whether or not you can deal with the drawbacks. Regardless of whether or not you decide to keep it, the old cult site sounds like it might be worth exploring anyway.
D&D: Decide to go to the old cult site.
